Meritocracy After-Jam Post-Mortem

Hello, everyone!

It's the end of the Jam period, and as I am wont to do, I am sitting down to write about the creative process regarding Meritocracy.

I won't go as in-depth as I did with "Room of a Thousand Petals" since this was a three-day Jam (as opposed to a two-week Jam), but I'll try to hit a lot of the major notes.  (I did discuss a little bit about the process behind Meritocracy in megapig9001's Jam entry, which I will rehash later.)

From the outset, I want it to be known that I deeply appreciate the efforts of the team members who joined me this time around. Any critiques in here are directed more at me than anything. The crew members did everything I asked them to do-- and in some cases, they did even more than asked-- and I was very lucky to be able to work with such capable and professional jammers. 

This is a hobby for me, and I consider myself a fledgling project lead despite being around for nearly two or three years now. I am still star-struck when people approach me to work with them or accept an invitation to work with me. On this project alone, MiracleMira and Tristepin222 were gets I didn't think would ever want to work with me. I greatly admired MiracleMira's work on Transience of Strange Dream, especially how they were able to meld in design choices with their narrative. Their debut entry was truly memorable. For this Jam, their clarity of purpose and experience in card games was a true godsend-- even if they had to deal with my ambitious tendencies. Tristepin222, meanwhile, has been a vet of both Touhou Jams and as a dev; their ability to construct the game quickly was a lot of the reason we were able to get the game out of the door for consideration in the first place. Even if it was a little bugged, we were still able to make iterations to improve it.

I'll talk about my other collaborators in the appropriate section as well. 

Here we go:

Overall Game Design

This game was one I wanted to do for some time; the server had been joking about bird-based games for awhile, and I wanted to play around in the space of the tengu clan, so it provided a good opportunity for making a game around that. This idea was actually a combination of two ideas I had written down before; an Aya-centric game where you would run the Bunbunmaru Newspaper and a Jo'on-centric game where she tried to advance through the Buddhist society using her wiles as a fortune god. 

I know BakaBaku has a reputation for visual novels, but this go-around, I really wanted to try telling a story in a very unconventional fashion. Our team settled on making a board/card game pretty quickly; we wanted to do something interactive and competitive so that was a good place to start. 

The original intent was to do a multi-player browser game. The first draft of the game was kind of similar to The Game of Life, where you'd choose a character to start, then progress down the line against the players you didn't select until you hit a number of conditions. We had to abandon this idea fairly early due to the complexity of making computer logic and/or multiplayer  in the case a player couldn't find three friends to play with. 

The next iteration of the game was to make a solo card game-- but to include more character-oriented gameplay via multiple event streams. In this vision, the other three characters you did not choose would have become event lines for the player to defeat or ally with along the way. For similar reasons, this idea was also abandoned as too complex for a three-day cycle. (This ultimately became two separate event cards: "A Compromising Situation" and "The Ascent.")

The last iteration of the game-- the one we ultimately created-- was a solo card game where the player would have the choice of a character and then have to survive the event cards and manage their resources well enough in order to meet the win condition. This was ultimately the most reasonable compromise between the original idea and what we could make work in such a small timeframe.

MiracleMira was instrumental in balancing and conception the game rules, and did an excellent job stringing together everything I wanted to do and put it into a very playable game which I think, once we squash all the bugs, will prove itself to be a wonderfully ambitious game.

We took a lot of inspiration from two games in particular: "Pass the Buck" and "Underhand". Pass The Buck is a "social deception" game where you try to pass off responsibility to other characters while getting as much benefit as you can. In the original card game vision, there would have been more events to get in the way of your other opponents. The tone of the game we ultimately made also takes on the language and feel of Pass The Buck. Underhand was the game we pulled from the most mechanically. Its deep system of resource management and the way it dealt with how event cards created win conditions was the foundation of what we ultimately built.

One differentiator we made in the game was to try and give characters playable strengths and weaknesses. The intent was originally to allow the player to choose when to play the cards (as long as it was before the end of a deck cycle.) That was to push the message of the game across in a very direct way; we wanted the player to be strategic and purposeful about when and how to use both their strengths and weaknesses. We had to make them into deck cards instead due to time and complexity.

We also meant to create a "Tengu Bulletin", which would have warned players of upcoming event cards in a very clever way. It would have been in the corner with a little ping whenever a new or returning event came around. The system also would have noted events removed from the deck. These would have been written in a newspaper style to add some flavor to the gameplay.

For the most part, I think we did very well all considered! Even with such a low card count as we have in this game (just over two dozen not counting character cards) I think we managed to make a varied and challenging experience which has a nice through-line story in all four modes.

There are a few things I wish could have gone differently,  mostly relating to programming or timing issues forcing our hand. Triste was given a severely tough task and did the best they could. If I had a chance to do it over again, I would make sure to not be as excited to talk shop; in my attempts to try and communicate the rules of the game, I often ended up making some confusing remarks, which did end up affecting a lot of the game's progress; there was at least one point we had to start all over again due to something I said. I also often switched up elements without good notification, which also made life difficult.

I take responsibility for how that went down, and how the game first came out as a result. I'll do better as a director next time.

Aesthetics

Mollynncy was our artist for this project; this is our third game together now and I think we have a very good understanding of each other. I am always overjoyed whenever she accepts an invitation to join along for a project because I know her work is quality and she is a pleasure to work with. I gave her a very hard assignment and she completed it with aplomb. I can't thank her enough for that despite it being an inconvenient window for her due to other obligations.

Saishoo partnered up again as well, this time as a composer. His task was also pretty difficult. Retrospectively, I wish I could have been more specific about the feel I was trying to get out of the music-- but even despite my lack of clarity on this particular subject, he still knocked the music out of the park. The combination of swing and ragtime influences really give the Touhou themes some new life.

I tend to be pretty purposeful with aesthetic choices; I see them as part of the storytelling element. For instance, in Kokoro's Doki-Doki Sabbatical, I spent hours researching what would be appropriate locales for the areas within the game, pulling from both Western and Japanese sources. The area around Misty Lake, specifically, was all sourced from one park because I wanted to make sure it felt appropriate. Same with the temple area in the "All Paths" ending.

I went into this mindset a little bit with Megapig, so I'll put that here for posterity and then expand on it: 

... [W]e originally wanted to make it a little more comedic than it ended up being. Our working title was "Tengu Society Simulator", which was meant to emulate like, Bus Driver Simulator or Goat Simulator or some such. ...  But as I got deeper into the writing of the game and we had to change how the game worked due to the time limit, I realized there was a very good opportunity to make something relating to the human nature of politics, so we pivoted. The aesthetic of the game is... purposeful; it is meant to emulate the [19]20's and [19]30's, which was a very tumultuous time in American political and social history. Monopoly and old comics of the time were especially influential on our design due to the expression and ease, while we leaned on swing and ragtime for the music. It's one of my favorite eras to study back on (along with the Reconstruction era) and I think it's something that hasn't really been touched upon as far as designing a Touhou game.

For this game, I wanted to get a cozy, yet tense feeling.

Mollynncy and I worked together to make Sumireko's Snowboard School in the past, and that had very Western design elements which I enjoyed very much. I told her she had cart blanche to do whatever she wanted with it back then, and delivered a very colorful 60s aesthetic which really changed up the feel of the game; I even re-wrote the script around it. I wanted to pull from those kinds of influences again knowing Molly excelled at those, so when I explained my first ideas for what it could look like, she understood right away and went to work. Their art really shines through, lending charm and levity to the game.

The 1920s and 1930s were filled with many such moments; the 20s were the Jazz Age in America, a time where new money was begin spent at exorbitant rates and people were not afraid to flaunt it about. Society similarly was starting to open up, with women gradually asserting themselves in society and politics, while culture was evolving thanks to the pioneering of the car, telephone and airplane making international communications easier. But there were warning signs everywhere in the era something was going to go wrong, and in 1929, the Great Depression began and really leveled the playing field all across the board in the economy and culture.

It was in this era I felt it would be fun to play with, as it was a time of rapid change, where people took what they could get. It's why I was so insistent on the idea once we decided to make it more of a political intrigue game. Choosing this specific era itself I feel helps to paint the story indirectly. The old, frayed cherry wood background, the canvas hard-back cards, the era-appropriate font styles... all of that was meant to exude the era. Even the winding up of the phonograph during the tutorial and crackling of the vinyl before the character music starts was meant to put the player into the mindset.

Saishoo, in that sense, did a great job capturing the spirit of what we were going for. The song selections, as well as the minor modifications made to a few of them, also tell a story of their own, oscillating between fun and uneasy. The looping nature of the music also gave him a lot to play with. I especially enjoyed his take on Hatate's theme, which has that lovely break where it's just the melody line playing on its own. It's light-hearted, yet eerie. Exactly what I felt would accent the game best. His choice for our original tengu Jubei was also interesting; I gave him the instruction to look around for unused ZUN tracks to take inspiration from, and the one he picked up I thought had a certain story-telling element to it. 

I have no regrets about any of the aesthetic choices. I knew it would be different-- perhaps even incongruent-- with how we perceive Touhou, but that's something I wanted to push the envelope on. On Sumireko, we got some pushback on the design choices. I took that to heart and decided at the end of the day, Touhou is still Touhou, no matter how it's dressed up. I hope that people can see what we tried to do here and appreciate the intent. 

Conclusions

I am ultimately proud of the ambition, style and result of our project. We largely did what we set out to do, and I still get a little smile on my face whenever I see someone play it or go through play-testing for it. Meritocracy, as a project, is a game I feel extremely proud of considering the circumstances. I wanted to make a dymamic, challenging and personality-filled game with limited storytelling and this crossed off all the boxes. We as a team can definitely take pride of that.

However, this Jam project was perhaps my most exhausting yet as a project lead.

I had to look inward at my leadership style a lot, and found myself questioning what I was doing a lot. My inexperience with making this type of game really showed, and I made myself look like a fool a lot. I put a lot of pressure on myself to get a polished game done in three days, as I still remembered how our last three-day effort (Sumireko) was met with some mocking. My significant other noted that this session was perhaps one of the more unhealthy I'd ever done-- even more so than when I pulled the all-nighter to complete Room of a Thousand Petals. (Sorry, sweetheart, you were right.)

I am very happy to have the support of many friends in this community, and knowing I can call upon them for something like this is wonderful and validating. Once again, I thank Mollynncy, MiracleMira, Tristepin222 and Saishoo for everything they did for Meritocracy; without all of you, we would never have put out this game. I mean that. You are the rock of what we do as a circle and I am proud to have called you teammates, whether this is out first time working together or otherwise.

That said, this is probably the last three-day Jam game BakaBaku will make.  

I found at the end of the day, I cannot (as a project lead) reasonably navigate a three-day window. We've tried four times; two times, we ended up with incomplete games with chaotic cycles which led to a lot of stress. The other two times were so bad, I made the unilateral choice to delete them. That simply isn't fair to my partners, who worked way too hard to have such things on their resumes.

This is NOT a retirement from games-making; it's anything but that. 

I'll still have a presence for three-day jams. When I can find the time, I will be happy to contribute as a writer, advisor or voice actor as I have done in the past. I will also focus BakaBaku's energy on longer jam periods (such as Pride Jam and potentially Station Jam) for extemporaneous projects.

BakaBaku will also start to focus energy on longer-term projects and work on them in spurts as well. As previously announced, we will be starting work on Eight Ghosts in February. I think this is the healthiest way I can approach making games from this point forward, and I hope everyone reading this is understanding of that as well.

We are hoping to release a final update for this game which fixes all the game-killing bugs in it some time soon; you can follow us for updates on various projects on Twitter over at bakabakucircle. 

I thank you all for your support, and look forward to jamming with you all again!

Sincerely, 

junejijo, on behalf of BakaBaku Circle