On every level except physical, I have been destroyed by the Minimalist TTRPG Jam.
A thunderhead of mistakes have led to this state, and we’re gonna unpack them so at least we learn something for the future. I am not inexperienced with game jams: I cut my teeth on them in college and more recently I had a great time with the Summer LEGO Jam. So what’s different about this one?
For one, I think the two month jam period hits me right in the executive dysfunction blindspot. It was just enough time for me to treat the jam as more of a marathon than a sprint, but when I inevitably lost focus for a manic episode, I was stuck with the scope of a two month project and half the time to work on it. Now, that is an elaborate way to say I struggle with mental illness but I want to drill down into the scope of it all.
If you don’t have a background in project management, scope is the technical term for how big a project is in terms of work needed to complete it. Most frequently, you hear about the term “scope creep” as a common occurrence where teams keep adding features to projects and it ruins their time management. I didn’t have a problem with scope creep for the minimalist jam — if anything, I butchered my darlings in a symphony of scope reduction. No: my problem was there from the very beginning. I chose to publish my fantasy heartbreaker, The Serket Hack, for the minimalist jam out of sheer hubris.
“Kill two birds with one stone” I thought to myself. One of the goals that I declared at the beginning of this year was my submission to Prismatic Wasteland’s Year of the Beta. I’ve been cooking my games for long enough and this was the clarion call to action for me. Get something written, get something published. Make it real.
The Serket Hack is not a small game, conceptually.
I can make small games; I released one a couple weeks ago in the style of Grant Howitt’s one page RPGs. This is a different beast altogether.
stuff i didn’t realize i needed to write
I take so much of this stuff as a given because I’m in the weeds thinking about mechanics instead of the experience someone has reading the game for the first time. I can probably assume they’re familiar with how tabletop roleplaying works if they’ve found their way to my itch page, but none of my outlines for the jam had the foresight to include a section on the basic game loop.
When I started writing, I sketched a quick set of bullet points for rolling the core resolution and jumped straight into class design. I thought to myself “this is the real meat of the game and the majority of my time should be spent working out how these feel”. Two months later I looked at the date and realized I had a week left and I needed to write an introduction, the combat procedure, enemy generation, and explain the rest of the Total//Effect system and the ways in which my game strays from Binary’s elegant SRD.
The document slowly filled with comments like “hey you need to explain what Advantage is” and “characters should probably have HP if they’re going to take damage”. I was extremely sure of myself when it came to writing abilities and systems that dealt damage, but I had completely forgotten to design any form of character creation where players would get HP in the first place. In fact, even when I went back to add HP to each class, I forgot to make that change to the Scoundrel and went on to publish the game before I noticed and quickly patched the submission.
stuff i didn’t realize i needed to remove
One of the fundamental premises of The Serket Hack has always been the idea that everyone is a Fighter. It mirrors one of the things that I enjoy about Lancer (where everyone begins as an Everest pilot), but more importantly it reinforces the idea that all of the characters are rooted in violence. I have to stop myself from over-using the word, but we as storytellers are only interested in these characters because they have the power to fight. When a character lays down their arms and opens a tavern or becomes a hermit, their identity is no longer based in combat and they are no longer a Fighter.
The second core premise of The Serket Hack is that all advancement is diegetic. In order to unlock the Fighter’s Vorpal Slash maneuver, the character must seek out a master willing to teach them and train under them. This is a rejection of both milestones and XP grinding: the players must self-determine their goals and seek them out in game.
I very quickly determined that writing the full advancement trees for my classes was beyond the scope of the jam, so I made the decision to limit the classes to their starting abilities. In turn, this meant that it no longer made sense to frame the other classes as advancements to the base Fighter. I ended up restructuring the entire class section so that players simply picked one of the three. This also affected the balance of abilities, because I no longer had to assume that characters would have access to the base Fighter abilities in addition to whatever advanced class they chose.
Speaking of advanced classes, I actually intended to include a fourth one in the jam version of TSH but I decided to remove it to give myself more time to work on the rest of the game. The Bartender class is another support class similar to the Scoundrel, but has a much greater focus on healing and restoration. I think in future versions I’ll even remove some healing from the Scoundrel to give them more distinct identities. Unlike the Scoundrel, the Bartender is capable of attacking as a bouncer / brawler type, and their abilities are enhanced by magical drinks.
The last major thing I pulled from the game was less of a specific feature and more of a broad removal of all mechanics that would affect initiative speed. In the final game, characters have numerical speeds and their position can be affected in the turn order by increases and decreases. You can see this reflected in my insistence that initiative be represented by mutable tokens or markers. However, these specific classes without any advancements don’t affect character speed enough to include such a complicated subsystem in the jam game. Because of this, I had to write an entirely new way of handling initiative when combat begins.
May this post serve as an oath that I’m going to write something simpler next year. I loved participating, but the overhead of trying to carve off a minimalist version of such a heavy vision is devastating. Still, I’m glad on some level: one of the reasons Binary runs this jam is to encourage designers to tear the bandaid off and release a bad version rather than trying to perfect a game before publishing. In this metric, it has succeeded terribly. I’ll be refining the game some, but I feel proud of the fact that I have a beta for my beloved heartbreaker.
Go check it out here.
