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Well, the results are in... two days early! Weird how that works. But I can successfully say, with an almost overwhelming majority, that the winner of our poll is the title "The Other Eggplant," so, I hope you like eggplants. Without any further ado:

 

The Other Eggplant

 

Another game by the makers of Hamburger Mode.

 

TO BE CLEAR: This is going to be slightly less ridiculous and over the top. That game was a total and unrequited, yet somehow hilariously charming mess. This is not that. This game has a STORY. And PLOT. And maybe even some sort of strange meaning to be found inside of it. Maybe, though. It's not like this is Citizen Kaine or anything.

 

SO:

This game takes place in a small tavern at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. You, the player, are a traveller who was just passing through when a sudden psionic thunderstorm came out of nowhere and was extremely threatening. Fortunately, most buildings nowadays are warded against this sort of thing, so you fled to the safety of this tavern, along with basically anyone else who was around at the moment.


 

The Game:

Is a story based game, where you, the player, can take a different action every hour, for 9 hours (from noon to 9 PM) inside the tavern. Actions include talking to the different people who are also staying at the tavern, plotting your course, helping out around the tavern, and of course, napping. That’s just like… That’s a thing you can do. Anyways, there is no specific goal of the game, aside from learning more about the characters and trying to figure out what they are doing. However, at some point during this (probably halfway) some sort of big event will trigger that then means you have to solve a mystery, or maybe go looking for someone who's gone missing. I still haven't quite figured that out, but it would probably be pretty boring to just talk to people with no direction.

 

“Now, Technomagie,” you might be thinking, “That doesn’t really have anything to do with your title and prompt for this here game jam!”

 

Well, you’re right.

 

Anyways, this game will be built in the RPG Maker MV engine, which, if you don’t know, is a game engine designed for primarily making old school Final Fantasy clones. I won’t be doing that. In fact, I don’t think this game will have any combat or dungeon crawling in it whatsoever. I would prefer to have a more visual perspective on this, as opposed to a Twine game. However, it will be important to note that it will be built using primarily images from the base engine, which in all honesty look pretty crappy.

 

Characters:

In the next couple of days, I will be beginning to post information about the main characters that you will encounter in this story. However, and I want to put this up here right now for this reason, I'm going to be adding extras into the game as essentially other people you can meet who are just hanging around the tavern. I want people who read this to reply below with an idea for one of these extras, and one or two lines of dialogue that you get when they're interacted withThese can be anything from shameless self-inserts, to dumb one-liner jokes, or anything in between. Think of this as your chance to be wild.

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This sounds interesting! Somehow it got me thinking about 80 Days and The Last Express, although there are other games that have structures more similar to this.

 

In your vision, will turn optimization play a big part in the game? I don't know what kind of form the actions take, but 9 (or 5) actions sounds like a limited set to solve a mystery. 

 

 

(I still have to think about ideas for the extras.)

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Sounds very cool! I like the thought of exploring an old school SNES-ish-looking tavern again. 

 

An idea for a recurring character that may be fun is a person that is just trying to get a drink. Like, from start to finish all they are trying (and failing) to do, even when the big event happens, is getting a drink. Could provide some nice counterpoint to anything serious going on!

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I'm still trying to decide just how optimized you'll need to be in order to get a "good" ending. While I am a big big fan of story games like 80 Days or Long Live the Queen, where you have to hold yourself to a schedule and make difficult choices of what the best use of your time is in order to succeed, I had originally envisioned this as being more of a relaxed sort of game, where you're just meant to be in the world and learn as much about the people there in the limited time you have. I'm a little worried that this might end up being a bit too boring, which is where the idea of a mystery of some sort came from. I do think that no matter what sort of tragic event that needs solving ends up happening, the game as a whole will be of a much lighter tone than most traditional mysteries are. I just don't feel like writing something exceptionally grimdark right now....

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NPC: kindly yet sad, bald old man.

Dialogues:

"*sigh* My hat blew away in the psionic storm."

"It was a family heirloom!"

"I wonder if some brave soul could venture out and find it for me..."

 

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