Postmortem 3 - Story

Story

So, a big goal of mine was to make people like Reid. Harold gets so much attention and is generally beloved, but Reid... tends to be a bit of a punchline in the community, so I wanted to change that. This is how I started on Operation ReidSweep, where I encouraged as many people as possible to make a Reid-centric game, but of course, that's only half the battle.

To make people like Reid, I needed to make a great story about Reid.

So, right off the bat, I knew I didn't want to make a comedically driven title like Re:Punch. Re:Punch's story was generally liked, but it was pretty irreverent which was fitting for that game. This time, I wanted to make a serious drama, so that's what I set out to do!

Last year had two especially poignant entries: Grave Secrets and Magical Girl Marsha, which both featured surprisingly tragic endings and had this strong sense of the protagonist fighting tooth and nail against the odds to do what they felt was right. The stories really resonated with me, and did extremely well in the ratings, so I felt they would be a good starting point for what makes a "good" story.

Of course, that isn't to say I copied them. Instead, I asked myself what feelings they gave me. Magical Girl Marsha started with a relatively comedic and tropey Magical Girl plotline and really only became a strong story at the end, while Grave Secrets was a compelling drama from front to back, so I took more notes from the latter. Harold in this game was a stoic character who desperately fought for his cause and suffered greatly for it, and I really resonated with that unflinching dedication. Furthermore, my own philosophies felt appropriate for injecting similar emotions to my own game, and so I decided to start with the foundation of Reid caring a whole awful lot about Harold, and having an unwavering dedication to save him from... something.

Eventually, I came up with the idea that the theme of the game would be refusing to give up, even when you literally can't win. This would have tied well with the Souls-like approach which I'm sad to see go, but thinking about it gave me the idea that Harold would have injected this philosophy into Reid, but in the climax of the story we would find the Harold was the one who had given up. I especially became intrigued with the idea of Reid "selfishly" sacrificing himself to save Harold.

From there, the story naturally filled itself out. I decided that Harold wanting to die must have been for some altruistic purposes, so I came up with the idea of some sort of zombie plague that only Harold could cure. To add to the theme of "selfish altruism" I figured that perhaps Harold was also sacrificing himself so Reid wouldn't have to, and this pretty quickly turned into a subtle meta commentary as I thought about Visustella's code obfuscation and how perhaps Reid's genetic material might have been obfuscated or something like that, with the organization Project FOSSIL named after the plugin designed to allow MV plugins to function in MZ. I got myself a little chuckle out of that.

The story pretty much wrote itself from there.

I'm famously pretty good at handling dialogue and writing just kinda comes out of me, so breaking down my process would be like trying to explain how I breathe. Everything had fallen pretty nicely into place by the time I wrote up this whole draft, but here's the big kicker.

By this point, I didn't know what the Required Elements would be.

I actually had this whole story written out pretty far in advance, before we even publicly announced when the jam would be happening. Because of this, I needed to leave some holes that the required elements would get to fill. This is the big thing about preparing for jams, you need to be able to anticipate what's coming and the general "meta" of the competition.

Last year, the required elements were a line of dialogue, and a location. The line of dialogue is easy to figure out, it's almost always gonna be vague enough to inject into almost any story, so I didn't trip myself up over it before it was announced. The location on the other hand is much harder (in theory), since you need to make the physical map for it. I decided early on that whatever the location was, it would be where the building of Project FOSSIL is located. If the location was a volcano, Project FOSSIL would be nestled within. If the location was "a bridge", FOSSIL would be on the other side of it. And of course, if the location was "an ascent", the building would be at the top of that hill.

Things got shaken up a little when the jam was announced, though!

We had our theme, Ascent of the Allies, which I was surprised to find fit my plans PERFECTLY, being a story about Reid rescuing Harold. There was one big curveball, which was that alongside a location and a line, there would also be a required character.

Again, this is why you plan for contingencies.

My plan was very simple. I had already decided at this point that Reid would be buying his skills from a shop. So, I decided to make a shopkeeper, and whomever the character required was, I would turn them into the shopkeeper. Just to flex, I even promised I'd write a theme for them, just to challenge myself a little during the jam. As a placeholder, I put Sai from Axial in there: he's easy to draw, and in the event that the required character was someone already planned for the story (e.g. Reid), I would just keep Sai as he is.

Well, funny enough, it worked out pretty nicely for me.

The required character was Harold! I should have seen that one coming, of course, but it meant I didn't need to make any changes. In fact, I had already written a theme for Harold at this point, so it worked out extremely conveniently for my plans.

But don't forget the line of dialogue!

So in a frenzied panic, I actually injected the dialogue line very early on into the game at first. In the scene where Reid offers to have dinner with Harold, Harold would have said "go on without me" before disappearing. However, as I continued writing the rest of the game, I soon took a closer look at what that line meant and realized it actually had some important significance. Human, our fearless leader for several years running the RPG Beta Tester server, was finally about to take a sabbatical from most internet activity. His activity had already waned as he had been working to improve his relationship with technology, and we all knew he was more or less on his way out. When he announced the Harold Jam this year, he snuck in the announcement that he would no longer be hosting the Harold Jams himself, and that he would effectively be leaving the server (with plans on checking in once in a while to see if everything is okay). 

"Go on without me" has a lot of meaning, in that sense.

I read it as a message from Human himself. "Go on without me," he says as he takes his leave and improves his life. He doesn't want us to stop having great conversations and making awesome games just because he's leaving. And so, obviously once I realized the context of this line, I decided that such a throwaway wouldn't be doing it justice.

Ultimately, I wrote it as the last line in the game instead, the final emotional gut punch. Reid sacrifices himself for Harold, who didn't want to be rescued, and all Reid says as his final goodbye is "go on without me". It's pretty effective, but extremely sad (far more sad than a guy leaving the internet!) and that's exactly what I wanted. I wanted to aim for the feels with this one, so ending the story on such a tragic note felt really great, and I love that the required line managed to nestle itself so perfectly in the overarching theme of this game.

Overall, I feel like I got really lucky with this. I was pretty much able to leave my plans for the story unaltered for it to fit the theme of the jam and the required elements, and the required line in particular enhanced the story! This was the best outcome!

Reception was generally positive, but unfortunately it wasn't as great as I had hoped. Everyone agreed it was a pretty sad story, but felt that Reid and Harold just didn't have enough screen time together to really sell their relationship, and I'm not sure I characterized Reid strongly enough to change anyone's mind about him. Still, I consider this story a success for sure, and it meets my typical standards of quality! Overall, I'm really happy with how this one came out, and I'm not sure how I'm gonna top it next year.