Time for Crab!

Screenshot of my RPG Maker project. It shows a Crab enemy attacking the player in a Pincer Attack.

I released a game called "Ten Battles to Destiny" yesterday, as a submission to the "Cookie Cutter RM2k3 Jam". The rules for the Jam were to make a game in RPG Maker 2003, while using a set of maps that were provided by the Jam Organizer. I generally like the idea of giving different designers a set of shared assets and then just see how each uses and interprets them differently.

The idea behind the game:

If you've been following my work for the past year, you're probably aware that I have opinions about JRPG battle systems and that I'm a big fan of Dungeon Encounters, or more broadly speaking, the work of Hiroyuki Ito.

During an interview about the Design behind Dungeon Encounters, he also mentioned how the original Final Fantasy was balanced around 500 encounters, mostly because that was the amount of fights you could get through in one debug session (around 12 hours).

I really like this very pragmatic approach to scoping out the extent of your project, and it's something I've been trying to keep in mind while planning my current (non-jam) JRPG project.

I also made the decision to enter the jam pretty late and didn't want to dedicate too much time to it, so I just set myself a hard limit of 10 encounters. Whatever the players need to have to beat the game's boss, they need to get it within those fights.

I then gave myself some rules, some to keep things simple, others as a manner of principle:

The last one was pretty important for me, because I knew that I wanted to put some rude fights in there, but I also didn't want to just throw people into a game over state. Also by making lost battles a source of character progression, it opened up the door for some interesting interactions and strategies. It's also part of my general idea of delaying the consequences of a potential failure into the future, instead of immediately confronting the players with it.

The Structure:

I ended up making 12 regular fights, which were roughly divided into 3 "easy" encounters, 3"regular" encounters, 3 "hard" encounters and 3 "strange" encounters. Then there were two Boss Fights, though players would only have to fight one variant. The players would level up after each fight, regardless of outcome. However, winning an encounter would give them an additional stat boost in either their physical, or magic stat.

Losing a fight would not give them the stat boost, but instead an ability.

Aside from one weapon, there was no equipment at all, and in general I tried to keep the stat growth both on the player and enemy side as simple as possible.

This was a game jam after all, and I didn't want to waste any time on things like balance, something I already consider to be pretty overrated for larger projects.

The Execution

First the positives:

I actually finished and released the game in a reasonable amount of time. I probably could've spent a few more hours on balancing and fixing things (more on that later), but once I saw that my Steam stats for RPG Maker 2003 showed 20 hours, I decided to call it. I usually don't finish my game jam titles, so I'm quite happy to actually have done so.

While it was deeply frustrating sometimes, I actually found it quite interesting to work in RPG Maker for the first time. I've been working almost exclusively with Game Maker for over a decade now and it was interesting to make something in a different engine. I was also quite happy that, despite running into a few problems, I did figure out things fairly quickly.

I'm genuinely happy with some of the fights I've built. I think the Crab fight is very funny. Using the annoying and time consuming ghost fights as level obstacles was kind of cool and it was interesting how giving players abilities upon death opened up some interesting interactions.

Suddenly, an "easy" fight could actually be quite difficult, because they were hard to lose. This led to strange interactions, where I had to get poisoned in one fight, win it (because losing also restores all HP and removes all status effects), then start a fight against an "easy" enemy and wait for the poison to kill my character.

Sadly the time constraints lead to me not doing all that much with that idea, but it's something I'm going to keep in my mind for later.

What could've gone better:

I probably spent almost half of my time with this project fighting RPG Maker to do things I wanted it to do. It's kind of interesting how RPG Maker 2003's battle system looks like an ATB-era Final Fantasy game, but actually works very different. For example, you cannot freely target abilities. Abilities can only target either enemies, or allies. It is also very particular about which stats you can manipulate and change, so I quickly got tangled up in a web of custom moves that took a while to get working properly.

These custom moves also made it impossible to have one of the optional final boss bottles against both Boss variants simultaneously, because all of the player's custom abilities were built around single-target fights and I only realized this problem right at the end. So I had to settle with the players having to fight both battles back to back, if they chose to not specify what celestial body they consider to be the most evil.

Another big stumbling block was RPG Maker's ATB system itself. A handful of encounters were built around players just waiting out the enemy's actions, however while it worked initially, it somehow stopped working, after I switched to a different menu layout. While it was possible to fix this, this then caused more problems when I made the browser version of the game, because that one read the ATB-toggles completely opposite to what I set in the engine. So I had to make two versions of the game.

In hindsight it probably would've been a better idea to stick with the engine's default skills and not get too cute with math abilities. However, doing weird math abilities to me is half of the fun of making these types of battles, so I kind of fell into my own trap here.

Another thing I noticed way too late was that those horizontal corridors which looked to be only one-tile wide in the editor were actually two-tiles wide. So a lot of my cute "place an enemy in a narrow corridor to force players into a fight if they want to progress" ideas just ended up not working. This includes the one occasion where I broke the Jam's rules and altered one of the maps to include a shortcut. I made an effort to put two ghosts in that corridor to admonish the players for being rule breakers, and now you can just saunter past them.

Had this been a larger project, I probably would've spent much more time on actively considering enemy placements and which paths players could take. In the end, I kind of just quickly threw something together, based on some very rough ideas.

On the other hand though, this is what game jams are right? To try out ideas and not spend too much time on them? After all, I have this other, bigger project already that requires a more deliberate approach, so why give myself another one?

Conclusion:

I had a good time with this and I learned a lot. It was also fun to play some of the other submissions and see how other people have used the things that were given to them. It just shows how much "Game Design" differs between people's preferences and interests and I think the premise of the jam and the very strict limitations were perfect for this.

Also working on this really hammered home the point for me that it is very important to think about your battle system's technical structure in relation to what you want your battles to look and feel like.

The reason I got into this mess with custom abilities, was mainly because I was coming from my own project that is much more open and also is built in an engine that lets me address things much more directly. So many of my struggles were because I desperately wanted RPG Maker 2003 to be something that it just wasn't and while I think I managed to coax some fun interactions out of it, it was a bit too much of a struggle for the both of us.

On the flipside: Most of my time was spent building fights and abilities. I didn't have to build the pause screen, the player inventory, the movement and collision system, the room transitions and any other thing that I have to do when I make something in Game Maker. It was nice to just make the things I actually like making, which are static pictures that crack jokes and then deal 9999 damage to you.

Anyway, I hope people have a nice time with this game. The good thing about that whole "Ten Fights and then the game is over" idea is that the game is actually pretty quick to play. It should only take around 5-10 minutes, just don't run into a Ghost without any means to hit them.