Welcome to the Jam: The Making of Super Street Harassment RPG

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Day Two: Things Get Real

With the first full day stretching out ahead of us, our struggle could truly begin. Connie got to work on the first set of sprites for our player character—after losing what she created the previous night thanks to a laptop mishap—while Richard and Josh sat down to work out the logistics of moving our heroine around the overworld map. Even though I felt my original design wasn't very complicated, I made some attempts to sand down the ruleset, removing all but the basics—with the understanding that we could always make Super Street Harassment RPG more complex if we had time. This revised, basic outline now had the simple, dependable mechanics of a board or card game. Expected RPG elements like stats, experience points, and equipment would have to wait until the battle system basics functioned properly.

Still, the underlying flow of the game remained the same. Players would be tasked with reaching the end of a level, and their progress would be hampered by random, RPG-style encounters throughout. The first turn, of every battle, though, is meant to underline the nature of street harassment: Running into another person triggers a battle scene, and players have to choose whether to respond positively (via the command "Take it Easy) or negatively (via the command "Brace Yourself"). So, what results from this initial choice?

• If the player chooses "Brace Yourself," and the encounter ends up being non-hostile, they lose Stamina (MP), and the encounter ends immediately.
• If the player chooses "Brace Yourself," and the encounter ends up being hostile, they get the first turn in the resulting battle. (And gain a small boost to Sanity and Stamina if they win.)
• If the player chooses "Take it Easy," and the encounter ends up being hostile, the enemy gets one turn, then the battle ends.
• If the player chooses "Take it Easy," and the encounter ends up being non-hostile, they receive some boost to Stamina (MP) or Sanity (HP), depending on the encounter. (Example: Choosing to "Take it Easy" and then encountering the "Old Lady With Cute Pooch" will give the player two Stamina points.)

When designing this ruleset, I tried to go for a relatively simple approach that attempts to emphasize the theme: Namely, that, for many women, every person they encounter could be a potential threat to their well-being. And the options in battle took much of their inspiration from Pokemon: Players have a choice of four attacks that draw the same amount of Stamina as the damage they inflict on the enemy—"Unspeakable Rage," the heroine's most powerful attack, drains four points Stamina but inflicts four points of damage to the enemy, while "Scoff," the weakest attack, consumes one point of Stamina and deals one point of damage.

Enemies, on the other hand, don't come with a prescribed amount of Stamina, but rather draw from a pool of attacks, with stronger enemies having access to stronger abilities. The "Nice(?) Guy," our strongest enemy—and the creation of Connie—can use "Violation of Space," which inflicts five points of Sanity damage, while "Dirty Old Man," our weakest enemy, uses "Cackle" as his most powerful attack—which only inflicts two points of Sanity damage.

That may seem somewhat complicated when conveyed via text, but Super Street Harassment RPG's collection of rules add up to a much less complicated game than even 1986's Dragon Quest—a seminal entry in the world of turn-based RPGs. From the beginning, though, we aimed to keep our ambitions realistic, and I intentionally limited the possible amount of encounters to ensure the art and programming side of things wouldn't be swamped with work: By the end, we had five enemy encounters and four non-hostile encounters, each with their own unique text and art.

Without a doubt, though, the programming side of the team had the most work to do, something I felt more than a little guilty about by the time my ruleset was essentially finalized midway through day two. Without much programming experience, I couldn't offer anything but moral support as Richard and Josh continued to plug away at Construct 2. "A big challenge was trying to figure out why a part of the code did not work or produced something that we were not expecting," says Josh. "Sometimes it was difficult trying to communicate with some of the team, but after narrowing down what the artist or writer wanted, it was easier to figure it out."