A Sorta Postmortem (Quest for the Teacup of Minor Sentimental Value, ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG, Uninteractive Fiction)

Competitions IFComp
1

I kept a sort of vlog during the judging period of IFComp this year, largely because this was my second attempt at winning the Golden Banana on purpose and I wanted to keep track of anything that might prove interesting later.

It probably won’t give a full picture of what I was going for on its own, but there’s also a blog post that goes into more detail. Long story short: I was counting on Quest for the Teacup of Minor Sentimental Value getting a substantial number of rock-bottom ratings because that was much what happened when I submitted my previous RPG Maker entry, Quest for the Sword of Justice, in 2020. The feedback seemed to suggest that the RPG format was a big part of the reason.

Having tried for a substantially higher level of polish (and being that much more familiar with using RPG Maker for a dialogue-heavy game of this sort), I’m not all that surprised that it got a solid number of decent ratings. What caught me completely off-guard was that ratings at the lower end just didn’t materialise. Essentially, and as I think somebody mentioned in the livestream chat, I appear to have recreated The Producers here. Not that I’m complaining!

For next year I’m going to focus on finishing Who Whacked Jimmy Piñata?, which will be a fairly standard parser game, but the response to Quest for the Teacup has been very encouraging and I would like to try and experiment with other things like it. I’d also be keen to see if anybody else opts for an entry of this sort!

The last thing to mention would be that I was incredibly pleased to see the various responses to Uninteractive Fiction that came out during the comp. All of them were hilarious, particularly as they mostly seemed to be far more ambitious than Uninteractive Fiction itself. Joey’s 1,000-word essay on this three-word joke game might be the best thing anybody’s ever written about anything of mine ever, though Brian Rushton’s 0-word effort is up there as well. Phil Riley’s parser remake is fantastic too. The community response to the IFComp entries is consistently one of the best things about the competition, but I think the response to something like this in particular really highlights just how good it is.

32 Likes
2

Where did you get the sound effect for Uninteractive Fiction? (I really liked it.)

5 Likes
3

It’s Fail Jingle (stereo mix) from Pixabay! I poked around a bit looking for the right sound and that one seemed like a perfect fit.

4 Likes
4

I really liked the Teacup, and that style of game. I might take a look at the game engine. Are there other comps out there which are more inviting to RPGs?

1 Like
5

My takeaway from this year is that IFComp is actually entirely accepting of RPG Maker games, though if you’re interested in producing a more traditional RPG (with equipment/items/levelling/skills/etc.) then it probably is worth exploring elsewhere. I’m more familiar with short jams than non-timed competitions myself, which might be an issue for RPG Maker since I find it a bit slow to work with. Still, there’s the 48-hour Ludum Dare, or any number of jams on itch.io that might give you longer than 48 hours to work with (but I personally haven’t tried yet).

Also, in case it helps, both Quest for the Teacup of Minor Sentimental Value and Quest for the Sword of Justice were made with RPG Maker MV in particular. It’s a bit of a no-brainer for me because it’s the only Linux-native version of the software, but it was also the first that opened up the option of exporting HTML5 games to be played in the browser, which is incredibly useful. I’ve looked into the newer version (MZ) and although it has some nice extra features, there’s nothing in there that I reckon offsets the loss of native Linux support for me or the higher price tag in general. These things are expensive as standard so I’d recommend waiting for a sale or a relevant Humble Bundle as well.

4 Likes