Val the Moofia Boss wrote: ↑
June 12th, 2025, 21:26
I think the issue is that most people are not experienced writers capable of churning out the quality and quantity needed to make a good story heavy visual novel/RPG experience over a weekend, not to mention time spent hooking up dialogues or scripting scenes or posing characters, etc. So you have one guy not accomplishing much, and the result might not be as impressive if you had both guys working on functionality/game systems/building maps/levels for a gamey game.
I like the O Henry or Somerset Maugham approach to short stories that might be good for content fast. It can even be automated to some degree, if the setting is sufficiently constrained. The game pops off goals from a list of things not yet explored and pops off stored decisions player already made from another list, and generates a little twist-based story and quest. Mostly would come down to fetch or slay quests, but at least that progress one another. So far not been done yet.
There is, indeed, a shortage of good writers at game jams. The general illiterate culture in the world today doesn't help. Second, because the writer must also be artist or coder to get invited to a team slot. Correct, it means the lead coder must actually be twice as good as normal and not fail at doing twice the work of another team.
Val the Moofia Boss wrote: ↑
June 12th, 2025, 21:26
The gamey games are also going to be more captivating for passerbys to look at than a lot of text. See people crowding around fighting game arcade cabinets or watching someone survive spectacular and overwhelming Touhou/bullet hell barrages. People don't crowd around to see someone play a story heavy game.
There are many coders that are double or triple the productivity of other coders. Ditto artists that are twice as fast as others. But dialogue choices, absent large cinematics that take years to craft in something like
Witcher,
Final Fantasy, indeed don't intrinsically draw attention. They lack JUICE compared to even a nice jump animation. So this issue is the hardest issue. If you want to win the jam.
I believe there might be solutions though.
One solution seems to be making something whose premise is both absurd/********
and yet also cinematic and vast, and making any dialogue quickly end and lead to "big effects" on screen.
Dialogue must be short and what happens must be huge.
► Show Spoiler
Title: Grand Rioter
There's a riot. Protagonist is some fool walking around and trying to flip cars. Game keeps score. If other NPCs see him trying to flip a car, they help out. If they try but not enough of them, they fail soon and give up and wander away. They wander, so the player must often herd them to an area with cars to set it up. Like an emergent puzzle.
They might themselves try to flip cars, which counts for the player character. The player can join in or not. Player can influence it by pasting stickers on cars. Totally not inspired by current events. Pinkie promise.
He can talk to NPCs and take quests to get them to follow him around. If he fails, NPC immediately starts a fistfight with sufficiently idiotic name calling involved.
Quests include going into the sewers to slay Cave Trolls which shoot fireballs larger than those in Doom; fireballs collapse part of the streets on the map. Making the main quest harder.
Eventually the posse ventures deeper underground and encounters larger and worse monsters and dark elves, who are demons. All of them larger. But the objective is still to flip cars, which arrive from outside the city into the city center.
The game only counts flipped cars right to the end. The player can paste stickers onto monsters and let 'em loose above, which gets other NPCs to fight them even though no gear.
Eventually reveals a giant eyeball the size of half the map underneath. It blinks, collapsing the entire map. The end.
Do it all with a twenty year old graphics style.
Anybody tried making a THICK RPG during a game jam? Advice?
