Welcome to the Jam: The Making of Super Street Harassment RPG
Critic becomes creator as USgamer's Bob Mackey puts his skills to the test throughout a grueling, game-making weekend.
This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.
Day Three: Time Keeps on Slippin'
When the third day dawned, Super Street Harassment RPG had much of its planned functionality, along with a few extras features that weren't included in the original design. Connie, for instance, proposed and crafted a few lovely splash screens that would display when the player either won or lost the game. And since our team had no musicians to speak of, we didn't plan on having any sort of audio component—until, that is, Pollock introduced us to Devin Dominguez, a local musician and CSU East Bay graduate offering his work for free during the Game Jam weekend. With not much to do other than offer my barely applicable skills to the programming side of things, I flagged Devin down as soon as he left our computer lab.
Since Devin's age was a little closer to mine than the rest of the team, it didn't take him long to pick up on what I wanted: Basically, your standard 8-bit RPG music, but with the typical "medieval fantasy" theme replaced with something more urban—in the non-marketing-buzzword sense of the term. The next few hours saw Devin return to our game design lair multiple times with some wonderful new creation to show off. And since the other teams were either too shy or too wrapped up in their own problems (or simply lacking a guy like me without anything better to do), by day three, we discovered that our group had been the only one to request music, which removed any reservations about requesting more.
Our original plans accounted for the most fundamental music: compositions for the title screen, overworld, and battle scenes. But with Devin's cooperation, we managed to expand on the basics, and he eventually composed both a battle victory theme, and music that would play during our "game over" screen. You can check out these compositions below, or download improved versions of them (along with other tracks composed for the Game Jam) at the event's BandCamp page.
That's not to say everything was going smoothly. As the deadline of 4:30pm approached, many teams weren't quite ready to share their final creations with the rest of the attendees. While I worked on our PowerPoint presentation—again, applying my most useful skills—Richard and Josh tried just about everything to iron out what should have been a very simple issue. When Super Street Harassment RPG launches players into a battle scene, it displays enemy sprites in the upper left corner, a la Pokemon. Their biggest problem, though, was getting the sprite from the previous battle to disappear completely; regardless of the amount of work poured into fixing this bug, each successive battle would simply layer the new enemy sprite on top of the old one—a problem that still persists in our "finished" version of the game.
Still, even if Super Street Harassment wasn't perfect, it was at least presentable. While we wanted to include features like map randomization, and making our random encounters truly random—rather than the result of player wandering into prescribed sprites on the world map, we had to roll with what we had—along with everyone else who had pushed their projects' production well past the 4:00pm deadline. By 6:30—and with the final bus leaving the campus area at 7:33—the time had come, and we had no choice but to pack up Super Street Harassment RPG, bugs and all, along with everyone else who needed just one more hour to get their burgeoning projects straightened out.
Thankfully, after living three days amongst these people, the possibly judgemental strangers of Friday had since transitioned into the thoughtful peers of Sunday. And if this seems like a bit of an anti-climax, you wouldn't be wrong. After three days of hard work, little sleep, and even less food—I think my "vegetarian option" on day three consisted of a slice of cantaloupe and a fun-size bag of Cheetos—we were too weary to let a little thing like public speaking get in the way of the long-awaited finish line. This was more than apparent when my team, who originally tasked me with doing all of the talking, freely jumped into the presentation to address the particular elements each of them worked on.
Even Connie, who seemed the least likely to come to life in front of a crowd—a rare skill, to be fair—cheered us on through the random encounters our five-minute presentation held. After seemingly winning over the crowd, though, I had little time to bask in the glory of having finished a game. The last bus of the night was just minutes away, and another work-based trip would follow the next day. (Don't we newly acclaimed video game creators get a sabbatical now and then?)