My first new game in a long time, “Santa’s Adventure,” is now complete! Here’s my first attempt at RPG Maker, as well as a return to purposefully bad satire.
I’m surprised by the length it took to make this game and the length of the finished result. RPG Maker is truly scary in how easy it is to use, and I can see why so many games with little effort come out of it. Hopefully, this game does not appear to be one of those.
I absolutely am proud of this game more than the others I’ve posted up here, not only because it’s my first attempt at RPG Maker, but because it is a game I am capable of playing as if it were not made by me. Playtesting the game felt like I wasn’t playtesting my own game but playtesting a funnier, more capable me than I previously thought didn’t exist. Even when I was testing it I wanted to do some of the optional content that was already tested just because of how fun it was. Maybe this sounds a bit narcissistic, but I do think this game isn’t bad.

Ah wait, this is a devlog, not a diary. Let me go over some of the game and my thoughts of it. I’m gonna try and make it spoiler free.

HUMOR:
The whole premise of the game was to be funny over everything else. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve tried to be funny by using satire, but this is the first time I’ve done with this sort of “cringe,” “made by a child,” “sonic fanart,” type of thing. I made an author character which is supposed to be a mix between a 7 year old boy and a 12 year old boy. I’m unsure which to go with because honestly the mix between middle school edge and elementary school ignorance is fun to write with, but I’ll think it over some more and eventually come to a real answer. I wanted to make the style of the “author” that of a young boy because as someone who grew up thinking that was what life was like using this kind of humor to look back at myself and laugh is cathartic and good material. I tried to write like I did when I was a child (a lot of that I couldn’t bear to look at for long) and I tried to mix in some of my life experience from all over my ages (taking from high school some as well as where I am now). Hopefully a 7 year old’s creation using “fuck” so freely isn’t a big dropping point for many. I also hope making Hitler 2 a metaphor for internalized homophobia wasn’t a mistake because I am still unsure if that was a good idea or not. I also was pretty inspired by DOGSTRONG (streaming from dirak’s twitch account) and her RPG Maker game she showed off with her Sonic OC game, as well as the humor style from “Nyan Neko Sugar Girls,” one of the best things ever. Some other things came into my focus as I was working on this (example: Tails Gets Trolled) and I sort of took from that style through osmosis I think.

WRITING:
I know this overlaps with humor but oh well. When approaching the writing to the game I typically went with “ok what happens next” and then taking the first thing that went into my head. I feel like I could have edited the game better because of this (a lot of ideas ended up being dropped because I’d write them down and then forget then when it came to put the events in the game so they’d end up different) so a “Director’s Cut” if one will come to exist would basically feature a rewrite in so many areas it’d be a different game. Either way, the game’s story ended up being very fun to do, even if I didn’t think I could finish it at certain points due to an immense scope.

CHARACTERS:
Still overlaps but eeeehhh. I wanted to make it like a child found the actor roster in RPG Maker’s database and decided to just edit what was there instead of making anything new. The idea to make Santa the main character didn’t even come into my plan until I saw RPG Maker’s default sprites included him. Included two catgirls and a bunnygirl was also a sort of reach from a middle school dream of having an anime harem and being constantly horny without really knowing what that meant. I also used some characters from a childhood idea of what was normal, like God is real, being nice to siblings, and weird powers are cool even if they are useless. I also have an insatiable need to make as many characters as I can gay because how else am I supposed to feel like I can be attached to the characters? I wish I made at least one trans character but since I didn’t know what that was as a child I feel like I couldn’t have done it very well (but if I have to “Dumbledore” this shit: Santa’s trans. It’s canon. So is Brenda and Dude, actually).

BATTLE:
I made most of the battles against one enemy type because 1. horny author really likes succubus for some reason hmmmm and 2. combat in RPGs is repetitive no matter what you fight unless the numbers are different. This way when a fight changed enemies, it was more noticeable. I also included “Tactical Nuk3” because of the young’s interest in Call of Duty, as well as just wanting to include a death-attack that didn’t work most of the time.

MUSIC/SE:
I wanted to make a soundtrack that sounded like an interesting mix in and out of the game, so I went all over the place in terms of genre. I also played with RPG Maker’s pitch slider because 1. it’s fun as hell and 2. a child would of course like to hear a bunch of their favorite songs really sped up and really sped down. I also got into listening to nightcore during development so I thought if I didn’t do nightcore-style stuff the game wouldn’t be complete. I used some of my dad’s music collection as well (even using the music files he got from napster) because it’s the only music I knew about as a child so it would be natural to take from my parent’s tastes. I also used video game music because it was the only other kind of music I listened to beside from my parents’ stuff. The only other music type in the game is meme music, which is something I think most people get behind. It gives it a simplistic but effective soundtrack that is still varied.

Hopefully this gives you a good look into my new game. I really think this game is worth playing more than my other games on this site, so please give it a try!