TWGOK FC: Thiên Sử Ca Diệt Gấu

The first indie game of mine that showed to public, for the incoming birthday celebration of a manga's fan club that I took part in.

Duration: 7 days planning + 7 days executing (2012)
Team size: solo.
Game Engine: RPG Maker VX Ace
Genre: JRPG, Turn-based, Fan Game, Indie

Prologue

Around 2012, I was active in the fan club of the manga named The World God Only Know (thus this game has the "TWGOK FC" part in its name). The fan club's birthday celebration in coming close and I wanted to contribute something, so I came to the decision of making this game.

I have about 2 weeks until the birthday. The game must be short and easy to play enough to make in that timeframe, but also needs to be cool. Therefore, I spent first week to planning the story, mechanics and features, then gather all resources that I gonna use and organize them in my USB so that I can efficiency work from anywhere next week.

Gameplay & Mechanics

The time limit for this project was short so I decided to make a classic JRPG game, with 10 recruitable characters scattered over the areas in game. I went with some character concepts like, a terrorist who tried to bomb a public WC, an angel girl but actually a boy gender, a snake who became a tanker just because he's too slippery. and so on.

The party system is also designed to have 4 characters per party, with in-battle and on-map skills supported, and various equipment with stats to freely optimize character's builds.

Story & Map Design

I came up with the short and silly plot about a Bear villain who trying to mess up the peace of land. Player as a member of fan club (the land), will gather party and resources to defeat that Big Bad Bear. There are many areas such as grassland, snowfield, abandoned house, ancient altar, dungeon. a big town with multiple building and Easter eggs. The game is fully filled with inside joke, so it was quite amusing to their niche audiences.

I scatter characters and items, special events, encounters all over the areas, so it required players to spend time and effort if they want to fully complete the game. Let completionists have their fun too, right?

In the end, players can speed run the game under 2 hours (my PR is ~1h50m), or fully enjoy the game cost about 10 hours of grinding exp and reading lame jokes.

Epilogue

Quite a long post for just a small JRPG game, huh? Well, I still holding some pride about this game. The sensation of working overnights continuously for a week, designing and testing and fixing everything, and it came out, though not perfectly, but obviously marvelous in my eye.

Feel like a dotting dad keep rambling about his son now. (lol)

I really hope that someday, I can comeback to the indie game industry and make something can truly bring fun and smiles to my precious players.