This looks good to me! One thing you could consider is dividing Necromancy into two styles: Undead Rapport and maybe Life Magic or something like that. Undead Rapport might be commanding/taking control of existing undead (note: if you have your own version of the spell written up as a feature, no need to add the spell, too) and speaking with dead, and Life Magic might be about animating dead and resurrection.
If you're playing solo, I feel like you should only think of it as "cheating" if you personally feel you're getting robbed of interesting play. There's no need to hold yourself to any more objective standard than that, in my opinion.
RE: magic styles, it is definitely loosey goosey in the book. A thing I tended to do was give a style fewer spells if the style gave access to what I thought of as more generally useful or potent spells, and give a style more spells if they were very situational. If commanding undead seems like it would come up a lot in your game, separating the two ideas like I mentioned above might be a good idea. If it's more niche, just make it one style. Again though, you should really only worry about changing this if you feel it makes the game too easy for you to make any fun decisions.
I just noticed Itch does not give notifications of community posts by default, so in case you missed it, your feedback is here! https://itch.io/jam/rpg-maker-rtp-only-beginner-jam/topic/2554627/submission-fee...
I just noticed Itch does not give notifications of community posts by default, so in case you missed it, your feedback is here! https://itch.io/jam/rpg-maker-rtp-only-beginner-jam/topic/2554637/submission-fee...
Sandworld Online by Sandybandit has you playing a sapient NPC in an MMORPG on the brink of destruction. The toxic behavior of its human players is somehow breaking the game’s engine, which presumably will lead to the death of its AI NPCs. Of the five games submitted in this jam, Sandworld Online feels the most like it’s going for a 90s-era Japanese RPG vibe. It’s not too focused on puzzle-solving or combat specifically, and seems primarily concerned with bringing the world alive for its player.
Sandworld currently only consists of a prologue quest and a few locations to walk around in, but does a great job with its plot set up. Your character, a quest-giving NPC with an amusing resemblance to Kite from .hack, wakes up to a routine day of listening to other AIs gripe about player behavior and goes off to do their job: asking players to bring the town water. When you enter the item shop, however, you’re told that you’re a secret failsafe designed to protect the game’s code, and are given a The Matrix-esque choice to take a red or blue pill. The blue pill puts you back in bed as though nothing happened, but the red pill gives you access to the same abilities that players have. This enables you to leave your assigned town, fight monsters, equip items, etc. With these new abilities, you can take on the game’s only quest: enter a small dungeon and fight a player.
As simple and sparse as this game is, I found it really charming. The MMO conceit turns a lot of what would feel like unremarkable interactions into some pretty good jokes. I chuckled when I talked to an NPC whose job was just to say, “We’re bandits!” for example, when I think that interaction would not have landed so well in another game. In another location, an NPC guards a castle and refuses to let you in unless you have a good reason, then says “and there is no good reason in the game.” There are quite a few small locations like this in the game world that don’t really connect to anything just yet, but felt inviting to walk around in and talk to NPCs just to see how the author would use it to express the MMO theme. Even things like the weirdly boxy and grid-like town design worked because it evoked an artificial world more than it did a real town, which felt right for this game. Overall, I appreciated that even though there wasn’t much plot to see, Sandybandit recognized that the world was the core appeal of their submission and let us look at more of it than may have been “ready”, so to speak.
As this game is only about 20 minutes long, I think it would be a little silly to overanalyze its combat, map design, etc. What I would recommend to Sandybandit would be to play to the strengths they displayed in making this submission. The almost freeform feel to walking around without many obstacles was great and felt properly like an MMO world. The dialogue was also fun to read. I’d say put the bulk of your work towards these elements, and really dig into what you can use the MMO premise to explore. Let me talk to some monster enemies, help an NPC with their player behavior problem, walk in on an in-game GM meeting, etc. Most of all, I’d like to see more environmental interaction. What’s different about these barrels, paintings, etc. because they’re MMO objects and not real ones? And is there a way an NPC might think to use them to her advantage to advance in the game that a normal MMO player might not?
This entry was short but sweet. If you stick with what’s fun about this demo for what you add later, I have no doubt this will be a great and memorable experience.
Crashland is a sci-fi adventure game made by Oshidead. You play as Clarke, a confident, oblivious space explorer looking for treasure. His ship has an engine failure and crash lands on a planet that doesn’t appear in his space charts. The game’s scenario involves trekking through a forest inhabited by dangerous lifeforms and retrieving his missing part so he can repair the ship and escape. To do so, Clarke must solve a series of puzzles that use the RPG Maker battle interface in a novel way.
Like Mossbrook, Crashland takes some cues from old point and click adventure games. The puzzles all involve picking up items and guessing at how they’re supposed to be used to overcome some kind of environmental hazard. Where Crashland differs is in its interface and overall structure. The game is set on a mostly linear path that has you inspecting objects in the field and then getting into “combat” where you must use specific skills or items to solve the obstacle in front of you. This was a pretty cool use of the battle interface that felt like an adaptation of the old “verb” systems from LucasArts adventure games. I really like this as a proof of concept, though I wanted to see a bit of escalation in the complexity of what the player uses this system to do. For example, some obstacles where the player needed to use multiple items to reduce an obstacle’s “HP” within a set number of turns or perhaps having to use skills in a certain order would have been an interesting twist on this basic idea.
The puzzles themselves are a mixed bag. I really didn’t like using “brutal bludgeoning” to defeat a snake or a log to prop open a hippo's mouth for two different but related reasons. For the snake, the “bludgeoning” skill seemed to follow no hint or observable fact about the snake other than that it was an animal that could perhaps be attacked. The electricity element felt like an unintentional misdirect, as it tells you something about what you get for attacking the snake rather than how to do so. This can be fine, but here it’s ultimately unclear both why and how you interact with the snake, leading me to figure it out through trial and error rather than following the game’s logic. Similarly, the hippo puzzle didn’t sit well with me because it felt like the log was only a solution due to happenstance; the player isn’t so much solving a problem here as they are trying something and having it work by a miracle. On the other hand, I felt the mirror and bird puzzle was well-hinted, and having the player return to town to figure out how to clean the mirror was a great choice that had the player do more than just walk forward in a straight line. Overall I think this was a good showing for the scope of this game, and displayed some out of the box thinking with respect to how it communicates with the player. For some discussion on effective puzzle/adventure game design, I would recommend checking out the Special Topic in the Mossbrook feedback, which talks about making a puzzle chart and letting the player encounter multiple obstacles and solutions at once.
Puzzles aside, this game has some cool aesthetics to it. Transitioning from the very well-tiled spaceship (loved how the game used dioramas to create a cockpit view!) to the more natural environment of the planet made Clarke’s path to the missing engine feel more like an expedition into the unknown. Even though the spaceship is a tiny part of the game’s story and setting, letting the player be there even just for a bit goes a long way to making the game world feel a lot bigger and the story feel like it’s got a lot of “movement” to it. The wilderness path felt a little cluttered, with a lot of environmental objects I wished I could interact with, but its structure was strong. I liked making the stop in the cabin and opening the shortcut using the rope on the cliff. Overall, I felt Oshidead showed off some strong map-making skills, and in particular they really made lemonade with the RTP here.
Finally, I wanted to briefly touch on the plot. It took me a bit to get it, but I think Oshidead was going for Clarke being educated but oblivious. The joke where we find out the true nature of the planet he landed on at the end really drove this home, and it was a fun twist. Still, I spent quite a bit of the game wondering who Clarke was exactly. It’s not so much that I wanted more dialogue, but rather that I think the existing lines in the game could have been better calculated to put Clarke’s interesting personality front and center. A little less sciencey exposition and a little more time getting to know Clarke would be great here, especially because it could help make the joke at the end work better.
Overall, I had fun with this entry. It’s a short and sweet experiment that lays some good groundwork for further experimentation with the engine. I would love to see what else Oshidead uses their sense of humor, their mapping skills and this puzzle battle system interface to make.
(As the Special Topic I would write for this game would be more or less the same as Mossbrook’s Special Topic, I will just link to that one)
Lost Depths is a 3-floor dungeon crawler from Bowtochris, described as a short dungeon crawl with 15 optional boss fights.
In Lost Depths, you wake up injured in a dungeon without your memory or any possessions to your name. The protagonist, Reid, recalls that they were traveling to a big city before arriving here. Reid must travel a mine full of magical monsters to escape.
The thing that quickly leapt at me about Lost Depths is that it’s a dungeon crawler with technically finite resources and no “home base” to return to. This is a tough game structure to work within because the player is expected to either learn the pace of its resource management over multiple plays and/or simply hope that the designer has placed supplies in the dungeon for the game not to be too difficult. Lost Depths does a clever thing here where enemies have a very high chance of dropping restorative items, sometimes even multiple in the same fight. The result is that it does, at least at first, feel like Reid is not so much exploring the dungeon as he is desperately trying to escape, scavenging what he can from his battles as he constantly moves forward. For an “escape” scenario, I think this makes more sense than having Reid train his body up by fighting enemies near a healing spring when all he wants to do is get out. This kind of structural writing is less visible than things like dialogue, narration or item descriptions, but it is important nonetheless. Bowtochris made a good high-level structural choice here to avoid giving the player a location that feels like a “home.”
Exploring the dungeon of Lost Depths is a bit of a front-loaded experience. At first I thought the sparseness of the dungeon was meant to be part of the starting area, with the narrow, yellow dirt corridors giving way to something different as the game went on. However, the environment remains pretty much the same for the entire duration of the game. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it is clear Bowtochris wanted this to feel like a repurposed mine. The mining motif pays off a bit on the third floor, where you can use a collapsed mine track to fall to a previously inaccessible location on the second floor. Beyond this however, the game doesn’t get much return on its consistent but samey environmental theme. From a graphical perspective it would be nice to have more decorations and tile variety, sure, but this sparseness has some practical implications as well.
Functionally, this mine feels less like a mine and more like a gamey labyrinth. This is not at all an inherently bad choice, but it is one to keep in mind when figuring out how much you want to adhere to a given theme. Here, the consistent coloring makes it rather difficult to identify landmarks to aid the player in navigating the maze. There are some interesting pathing challenges to be had in this game where the player must return to the beginning of a very long branch to find the right path, but the uniform feel of the environment made it hard to remember when the branch actually happened. A game with this kind of structure and environment does not necessarily need to go into Super Mario Bros territory where you’ve got wildly different aesthetics marking areas of the game world, but it would benefit a lot from having more small touches to act as landmarks. Some rooms that miners (or the dungeon’s creator) may have used, some weird but memorable geography, and some on-theme variation in the tiling and decorations would give the player better tools to take on the pathfinding challenge.
Other than solving the maze, the principal challenge of this game is surviving the random encounters. There are no objectives or mandatory bosses to fight in this game, so in a way these become the primary test of whether Reid has what it takes to get out. This is a clever twist on how battles tend to work in other RPGs. Usually, random battles are something you need to fight just enough of to be strong enough to defeat the boss that guards the way to your next macguffin, cutscene or dungeon exit. Bowtochris has reversed this, making bosses optional challenges that grant you new abilities. These abilities are sometimes very useful, allowing Reid to buff himself, deal higher damage to enemies, and inflict useful status effects. They also tend to give Reid a tool necessary to defeat the next optional boss, creating a bit of a feedback loop. As the bosses are optional, defeating them feels like a way to get a leg up on the enemies encountered in random battles, which can occasionally be as challenging as the bosses themselves.
The combat itself is also a bit of a front-loaded experience. The first 30-40 minutes of the game feels well-playtested and tight, with some interesting enemy troops to fight, a good sense of power escalation, and some pretty well-designed bosses. While the boss design remains a highlight for much longer, the enemy troops can go quite a long time without offering much variety. I’ve fought probably hundreds of goblins throughout this dungeon, and while they were a good demonstration of how your stats scale up (they are barely outside of one shot range at the start, and become one hit kills pretty soon after), they don’t really add much beyond that. And with the game’s very, very high encounter rate, this means fighting a huge number of battles that don’t contribute much to the game’s fun. This isn’t true of all the random battles of course. There are enemies that inflict scary status effects which can be countered with accessories, enemies that buff each other and debuff Reid, enemies that are best run away from rather than engaged, etc. The troops necessary to give the game a pleasant variety and danger to its combat are there, they’re just overshadowed by the sheer number of repeated fights with enemies the player no longer has reason to fear.
The monotony of the fights and exploration combine to make the back half of this game a bit daunting, despite only taking a couple hours to get through. From the player’s side, it was a bit rough to get over the finish line. But a jam game isn’t all about the player — it’s also an avenue for a new creator to experiment and learn the tools. Overall this feels like an exploratory submission, one to figure out RPG Maker’s math and play with the basics of level design. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, and I commend Bowtochris on not only finishing a 3 floor dungeon, but in filling it with as many solid bosses and encounters as they did.
Lost Depths labels itself as a dungeon crawler, and its mazey environments and reliance on resource management call to mind old school RPGs like Dragon Quest III. As I mentioned above, it departs from the old school by avoiding framing its dungeon as a thing to plan expeditions into or to traverse as a way from point A to B. Instead, Lost Depths frames its dungeon as an escape. The player is always in danger, and they’re solving basically three encounter-packed mazes in a row with no breaks. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it’s worth recognizing how stressful of a structure this is. It’s also worth considering how much the dungeon gets out of being so linear. Outside of a clever decision to let you fall from floor 3 to 2 to access a new area, you are pretty much always seeking the single “correct” path.
I personally think a key element to making this kind of dungeon interesting to explore is in affording the player some kind of agency in how they go about it. While there is a definite beginning and end, I would suggest offering a bit more freedom in how the player moves between these two points. The game already gives the player agency in how they make themselves stronger through the optional bosses, but I think it’s possible to do this with the pathfinding challenge as well. Here are some suggestions for how the dungeon layout can offer the player some feeling of agency:
The key thing these ideas all have in common is that they give the player decisions to consciously make when they explore the winding tunnels of your dungeon. When the choice between left and right feels like more than just a question of guessing the “correct” path, it turns the levels into something for the player to actually play with rather than be constrained by. That is something that I think is important to keeping a game focused on dungeon crawling fun.
(This was one of our two winners! We will be reaching out to Doctor Spacebar soon to give them their prize)
Workshop in the Ironwood Grove by Doctor Spacebar is a dungeon crawl-focused game with a special emphasis on tactical combat. The story follows the ranger Neris and her academic sister Nell as they investigate a mage’s workshop located in a forest full of fantastic creatures.
The stand-out feature of this game is that both of its lead characters can switch “modes” and change the skills they can access. In Neris’s case, she can use a skill to swap between a bow and a musket, which is I think a workaround to enable you to change equipment in the middle of battle. Nell on the other hand gets something more involved: as the player progresses through the game’s first half, she unlocks four elemental forms that have highly varied stats and skills available. Tacticall changing the characters between modes and managing their MP consumption are at the mechanical core of Ironwood Grove.
Structurally, the game is split into two halves. In the first half, the player explores the forest while finding new forms for Nell. Typically, they’ll find a new form, use its field abilities to solve a switch-hitting or block-pushing puzzle, and then fight a miniboss. This first half is I think meant as a tutorial to introduce the player to the game’s rather intricate battle mechanics, but ironically ends up being a lot more intense than the back half of the game. The key difference is that there is no equivalent to an inn in the first half. Instead, the players must make careful use of Nell’s free self-targeting MP restoration ability, ration the items they find, and make good choices in combat to minimize HP and MP loss. This small decision really changed how I played the game, as I found myself trying to fight each battle as efficiently as possible, occasionally retreating to an earlier area where spending turns to restore MP didn’t result in as much damage taken from enemies. Personally, I really enjoyed this part of the game as it’s not the kind of play you tend to get from modern mainstream RPGs. However, I think it sets some expectations that the second half diverges from wildly.
In the second half, which takes place within the workshop, the players explore smaller elementally-themed areas as they attempt to identify a traitor in the workshop’s staff. This portion of the game offers free, unlimited healing and some equipment upgrades. While the encounters get much tougher here, this portion of the game felt really short in practice. That’s because with the free healing available, I made decisions (including huge mistakes) swiftly and confidently as I was much more willing to spend MP for all party members. The encounters in these areas had so much going on that it seems clear to me these are meant to test the skills the player developed in the game’s first half. Instead, it felt more like a victory lap where I was plowing through encounters at a fast pace. I don’t think this is a bad thing per se, as catharsis of this kind feels good when playing a mechanically challenging RPG. However, I did get the sense that this may not have been what Doctor Spacebar was going for in their design.
A thing I don’t want to forget to mention about the second half is that it has a few moments where the dungeons offer interesting choices. The two that stood out to me were the choice to bribe one of the trolls (which is then subverted in a fun way later) and the choice between a block-pushing puzzle and a boss fight in the final room before the last boss. While I was very tired of pushing blocks by the end of this game, I appreciated that Doctor Spacebar experimented a bit in what kind of interaction can be had in the dungeons. I would say follow this instinct! While this game’s battles are interesting, even some simple variety like picking between two paths or talking to an enemy rather than fighting them helps the game feel more like an adventure and less like a series of purely mechanical challenges.
A recurring thought I had while playing Ironwood Grove was that this feels like a full-length game’s worth of battle mechanics and encounter design compressed into a very tight space. I can see why the author would err on the side of experimenting with more rather than less for a jam game, and I think the groundwork laid here will probably be immensely helpful to them in future projects. In Ironwood Grove itself, however, it at times makes it difficult to meet the game halfway and engage with its content on its desired terms. There are places in the game where I can tell I’m meant to learn enemy weaknesses, patterns, or reactions to certain choices, but the chance to do so is simply too narrow a window. In many cases I would look at the included walkthrough (a great choice, by the way) and notice some clever detail worked into an encounter and realize I’d brute forced my way through it entirely by accident. This is an issue I’ll touch on in depth in the special topic section below, but for now I think the best takeaway for the author is that the next thing to experiment with here would be finding the right pace to gradually escalate the complexity of the game. A game with maybe two or three forms to switch between and dungeons full of encounters that try to get the most out of those limited mechanics would have been great for this game’s length.
Complexity issues aside, I don’t want to overlook what this game does accomplish with its involved battles. The overall game math was very well tuned — I never found myself needing to grind, even after fleeing from a few battles. The only place where I felt a weird jump in difficulty was the first time I met a marshgoyle. I think this was an intentionally tough encounter, but it was made even harder by some ambiguities in how the game worked (covered below in the Special Topic). Other than that, the troop design in this game is very impressive. The bosses in particular hit that sweet spot where I died once or twice against a couple of them but was raring to jump back in with a new strategy. This is a tough thing to pull off with a short, plugin-less game, and I think Doctor Spacebar should be proud of accomplishing that with Ironwood Grove. The bees, the earth dungeon boss, the final boss and the optional boss were all stand-out fights that felt like they could be approached with multiple strategies. I had a lot of fun with these.
Finally, I’d like to touch on the writing. I will admit that the plot involving the workshop and the backstory with the war between elves and other fantasy creatures was not really what kept me playing. The back half plot involving finding the traitor was cool for its cipher puzzles, but likewise felt perfunctory because I didn’t feel like it related much to how I interacted with the game (some kind of information gathering puzzle to identify the traitor would have added a nice bit of variety). Instead, the most interesting plot threads I saw in the game were Nell thinking through the ethics of her profession as a magical researcher, and the relationships she had with Neris and some of the staff in the workshop. As you spend most of the game taking advantage of the elemental power stored in the forest, it felt right for the ending to involve Nell restoring that power to the grove and continuing in her predecessor’s footsteps in the workshop. That was a simple but satisfying arc that felt right for this game’s length.
Nell’s relationship with Neris grabbed my interest, but felt underwritten considering how much dialogue there is in the game, and I really felt this absence because most of the game is about coordinating their modes to succeed in combat. It felt like their relationship was supposed to be core to the game’s themes and scenario, but maybe that some complexity to that relationship was left on the cutting room floor. Still, I was interested in their relationship, and that counts for a lot.
While I was left a bit unsatisfied with the overall structural writing, there were plenty of touches here and there that showed a lot of care went into subtle elements of the game’s narrative. For example, I liked that Neris started the game a couple of levels above Nell. Her expertise even came through in some of the mechanics: having Neris’s experience as a ranger let you “track” enemies to see what you’d encounter in that area was a brilliant choice. And even later, when the player can access some last-minute tutorials (a bit odd in the back half), it’s Neris explaining the mechanics to someone else. These are all great touches that show that when Doctor Spacebar really cares about a certain world or plot element, they are willing to put in the work to make that felt throughout the game. That feeling of care permeates this game. While things feels smooshed into a tight space at times, it always feels like the issue is a surplus of ideas and creativity rather than a deficit. That’s a good place to be in!
This is a game that really demands the player to engage with its systems and encounter design, which I appreciated and often had a lot of fun doing. Where I think this game could use some tweaking is in the way it communicates with the player. To Doctor Spacebar’s credit, there is already a lot of work done to make things feel fair to the player. The tracking ability mentioned above lets the player view what monsters will appear in an area so they can prepare their pre-battle setup. The skill descriptions are pretty explicit about what they do. You can even go and read books in the workshop about each monster’s strengths and weaknesses, which was a feature that really impressed me. It is overall very clear to me that there isn’t an intent to “hide the ball” from the player. In this section I want to talk about how the ball can become inadvertently hidden from the player.
One of the biggest consequences of how this game packs a lot of encounter variety and battle abilities into a short length is that the player is a lot less likely to learn things through observation. An easy example of this is the skeleton: I found out through the walkthrough that skeletons have high magic defense, making Nell’s base form come in handy with its MDEF-ignoring skill. The problem is, these skeletons appear so early in the game that it’s difficult for the player to understand that their high magic defense is something special. Further, the player may not even have a chance to notice the high magic defense if Neris kills them too quickly with her weapons, as is what happened in my playthrough. Later, when the player finds undead again, there’s a new problem: Nells now has a multitude of forms each hitting enemies for different damage depending on their elemental resistances, so it’s a bit of a longshot that the player will pinpoint what makes skeletons special. From the player's perspective, the low spell damage could just as easily be from an incorrect form choice as it could be from the choice to use magic at all.
This is a recurring issue in this game: the player has a very limited window where the author can reliably expect them to discover a particular fact about an enemy, and later the “direction of approach” (i.e. what forms the characters are in, what skills the player tries, etc) becomes too variable to expect them to learn this fact on subsequent encounters. The end result is the player not having sufficient information for their choices to really be choices. Instead, they’ll end up throwing darts against the wall until one sticks rather than trying to be on the same page with the game’s internal logic.
So what’s the solution? One way to approach this is to reduce encounter variety. If the player can be expected to see a number of skeletons while they’ve got a limited kit, they have a higher chance of figuring out what’s special about that skeleton’s behavior or stats. Then later in the second half of the game, if the skeleton appears again, they immediately clock what kind of threat it presents rather than stroking their chin as they try to remember what this particular enemy’s gimmick was.
Another approach is to provide this information explicitly. This game does that via the library, but that information comes at a point in the game where the player actually has to be less worried about making bad decisions. Having Nerris give this information out or putting it in a note can solve the problem neatly, though it might feel boring to do it this way from a design perspective.
A third approach is to minimize what sorts of things have to be memorized in the first place. A lot of important facts about enemies in this game are technically “invisible” (i.e. they’re stats, a resistance %, etc) but can be learned by the player through observation of damage numbers or of the enemy’s visual appearance. This is fine, but in a game with this much troop variety, you’re going to want to make as much of this information as obvious as possible even if the player has totally forgotten their previous encounter with a monster. The Ice Fiends having a message that tells the player about their magic barrier outright is a good example of this. I should note that this barrier was a bit confusing too — fire magic would destroy the barrier but deal 0 damage, whereas Neris’s Fire Shot would both destroy it and one shot the Ice Fiend, leaving me unsure as to what I’d done right or wrong.
In general, I think whenever adding an information-based challenge to the game, it’s worth stopping and asking:
1) Has the player had enough opportunity to learn this piece of information?
2) Once the player has that opportunity, is it possible for the player to make incorrect assumptions rather than learn the fact you intended?
3) Is this challenge still fun if the information is given up front? Would the player still have decisions to make?
I do want to reiterate that Ironwood Grove has a lot of smart design decisions that attempt to make information as freely available to the player as possible. However, the information load became so great that about 3/4s into the game I started relying entirely on the walkthrough rather than continue to remember what each enemy’s deal was. While this may sound discouraging, I think finding the sweet spot of how much the player should observe and remember is extremely hard to do as a one person design team; commercial games have entire QA teams to figure this out. Having bits of info fall through the cracks like this is inevitable in a game of this type, so hopefully it’s helpful to hear about those situations for when you refine these ideas for a future project. The steps already taken make it clear to me that these gaps are the result of the time limit rather than a lack of good design judgment.
(This entry was one of our two winners! We will be reaching out to Campbell in a bit to give them their prize.)
The Secret of Mossbrook by Campbell is a combatless adventure game. The story follows a boy who comes to a remote forest town in hopes of becoming a wizard, and he is soon given a set of tasks that should earn him the title. Players will spend the entirety of the game in and around this town, interacting with the villagers and unearthing the town’s history.
Most of the game will have you checking the interiors of Mossbrook’s buildings, wandering the outskirts of the town to find solutions to puzzles, and figuring out what you need to interact with in what order to accomplish Finley’s objectives. This kind of adventure gamey play later gives way to a special minigame coded (as far as I can tell) entirely through eventing. I won’t spoil what this is, but suffice to say Campbell has endeavored to inject some variety into the kinds of puzzles you’ll solve, and the way the minigame builds on itself as you get closer to the end is quite satisfying. I found myself a little weary of it by the end, but some of this is just me being terrible at logic puzzles and taking longer than most might with these.
If I could offer one suggestion here, it would be to vary the type of thing the player does in the game’s final act. The rapid-fire minigame puzzles were packed maybe a little too close together for my tastes to the point of making the final act feel rather repetitive. It also didn’t help that, at least as far as I could tell, the map provided to help solve the final puzzle seemed to be incorrect. It took me longer than I care to admit to solve that puzzle, and I was only able to do it by disregarding the in-game hint map altogether, which feels a little bad. That said, these pathing puzzles did at least play an important thematic purpose I’ll talk a bit more about later.
While most of this game’s non-minigame puzzle solving is about clicking on things in a particular order, Campbell has done a fantastic job of making it rewarding to do that. Finley’s comments on the objects and characters he encounters are always entertaining to read, and usually have a joke or pun involved. The game takes a shotgun approach to its humor — just about anything you do has a comedic element to it, and I’m sure at least a few of the game’s jokes will have you laugh out loud. Even when the thing you’re messing with turns out to be a red herring, you’ll usually be happy to have clicked on it. The environments themselves likewise follow a discernible logic — the buildings, the paths between them and even the more fantastic areas feel naturalistically and believably designed within the limits of using only RTP. Hats off to Campbell for giving every last thing I could find just that little extra bit of attention that a game like this thrives on.
While the game is full of humor, I wouldn’t call its story a farce. Talking to the residents of Mossbrook and unraveling the story of the town is a lot more rewarding than I expected. I found that pretty much every character in this game had something “real” about them, even when our interactions were brief. And the more time I spent with the game, the more I noticed that even one-off jokes served a greater purpose in developing the town and Finley himself. There are a lot of technically impressive things about this game but the biggest one for me was the way it weaved its comedy together with genuinely thoughtful character writing that suggests the author really cares about their characters and world. I never felt like something was in the game to exist as a joke and literally nothing else, as even Finley’s little comments on people’s personal belongings tended to say something about him.
What really made this entry a gem was its cohesiveness. Most of the dialogue and interactivity in the game is doing more than one thing, whether it’s serving as comedic relief, developing the town of Mossbrook as a setting, or helping you understand what kind of person Finley is. I really cannot stress enough how thorough the author is about this: I was seeing things that made me go “oh I get why this character did this” all the way to the final minutes. Even the minigames that stand in for magic spells feel like an abstraction for what the spell is trying to accomplish rather than just a non sequitur. The repair spell has you “get into the nooks and crannies” of the map it puts you on, and the familiar spell has you meeting your familiar “halfway.” The only spell that didn’t feel quite so thematically on point was the fire spell, though I suppose you could say it had you making flame-like spiral motions with your movement. Even the fire spell had an amazing moment in the wizard’s house though, where it feels like you’re in direct conflict with another wizard. This is why I find it easy to forgive the game’s final act being a bit too heavy on this minigame: it did feel like Finley had become fully immersed in spellcraft and was now solving only supernatural problems. By having these puzzles be the game’s “language” for magic, the finale felt like a proper escalation of the game’s scenario. Finley went from putting a bucket on his head as a quest solution to going toe to toe with the spell locks of a powerful wizard.
Overall, this is a solid adventure game that does a lot with a little. It restricts its scope but gets as much as it can out of a few well-chosen elements. While I’ll try to dissect Mossbrook’s adventure game elements a bit more in-depth below, I would recommend stopping here and playing the game for yourself. It’s a real treat, and exactly the kind of entry that makes me excited about game jams.
I realized what kind of game this was when I noticed I could not access the menu. By foregoing things like stats, a traditional inventory, and (I assumed) combat, I was interested to see what kinds of interaction the game would offer in place of these elements. Rather than combat, all of Mossbrook’s interaction is about paying attention to the environment and interacting with things in the right order to solve environmental puzzles, with the spellcasting minigame used to sprinkle a little variety into this.
Theoretically most of the non-minigame puzzles could be solved by brute-force-clicking on every game object over and over, but there are enough interactable elements that thinking about the logical connections between characters, items, and the world to figure out what needs to be clicked on will save you a lot of time. Convincing the player to actually sync with the game’s logic rather than simply mashing Z on everything is important work for an adventure game to do, and I think Mossbrook manages this.
Direly important to accomplishing this, in my opinion, is a thing Ron Gilbert once said about “backwards puzzles”: you generally want the problem to be found before its solution. One of the reasons I think this is important is because if a player sees a problem in the game and then goes searching for “leads” on how to solve it, they’re engaging with the game’s scenario and trying to follow its logic. If the player instead is looking for things to click on assuming they’ll be important later, however, they aren’t really engaging with the scenario but the genre — in other words they’re just looking for keys with the assumption that locks will come. This is a particularly joyless outcome that I think Mossbrook deftly avoids by making the player aware of their immediate goals very quickly.
Roughly, the game’s flow goes something like this:
Meet Eugene and Martha, be assigned your 4 tasks -> Identify Mervin and prove he’s a wizard -> Enter the cave and gain spellcasting -> Finish the remaining three tasks -> open the way to the final challenge.
It says a lot of good things that much of the interaction in this game lies outside of the structure above. Since there are a few optional objectives and one of the tasks has three possible solutions, the structure feels a bit more open ended and not simply like a knot to unravel. The player can be progressing toward the three tasks pretty much immediately, and the order has a lot of leeway to it. For example, in my game I ended up in the cave before I found Mervin, then went to find the bucket, repair the lookout, and get a familiar. I also forgot about the chicken entirely until later, as I went back to solve the fortune teller situation assuming she was important to one of the other tasks. I thus very rarely ever felt like I was searching for the “right” way forward, and you should be proud of accomplishing this, as many commercial adventure games run face first into this problem.
This leads me to one of the things that impressed me most about the game’s overarching design: you used your “red herrings” quite well. It’s important for an adventure game like this to have more things a player could be interacting with than they need to for their current puzzle, forcing them to guess at what is relevant to the particular problem they're working on. This, like avoiding backwards puzzles, is how adventure games encourage a player to engage with the world logic before resorting to brute force.
There are three big things in the game that I think are really good red herrings: the fortune teller, the guy whose window was broken, and the mailman. They’re not actually necessary to solving most of the game’s puzzles, but they tie into the game’s overarching theme of a wizard practicing magic to help others and not simply to serve their own desires. Better still, they actually play into how you get the good ending, serving multiple purposes. This was brilliant!
Overall this game had a strong showing in puzzle design even with its very limited mechanics, and I look forward to seeing what Campbell might do later with fewer limitations.
Hi all! Please use this thread to give each other feedback on the submissions (anyone is welcome to, even if you didn't submit). I will soon be playing all of these games and writing up my thoughts. As we didn't get quite enough submissions for submitter voting to work well, I'll have a set of judges decide the second of two prizes we'll be giving out, and I'll ask them to provide short reviews as well.
Thanks again for participating in the jam!
It depends on what you mean by the main points of the story, but I think it is generally a good principle to create the frames/overall structure of your game before getting too far into the nitty gritty. Yanfly's comic series discusses this pretty early on here: http://yanfly.moe/2017/01/07/comic-lets-make-a-game/
Chat about your projects here or ask for help! There's a general purpose RPG Maker discord you can go to for additional assistance here: https://discord.gg/DC7n33pD
Here are some tutorials and similar resources to help you get started on your submissions.
These resources are skewed toward MV because it's been the main release for so long, but most of the information contained above are easily applied to older versions too. For more tutorials and resources, a good place to start is the RPG Maker Portal, which acts as a hub for useful information: https://discord.gg/8wVaHRz
Good luck!
Messing around with sensing energy as a style.
Zanshin
Type: Advanced
+2 HP, +1 ATK
Suggested learning: After spending a week practicing yoga in the wilderness, a character may choose to give up one of their ordinary senses to gain this style. If sight is sacrificed, this style is permanently equipped and does not occupy a slot.
Here's a go at a style for characters who want to get a bit more out of wielding lighter weapons like daggers.
Celerity
Type: Advanced
+1 Attack Bonus
Suggested learning: A distant monastery trains a secret sect of spies in wetwork. The principles of this style are well-recorded and archived, but protected.
One thing I would implore of people creating their own styles is not to worry about doing something another style already does. You don't know if you'll even use the other one in your campaign after all! That and I think it makes sense for styles to occasionally share features, as different martial traditions will inevitably borrow from each other.
For your other question -- I kinda like both, especially because for a home game you wouldn't be limited by space and so the mechanics don't need to be written "elegantly." Instead of the x-in-6 chance though, I think what I would do is have the player roll an attack and compare their result to the roll of the arrow that was fired. It's not at all simpler or "better" than x-in-6 of course; I just like the flavor of it.
Oh this is a good idea! The central idea is something that is probably worth doing with a bunch of the BX weapons-- take an underused weapon and give it something unique in addition to some small stat bonuses.
I like to give the weapon-focused stuff a flavorful kind of "ribbon" too -- like something that is only situationally useful but really sells the style as a unique thing people really want to learn. What if, for example, you could forego attacking to spin the staff and block projectiles, or maybe use it to pole vault? Like if you saw someone using this style and couldn't see what dice they rolled, how much damage they did, etc. what would visually tip you off that they're a staff master?
Thanks for posting that, it's definitely giving me something to chew on!
This looks cool! Man, there is something magical about seeing the style stuff get mixed with other people's ideas to make something entirely new. By the way, I like that you redid the Exhaustion table from 5e. That idea was close to being useful, but it just kinda funneled you into having to solve things with combat. Making the combat penalties come sooner in this version was very smart.
That's awesome! I appreciate the feedback.
What I was trying to convey in the seeding advice was to have a rumor that basically says "you could learn a style by observing direwolves going to war" or whatever and have players craft an adventure for themselves out of that, so I suppose I would say the book leans toward transparency on that end. I think players generally don't want to know exactly what rewards await them at the end of an adventure, but I think a good rule of thumb is that if players are concocting plans and doing a bunch of elaborate stuff to learn a style, they should probably know in advance if learning a style is on the table.
Of course, I've only tested this stuff with my own table. I would love to hear the results of your own further experiments!
Hey Luke! I have not tested Old School Stylish with the OSE Advanced Fantasy races, but I will note that the race/class divide will tend to make slightly stronger characters overall. As the OSE base classes don't get weaker if you add in the extra features from the Advance Fantasy races, all characters basically get a few extra features.
Personally, I don't think this is going to substantially diminish the challenge of an old school game. A dwarf's (possible) bonus to resisting poison probably won't encourage a player to drink suspicious liquids left and right, and an elf's ability to detect hidden doors doesn't happen often enough to preclude players prodding around dungeon rooms just to be sure. And on top of it all, none of the Advanced Fantasy races do much to mitigate the fact that your characters probably have little enough HP at levels 1-3 that they could be killed by a bad round in combat at pretty much any time. These abilities will give your players a little bit of a cushion, but I don't think they will qualitatively change play. Overall, if your concern is about power scale, I don't think you will be unhappy using the Advanced Fantasy races. Just be sure to use the rule that gives humans abilities too, as the racial class limitations are obviously not going to apply when using this supplement.
My recommendation: if you want to keep things simple, let players say their character is whatever they want and pick a single racial ability from any of the OSE Advanced Fantasy races to describe their choice (with the onus being on the player to justify it). So one player with a human character may take sleep immunity and say they're an insomniac, and a player with an elf may take leadership to reflect their natural talents. But that's just me -- I like to keep fantasy species stuff as simple as possible.
That said, this is just my prediction. The only way to really find out is to give it a shot! Please let me know if you have any feedback after going in whatever direction you choose, and thanks for your comment!
This thread is for posting any styles you came up with and feel comfortable sharing with the world. Annotations about your thought process behind making it or what happened with it at the table are also welcome. If people are interested we could maybe do some kind of style "community pack", but nothing would be used without explicit permission. Anything you post here is yours.
I will start us off with one that didn't make it into the main book:
Type: Secret
Days of Starvation | New Ability | Negative Effect |
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Every meal an ascetic eats causes them to revert to the previous level of starvation (i.e. they move up one position on the table) unless they are at day 8. They lose any abilities gained at their current level of starvation when they revert to a previous one.
Suggested Learning: A character can learn this from an actual mountain ascetic or make it 7 days without food. Use the effects of starvation outlined above without the benefits, and additionally the character takes 1 point of damage at the start of every day.
COMMENTS: I originally wrote this because it's such a big staple in Hindu myth, and also because I think the idea of embracing this kind of fantasy version of yoga fits in well with the mood of the rest of the book. However, at the end of the day, this one just felt a little too esoteric and fiddly. If you do end up trying this one in your game, though, let me know what happens!
This is something I would have liked to include in the main PDF, but unfortunately did not have space for. Below is a list of 36 starting styles that you can roll on if you like your chargen to be more random. They are written as professions, so you can have them double as a quick indicator of what kind of vocational knowledge a character is bringing with them into their adventuring career.
If you haven't used a d66 table before, you roll 2d6 and read the first die as the tens place and the second as the ones place. So rolling a 2 on one die and a 4 on the other could be read as rolling a Cutpurse (24). If your players like a smidgeon more choice, let them read the numbers in the order they choose.
By the way, if you have ideas for your own starting styles (or your own tailored list you want to share), feel free to post them in here!
11 Academic Carrying a textbook gives access to relevant expert knowledge.
12 Animal Trainer +1 on reaction rolls with non-humanoids
13 Bandit +1 on Move Silently and Hide in Shadows.
14 Bureaucrat Can use their title to access low-security restricted areas, such as jails, records rooms or a busy official’s office.
15 Burglar +1 chance to Open Locks and Find or Remove Treasure Traps.
16 Caver Can climb sheer surfaces.
21 Crafter Can repair non-magical objects. A turn for a simple one, an hour in other cases.
22 Cook Can turn two rations into a single meal that heals 1 HP.
23 Connoisseur Knows when a single object is worth more than 100 GP.
24 Cutpurse +2 to Pick Pockets
25 Delinquent +1 damage to enemies laying on the ground or held in place by an ally.
26 Detective +1 to find hidden doors, can discern what killed something.
31 Farmer Heal +2 hit points on rest.
32 Fisherman Always succeed on hunting rolls near a body of water.
33 Herbalist Brings a satchel of herbs that heal 2 HP once. Refills in downtime or wilderness.
34 Hunter 1-in-6 chance to turn any corpse into a ration.
35 Laborer +2 HP.
36 Librarian Find anything in bookshelves, desks, or similar spaces without spending time.
41 Lookout +1 on Hear Noise and Move Silently.
42 Lumberjack Always succeed on rolls to destroy or cut objects with an axe or similar weapon.
43 Mediator +1 on reaction rolls with humanoids.
44 Mechanic Can use any item to repair an object given a semi-plausible explanation.
45 Merchant Recovered treasure is valued at 10% more gold (after awarding XP).
46 Minister If allowed to deliver a sermon for at least 20 minutes, can put listeners to sleep.
51 Noble Always departs with a retainer who does not demand payment nor test loyalty for dangerous tasks. They demand on-the-job training or similar opportunities.
52 Painter With access to the right pigments, can create convincing visual illusions on a wall or similar surface.
53 Performer Retainers and Mercenaries add +1 to Loyalty when testing it.
54 Rebel +1 ATK when attacking during a surprise round.
55 Sailor Can man and repair small vessels on their own, and can book passage on bigger ones for free during an expedition.
56 Scout Wilderness encounters are always spotted from the maximum distance possible, including when surprised.
61 Smuggler Has a hiding spot on their person no one can find, even with a thorough search. Can hold an extra item smaller than a sword, which does not count toward inventory space.
62 Socialite Can invite themselves to most parties, ceremonies, or similar functions.
63 Soldier +1 damage when outnumbering an enemy in melee.
64 Speechwriter +1 to morale of allies.
65 Traveler Starts with an extra language and a regional guide to (d6): 1) temples or shrines 2) all notable taverns and bars, 3) an adventure site (contains every rumor available for it), 4) local fauna, including monsters 5) officials and nobility, including a couple scandalous secrets 6) famous masters and their tutelage requirements.
66 Yogi Eat half as often as a normal character.
Wow thanks for the comments! And yeah I think some of these styles are definitely going to be less of a big deal to find than others. If I were to do it again, I’d probably further split the Advanced ones into two rarity tiers, or perhaps move some Advanced ones to Secret (e.g. Telepathy is much cooler than Survivalism). For now, I left it to the GM to decide how hard any of them should be to find with the Secret category being a vague suggestion.
I would love to make another one of these! Especially now that most of the basic OSE abilities are already represented here. One thing I would recommend if you like this idea, by the way, is to consider converting some GLOG classes to styles. One or two templates (depending on the class) could probably work as a style.
