Releasing the Prototype of Middle School Monster Party

Middle School Monster Party was a 1 month game jam game to really get me back in the mood to make things. I think it's been over a year since I even touched some code with Sonic Grid so I needed some sort of project to push me forward. I don't know if it was because my computer was cracked, there were too many good shows on TV, or just simple lethargy that left me uninterested in crafting but I just wasn't in the mood. I have a new computer. There is a jam with some money on the line and it's just a simple theme set for the holiday. I was intrigued.

So the idea was to use the game jam so I could work in and craft a game with my daughter as a collaboration. I'd work on the code. She'd work on the story line and assets. That didn't happen though. Rust had really sunk in for me. Simple math errors delayed what was already proving to be a tedious process with the map system and my kid was too wrapped up in kicking butt in school to have any time to really contribute to the project. She's basically forgotten how to code in renpy and with orchestra and her extra-curricular activities it was just fruitless. 

Since I was rusty, the idea was to steal from my old code and relearn what exactly I did to make it work. The map system came from me looking at Sonic Grid and thinking "why can't I use this to make a map." So since school had just started up and I was working on this with the kid, the setting of a school just made the most sense. From there flashes of Day of the Dead or any other type of zombie film popped up and I thought a single location would work. Single location, single map. So I went in to crafting a movement system. 

I thought about the first "scary" game I played as a kid called Monster Party from the NES era and that's kinda where the theme went was a party full of monsters. Everything was in place, but about 2 weeks from the deadline it became painfully obvious I had no chance of completing the game. I actually dropped out at one point and figured I would try to tackle the game for a Halloween release. 

A few days before the deadline I finished the map system. I then cobbled together everything you see in the game that doesn't include the map 4 days from the deadline. This was a colossal failure in terms of time management in my opinion and I was disappointed with the release since it felt like a tutorial for the actual game I wanted to showcase. Game jams have deadlines however so I spent a few hours working out how to get the web software to publish and then uploaded the game.

One of the saving graces however is that the map is something I can show off. My daughter looked at it in action and became many times more interested in what the game could be. I took a piece of cardboard, with little cutouts of the dozens of the game's characters, and we sat and discussed placement, motivations and actions the characters would take as a sort of trip into a middle school table top game. Already she has added fun and creative ideas for characters and their actions and I hope to be able to release something I think people will enjoy.

The direction of the game right now seems to be in creating an ally system that functions in boosting character interactions and motivations as Penny tries to figure out what is really going down in Poe Middle School. So I'm still not sure if this is an RPG, a board game or an adventure game or some weird homogenization of all those concepts but it's slowly evolving which is fun to see with each addition of code.