One of the earliest pieces of criticism that I had about Grunge was in regards to the fighting mechanics. Someone played the game and suggested that there shouldn’t be a fighting in the game at all.
Now to be fair, I was pretty terrible at programming battles. In the earliest builds, every thirty paces you took resulted in a battle. You were spammed with battles. When I was refining the battle system later, I discovered what was causing this issue and was able to fix it.
This particular person wanted the game to be more like Always Sometimes Monsters, which is an RPG that does not involve fighting. Your goal in that game is essentially to save up money and travel across the country to stop your ex from marrying your old best friend. You need to “grind” at different jobs to earn money, save up your funds, and get there before time runs out. Honestly, while Grunge does have some influences of Always Sometimes Monsters, I wanted it to be more influenced by Rockstar’s Bully than anything else.
Like Bully, I wanted Grunge to take place in both a school and city environment so that players felt like they were immersed not just within a “world,” but a community. I wanted you to be able to play the game and recognize faces as the years passed, and I wanted to show the change of a neighborhood over time.
Don’t get me wrong: I love Always Sometimes Monsters, but at times, there are lulls in the action. Sometimes you get to certain levels or areas of the game, and I felt that there wasn’t too much to do or interact with. Rather than get to know characters, I was over-eager to leave an area. To me, fighting adds another entertaining element to the game to keep the player engaged.
This is a less significant aspect, but the fighting mechanics also reveal a bit about each of the girls’ personalities and interests. Seraphina, a dancer, primarily attacks through dance moves like the Moonwalk Dropkick and Grapevine Grapple. Carmen, a black belt, uses a roundhouse kick and a karate chop. Brandy, like the mean girls, will slap people and pull hair. And Candace, the aspiring nurse and sweetest one in the group, will try to heal people and talk enemies down using moves like “Kill ’Em With Kindness.”
Some people may be confused about the fighting element because Grunge is supposed to be about empathy, forming connections with others, and supporting people through a difficult time. But the reality is that no matter how kind you are to others, there are some people in this world that want to harm you: either physically or emotionally. There are people who will even go out of their way to hurt you.
When I was building the game, I thought about the types of people that women encounter from high school throughout adulthood. I thought about creeps who catcalled me while walking down the street in sweatpants at 12 years old. I thought about girls who incessantly mocked me over my interests, the way that I dressed, or the people that I spent time with. I thought about boys who punched me in the face, stole or hid my things, and stuck tape in my hair when I was riding the bus home.
And I thought about how we punish women for fighting back.
You don’t have to search extensively to find evidence of this. Within the past few years, I’ve read numerous stories about girls who were expelled, suspended, or punished for defending themselves at school. The women who end up incarcerated for trying to defend themselves against their abusers. It’s a pervasive problem that hits especially close to home for me. Apparently, we expect women to cower in fear until help arrives, or to be assaulted and killed, rather than giving them the freedom to defend themselves. To make matters worse, we’ll then take to social media to criticize women or to question why they don’t stand up for themselves. We don’t live in a world that protects women who protect themselves.
The girls in the game rarely start fights for the sake of starting fights. In fact, there are only a few times when this happens: when Seri confronts Becky in homeroom on the first day of school, and when Edd asks Seri and Carmen to fight him so that he can train for a match. Both of these instances are optional, and in Edd’s case, it’s completely consensual with both parties. Otherwise, all other fights in the game are started by other people, when they choose to lay their hands on you.
My girls aren’t bullies. They don’t go out of their way to physically attack people. But they aren’t pushovers, and they aren’t defenseless. I wanted the girls to be able to defend themselves from attackers. Furthermore, I wanted them to feel empowered to do so. That isn’t to say that they aren’t punished by authority figures for defending themselves at times-- after all, that wouldn’t be realistic. Seri is shamed by a police officer when reporting her assault. Brandy is suspended from school for defending Candace from Becky. It is mentioned that they develop a reputation for “fighting” when really, all they’ve done is protect themselves. But even when these incidents arise, they keep defending themselves. They are their own heroes and each other’s protectors.
Is this mechanic perfect, and without error? I wouldn’t say that. Does it successfully convey its message? In retrospect, I think that I could have been better about conveying this message, but then again, I didn’t want to oversaturate the narrative with this idea.