Gone for Good

Almost an RPG

Gone for Good is best described as "and old school RPG adventure presented using and interactive fiction engine". It's a bit of a compromise between the idea i had and the execution that'd be within my abilities. I created it as an entry for Videotome Jam 2 and... It's fine. It's good for what it is, i'm glad it's playable but i still kinda wish to remake it some day as a fleshed out game.

I strongly suggest giving this thing a try before reading the text below, it's not that long to get to any of its endings.

How it started

My human-shaped frog (back when we were still dating) was telling me about a manga she started reading at the time. One about a group of adventurers in a dungeon "living off the land". Yeah, it was Dungeon Meshi or Delicious In Dungeon. I'm not a great listener. I'd rather watch something or read. Whenever i hear words, my mind tends to wander. And so, while she was telling me about this manga, its characters and so on, my brain decided to make up a game. Not even a game that would adapt the concept of the story i was just hearing about. The idea was: "what if it's a typical rpg with turn based combat, but the monsters undergo transformations similar to cooking?". At some point i shared the concept with Froggo - mostly because we have a polite agreement that whenever i catch myself not actually listening to her, i just confess to it and i'm forgiven as always for how i am.

(she's great btw, love her patience)

So the slightly refined idea was as follows:
Normal rpg attacks and spells like blunt force, cutting with a sword, water spells, fire spells etc. transform monsters as if they were ingredients. After each transformation, their name changes to reflect their new form. And the fight is actually a puzzle, because each enemy has its preferred way to be cooked. Later on, the theme of exorcisms got added on top of that. And at that point, it should have been okay to just prototype a game quickly in any engine like rpgmaker.

But since i was traveling between two cities a lot at that time, there was no good time to just sit down and make a tiny game prototype. So the worst thing happened - my mind decided to further "refine" it. Add story, mechanics etc. Trying to build a whole experience in my head, with nothing to show for it.

This process has a name: it's "scope creep"

Fast forward a few years to 2025. I'm settled in one place at last, gf graduated into wife, and i have an unfinished game project begging to be worked on. Then one day, Videotome Jam 2 gets announced and i just... Can't pass an opportunity to try doing something in a very simple engine for the fun of it! I tried to pick a concept to turn into a jam game. The first one wasn't a good fit for the engine, dismissed it quickly. Another idea inspired by jam's theme, wouldn't really be fun to work on. So i went back to the "unnamed cooking rpg thing" and picked it to be a jam game direction. Why not, let's give it a shot at last!

Engine choice

With a game concept chosen, another choice to make was to pick one of four Videotome variants. Original VT was purely linear, so it got disqualified immediately. VT Heartbreak looked like something that'd be a good fit for a game that's closer to a jrpg than interactive fiction... But i already decided to cut the scope to the most basic idea, so any extra features of the engine would tempt me to creep again. With that, VT Heartbreak was out.

Down to two options, i opened Videotome Super and fiddled with it. The example provided with the engine focused on graphical features of this VT variant, and not much on CHOICE and GOTO parts that i would have to use heavily for imitating a turn based fight. And like with Heartbreak - i kept it in mind, that any feature above what's needed to bring that game to life, would work against me. Do i need to move sprites and draw freely on the screen? Or does it need to look like old fashioned jrpg fights connected with a bit of roughly translated narration and dialogue? Would i even have backgrounds and sprites to work with? Of course not, i can't draw them. I knew i had to focus on writing (bad writing, but still writing). VT Super was out. A day before the jam i unzipped Videotome ADV and checked it out.

Co-created with Videotome ADV

Every difficulty i'd have with ADV, would have also been present in Super. And ADV's example showed me its strengths, but also inspired me with its non-blocking choices (when presented with options to pick from, the player can be allowed to proceed with the narration/dialogue, while the list of option may change during that). At this moment, the engine itself co-wrote the intro with me, fleshing out the format i'd write the story in. Instead of a singular protagonist, a group of characters was introduced - simply because it would feel wrong not to write several characters in an engine like this. And non-blocking choices gave me a great reason to write more internal monologue of the group's leader, the Exorcist. Exorcist being a novice, unsure of the right approach, was a result of me writing it in Videotome ADV. And other characters acting on their own is a part of VTAdv's influence. It feels close to Telltale Games series like The Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us. You can just fail to make a choice, and other characters in the story will react to it. This gave the game depth that would not be there if i made it in renpy, rpgmaker or just programmed it without an engine (which i also considered at some point).

Of course this engine's limitations worked against me at times. CHECK always doing an if-else jump between two possible labels/chapters especially. Writing attacks with effects based on enemy's state (mood, moistness etc.) would have been easier if i could MAP variables to labels, or just drop the required jump on "else". That, and the fact that the line with CHECK needs to output something to screen... It's neat! Specifically - it's a neat limitation for this project. It required me to keep fights simple. Keep the list of actions short, removing obviously ineffective attacks (like weapons against slime), and not allowing the player stray too far away from the desired path. This meant that while the engine helped make the writing better (but not by much, since i avoided gendered words for several characters, leading to some awkward grammar), it also improved the game's mechanics, streamlining it a bit. If it was a fight in an engine made for rpgs, i could have had a problem known from adventure games - too many choices, when your inventory is full of trash that's not needed in the current moment in the game. Having access to attacks not needed for 2-3 fights in a row would be like hauling a key to a door that you won't encounter for the next hour of the game. Choice paralysis in a game breaks the flow. And it's frustrating, really. Too many keys for a single door. I'd rather give the player a limited choice and offer a consolation prize of alternative narration/dialogue for picking one of a few wrong ones... Than put a player in a loop of trying every option in every scenario and getting nowhere.

Yeah. That's how Videotome ADV made turning this idea into a game possible. At the same surprising me with how it turned out!

Suck it, shitty chatbots! You can collaborate with a goddamn piece of code that doesn't talk to you if you're even the slightest bit creative.