Making Mayor On The Run: Part I

When I was making Mayor On The Run for IGMC 2022, I was too busy working on the game to post during the development process! This is very normal for me, especially for games with very tight deadlines. In general, I also don't usually share stuff in progress until I'm pretty sure it's going to be in the game.

But I thought it would be good to write about the development process for this game retrospectively, because I feel like it came together more slowly than some of my previous jam games and I wasn't sure if it was going to be a fun to play. (I can have all sorts of ideas but it isn't until the gameplay is implemented that I have an inkling as to whether the game's fun or not. I was prepared to discard it if wasn't.)

When the theme was announced (Rebirth/Resurrection/Rejuvenation), I didn't have any good ideas. Maybe something about a phoenix that lays an egg, then dies, but is resurrected? But I couldn't get a good story around it - I personally need a story with a clear ending in mind in order to even start making a game. Also, I would have loved to make a sequel to what I call the Monkey Game (i.e., Forest Star), maybe something about regrowing a forest after the humans destroy it, but aside from replanting trees and getting animals to move back in I couldn't come up with any gameplay ideas for it!

I did know what graphics I would like to use for the game, though - I have always liked Pixel Art World's and RPG Maker XP's graphics, but since they're 32x32 pixels they couldn't be used in RPG Maker MV or MZ without upscaling (or using a plugin). But since MZ's 1.5.0 update allowed one to change tile sizes, I could now use those graphics easily! (If I could draw, I would have made my own graphics. But alas, art and I are not meant for each other.)

After several days of considering different possibilities, I settled on the idea of rejuvenating a village that would also involve a personal transformation for the player's character as well. The main gameplay would involve finding objects and using them to complete quests, and making choices that matter (two features which are the norm for all my games). In this game, the biggest decisions involve choosing who gets to move in to the village, and deciding how to (and whether to) spend your money. I also knew that I wanted new buildings and decorative objects to appear as the game progressed, and another gameplay feature would be buying and placing furniture for the villagers.

As a result, we have a player who's fleeing from unknown people, and stumbles across a village and becomes the mayor. The player gets to explore new areas, meet new people, and direct the village's transformation. Since the judges for IGMC play for only an hour, the player has to accomplish all the goals fairly quickly (which turned out to be a week, in game time).

Next time, I'll talk about how I settled on the system of buying furniture and making villagers happy in the game - that took several days of finetuning, and I actually discarded a lot of the code I wrote initially.