Author's notes

The previous sketch suffered from having too many elements to implement and not enough time to test that everything worked. This week I wanted to make something that would be quicker to implement so that I'd have time to focus on ensuring function and balance - as much as you can in an hour, anyway.

On the process side, this was a big was that I got nearly all the pieces in place in the first half hour, leaving me about 25 minutes to focus on testing and balancing in the back half. Part of this victory belong to responsible scoping: Even though there are four playable characters in this and the boss has two phases to it, the designs are very simple, their skills are basic, and there are no maps or warp points to worry about, and no dialogue to write. That last one was probably the biggest timesink in sketch #5, actually. Writing tends to paralyze me even in favorable circumstances, and on top of the time constraints, Paleburg's dialogue had a lot of functional purposes to serve. It was a lot of pressure and a lot of cognitive load. I was glad to be free of it in this one.

Part of the victory belongs to preplanning. I still try not to overplan in advance, but I came into my hour with a pretty clear idea of how I wanted the party dynamics and the boss phases to work. That's not a lot of preplanning compared to Dalig and Paleburg, where I had most of the game written out in my head and was racing to regurgitate it all in time, but it still meant some of the biggest questions were answered before I sat down to work.

I'm still deciding how I feel about this. Sometimes I wonder if it would be purer or more worthwhile if I had to do all my problem solving inside of the hour. I can envision some extraordinarily playful and inventive artists out there turning out roughspun gold every week, spontaneous and unashamed, full of color and humor, propelled by force of character. I wish I could achieve that. Maybe I will one day. But I only worry about that because I know I'm trying to show off. The urge to show off means a lot of work doesn't get finished or shared because I don't think it will earn me any esteem. Making a habit of sharing games made in an hour means they have to get finished and shared anyway. Preplanning might help me feel more in control of the outcome, but ultimately it won't save me from the discomfort of releasing work that doesn't match my standards. That's the important thing to me right now, having to confront that discomfort. As long as I'm doing that, I think it's okay to come in with some of the major questions pre-mulled over. That feels like the right balance for now, anyway.

As for the content of the game itself, I'm a little more mixed. I'm not quite sure the vision came together the way I had hoped. The story I wanted to tell was like this: You fight against a boss with a high damage output and limited healing to counter it with. There's a weak link in your party who deals the least damage and eats the most potions. You realize you're better off letting the weak link die and saving your resources for the heavier hitters. But when you reach the second phase, the tables turn, and suddenly the weak link is the powerhouse and the physical attackers are the drains. In the end, it's the fighters who have to be sacrificed to extend the life of the mage.

That's a pretty complex dynamic. When I finished playtesting the game after my hour, I was convinced I didn't get it at all, and only succeeded in making a difficult and bloody boss battle. I worried that "let the mage die to save the others" was an unlikely conclusion to draw, so its subversion in the second phase wouldn't read. I was prepared to talk about how that dynamic was just too complex for the hour. But as I wrote these notes, I started to question that, and let go of my worries a little bit. The battle will still probably prompt questions about which characters' maintenance is worth prioritizing, and the second half will still prompt you to reevaluate those answers. That's more important to me than the specific forms those answers take. (It's generally foolish to try and control those in an RPG, anyway.)

It's really hard to assess the successfulness of a design when you're the only one who's experienced it so far. I think I'm venting my lingering frustrations more than I'm identifying actual design strengths or weaknesses. Until I have more feedback, it's nothing more than speculation.

But even setting aside the question of how successful the design was, it's a lot of complexity to untangle in an hour. I'll highlight this by unpacking one of my specific frustrations: the game's difficulty. This sketch came out pretty hard, with slim margins for victory and a certain amount of luck required to actually win. My immediate regret was making the Hemiangel's Light Magic deal too much damage to Diao. Diao is magic-resistant in general to make her uniquely well-suited to surviving the second phase, but she still needed to take enough damage that you had to save some potions for it. That's why Light Magic is markedly stronger - but how strong did it need to be? It does about 30 damage now, but I think 20 would have been sufficient. How much damage it needs to do depends on how long Diao has to stay alive to finish her off. Hemiangel needs to live long enough for the three fighters to start dying off, but not so long that Diao runs out of MP, and I can't give Diao too much MP or she'll be able to use it in the first half of the fight (it's weak, but still better than attacking) without compromising the second half of the fight...

So you can see why I say it's too complex a dynamic. There are a lot of concerns to balance against each other to make it work. Some of these concerns aren't even real: Why is it a bad thing if Diao casts magic in the first half? Why should she need to use so many potions in the second phase as long as the player realizes she's worth spending potions on in the first half? Now that I'm done, it seems obvious that these questions don't affect the core dynamics. When you design a game, you make about 6000 arbitrary assumptions that may or may not actually serve you. Half the skill of game design is learning to recognize when this happens, spotting your assumptions, and letting them go. I usually spot these in a matter of days if I'm lucky, or months if I'm not. When the process is confined to an hour, these false constraints run wild, and the problems I'm trying to solve appear more complex than they actually are.

Conclusion: If I actually want to produce something well-balanced within an hour, I need to aim even simpler. Unsurprising, but easier to accept now that I can better see why. Doubling the complexity probably quadruples the work as new assumptions and blind spots creep in. It's also worth trying to condense the action itself: the fight drags a bit, but worse still, it takes a long time to test! In this case I'm still undecided about where best to trim the fat. But at the very least, future boss-focused games should consider the fastest, most direct ways of getting the desired dynamics to emerge...