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Time and Time Again

I started replaying Chrono Trigger recently for the first time in over 10 years. I’d purchased the Steam edition months before and putting it off for some reason. Procrastination is a hell of a drug. Since I’ve been working on a JRPG combat system prototype, I was excited to revisit one of the games that most inspired me to try my own hand at the genre with its fluid, streamlined gameplay.

It’s been a lot of fun, naturally. I haven’t made time to dig into a long narrative-focused game like this in a while, actually. The combat and exploration mechanics are as stellar as I remember, and avoiding skippable encounters only adds to the satisfying challenge of the bosses, which are normally a little too easy if you’ve been grinding. Double techs, especially the more flashy elemental+physical combos, are still a joy. Picking my own names for the characters has been a pleasant surprise too; I never used to do that when I was younger, but I’ve had a good time replacing each party member’s identifier with a phonetically similar Unix command. I’m particularly proud of christening Frog fsck, although I’m regretting calling Ayla alias instead of kill.

The writing has held up well, too. Chrono Trigger doesn’t have a particularly deep or nuanced story, but it’s able to tap into the central theme and each character’s emotional throughline well enough that it usually doesn’t matter. We care about averting destiny to save the world, about Glenn’s guilt and shame, and that’s enough. It’s not Undertale, but it still hits those story beats where it counts. In particular, then as now, Robo’s backstory really resonated with me. Feeling alienated from your family/creator, who fail to understand you and sometimes intentionally cause you harm, is something I think we all can relate to. Something I can relate to, at least.

Time has changed my perspective on some things, though. The heteronormativity of Marle’s relationship with Crono and the presumption of default maleness implicit in his role as the indefatigable silent protagonist feel more viscerally odd now. When I first played through the game and had the opportunity to pick someone else as party leader, I’m not sure who I chose; I think I cycled through several different characters in order to be balanced. This time, though, I switched straight to Lucca. Chrono Trigger isn’t amazing when it comes to women’s representation (of the 3 playable female characters, 2 are the stereotypical fragile mage girl and the last is instead all brawn and no brains), but Lucca is probably the most nuanced of the bunch. Given my life experience, I definitely identify with her the most out of all the party members. It feels good to recognize that now, instead of feeling vaguely dissatisfied with the default party leader but not being sure whose role I would prefer to be playing.

I’m still uncertain if there was a point I was trying to get at in writing this piece; it feels like I’ve just been rambling. Perhaps I just wanted to take a stroll down memory lane after revisiting an old friend of sorts. I hope you enjoyed this brief detour. It’s been a strange journey, but I’m feeling better about where I’m at now than where I was then. Here’s hoping the next decade will treat me well.

Anomaly and Character Vignettes

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I haven't really made any progress on this project over the past 2 months (DMing has eaten into my creative time a lot), but I've still been thinking about it quite a bit. As usual, after some analysis I realized that there were still some serious issues with the initial concept.

I had originally been planning to have the game take place over a relatively large environment composed of multiple separate areas for the player to explore, which would comprise several hours of playtime in total. It's clear now that this was still a little too ambitious in scope. Even starting the iteration process with a short and sweet demo, this project would be a rather large undertaking compared to my prior development experience (which is to say, practically nothing). So I'm taking things down a peg and trying to fit the whole game into an hour-long experience, tops. Making arbitrary decisions like this won't be enough by itself to get me making regular progress, but it definitely makes for a more manageable goal in the abstract.

Helpful or no, I've also decided to finally give the game a working title: Anomaly. With the Giger Counter (a weirdness detector of sorts) at the player's fingertips from the get-go, this name seems like the perfect fit for a small, quirky adventure in which the protagonist is attempting to uncover a bizarre mystery.

On the positive side, though, I've been feeling very inspired lately where it comes to the background for this game. I've been throwing around ideas in my head for characters, stories, etc. set in this world for a couple years now, but haven't committed most of it to paper, much less in a released form. So I'd like to use this blog as an outlet for writing these concepts down and doing a little light brainstorming, for posterity if nothing else. For now, here's a list of vignettes describing some of the characters inhabiting this world. Not all will be relevant or even make an appearance in Anomaly, but I think all of them are interesting in some way and have potential to appear in a future game or story.

Sybil "Syb" Ganesh

While struggling to complete her PhD in physics at the University of Chicago, Syb stumbles on a means of travel between parallel universes in the course of her research on gravitation waves. Armed with a passion for exploration, scientific ingenuity, and an understanding of the magnitude of this discovery, she quickly delves into its mysteries as part of a secret government research project. This wasn't quite the independent investigation she dreamed of as a child, but she pursues it with her trademark enthusiasm nonetheless. In college, Syb was friends with Nic and roommates with Emily, but she's lost touch with both of them since finishing grad school.

Nicodemus "Nic" Gutiérrez

Nic is an electrical engineer by profession, and a talented one at that, but he doesn't care for formal designations; pulling pranks, making sarcastic remarks, and finding ways to get out of doing work are more his drift. If you can get him excited about a project, though, he'll gladly stay up all night to get it working, even if it has to be hacked together at the last minute. It's getting him motivated that's the hard part. He's currently trying to deal with the fact that not only might government conspiracies be real, but his close friends Sybil and Emily might have been hiding the truth from him for years.

Emily Mason

Emily is an expert on organic chemistry, statistics, philosophy, mathematics, evolutionary psychology, and economics, and she won't let anyone forget it. For this reason she usually declines to comment on most people's everyday affairs, but when she does deign to speak you can be sure it will be a deep, enlightening piece of advice about how you're utterly failing to meet her standards of quality. Other than that she mostly keeps her thoughts, goals, and occupation to herself. Emily used to live with Sybil, but nobody's heard from her in a long time.

Jeremy Eckbert

A freelance investigative journalist who tracks down stories no one else is willing to cover, Jeremy is relentless in his drive to dig up the truth even if it's not strictly legal to acquire it. This brings risks and complications in disseminating that information, especially when the job amounts to spying on the government, but it also brings buyers willing to pay well for someone else to get their hands dirty. The vagrant nature of his line of work has totally tanked his social life, though. His only frequent contact is Ava, who he collaborates with in order to gather data digitally.

Ava Thompson

While trying and failing to give a shit about high school, Ava discovered that she was already good at educating herself about something: hacking. After seeing that she could make money off of her talent for computing, she dropped out and started doing odd jobs on the web full time. Her analytical acuity and disrespect for authority often risked getting her into trouble, but it also connected her with a number of like-minded individuals also feeling oppressed by the intrusive, murky identity of the US government as of late. She often works with Jeremy and is currently dating Odette.

Odette Asadi

As stubborn as she is elegant, Odette is a firm believer in the power of governance and diplomacy to effect change. With her fierce, charismatic demeanor, well-educated background, and no-nonsense attitude, she's a natural fit for leadership roles. While originally from France, she's currently studying international relations and political science at Columbia University in hopes of working for the EU or UN in the future. Despite their many differences, she and Ava have had a steady relationship for nearly three years.

Minimalist Game Design Brainstorming

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With the new year fast approaching, I feel an urge to create something new. Now that I'm done with my undergrad and have my work situation settled for the moment, it's a great opportunity to reinvent myself and put my free time towards a creative endeavor. In short, I want to take a proper stab at making a simple computer game.

For the past couple years I've had a number of ideas rolling around in my head, but haven't really had the opportunity to pursue any of them. As usual, most were hideously out of the realistic scope of my abilities, both quantitatively and qualitatively. My interest is in making narrative-based games, but I've too often used that as a crutch to build out long, plot-heavy concepts instead of focusing on practical, resource-independent game design. This time, I want to come up with a solid set of mechanics and fit the story around them, not the other way around.

To accomplish this, I'd like to draw on some core mechanics from the Metroidvania genre. Specifically, the game will be designed as a top-down adventure wherein the player is mostly limited to a linear progression, but will be tricked by exploration-driving incentives into thinking they discovered where to go on their own, ala Super Metroid. This, combined with simple inventory-based lock and key puzzles, a dynamically-updated map to track progress, and some fetch quests (e.g. collect A, B, and C to open this door) will make up the majority of the gameplay. Some light combat, puzzles, or narrative choices might figure in where appropriate, but they won't be the central focus. The key motivators and aesthetics being targeted here are exploration and basic problem solving.

I figured that the most effective approach to telling a story around this concept would be to make it contigent, as much as possible, on the player's decision to buy into it. The idea already lended itself to an "uncovering mysterious backstory in the middle of nowhere" scenario in my head, so it's a natural progression to put most of the narrative being revealed into documents that the player is trying to find. An image came together of the PC as a freelance investigative journalist seeking answers to reports of a secret government facility conducting mysterious, inhumane experiments. But there's no need to talk too much about him in-game. In fact, most of the core narrative, stored in reports and files recovered by the protagonist, can be skipped by players that just want to complete their mission. I expect that many will be intrigued by the (brief) opening hook and want to figure out the explanation for everything, but even those uninterested in the story aren't forced to engaged with it and, in fact, still get rewarded in-game for collecting everything (again, see the Metroid series and its end-of-game collection % count).

Anyways, the rest of design details can be worked out once I've got a working prototype together. I already own DLS to Game Character Hub and RPG Maker VX for creating modern style sprites and maps, respectively, so I have basically everything I need in terms of visual assets to build this in RMVX. There'll probably be some other resources needed later (e.g. sound effects, music, icons, faux-document pictures, etc.), but I can create or scrounge for these things when they come up. For now all that's needed is to create a functional demo and iterate from there.