Teebeyae's Backstage Adventures (Or from this point forward TBA) Pt. 1: The Before Ages

My entry for Harold Jam last year came from a swirling conception that led to my current passion project, of Reid losing his sword and changing forms to access new playstyles. It came full circle and I ultimately used it as a testbed for the real deal.

This year’s entry came about when I learned about this dude named Fred.

FIVE

Right after Harold Jam 2023, Best Graphics winner Gensun discovered a second party of default heroes deep within RPG Maker MV’s DLC. Among these characters was Fred, who was intended to be the protagonist but certainly did not look the part.

My first reaction says enough.

He looks like a Fred

Look at him. Look at this edgelord. He has an ear piercing. I bet he looks so mad because his parents named him Fred and not Shadow Rose Heart or something like that. I love him and I want to protect him with my entire life. Look he even has a SISTER! I WANT TO PROTECT HER TOO!

The second RTP heroes, or FIVE, instantly became a hint with the rest of RPG Beta Testers (or RBT from this point forward). We all collectively agreed they looked like a rival gang to Harold and his party. Gensun took it even further by suggesting Fred could be a cold, intelligent, and calculating foil to the single-celled organism with a heart of gold. Then we just started going goblin mode and saying he probably listens to a ton of nu metal. Some of us even pushed for the next Harold Jam to be Fred-themed. One thing was for certain; they had to be in my next Harold Jam game.

This immediately got me thinking about Harold Jam 2024, and I decided to recycle an idea I had considered for Harold Jam 2022 or 2023 which was a bunch of back-to-back minigames. I wrote down a quick list of criteria I wanted, and you can see a lot of that transferred over to the final Curse of Teebeyae.

• Centered on Harold, Marsha, and/or Fred
  • Potential Harold/Marsha vs. Fred/Eliza rivalry?
• Game Boy color style
  • 480x432 resolution if possible
  • Pokemon Gold/Silver palette
  • Game Boy style music, FamiStudio or JummBox
• World map with different levels(?)
• Arcade-style games for each level
  • Apple catching game
  • Simon Says game
• Forgo battles altogether?

Even before Fred and Eliza stole my heart, I really wanted to give Marsha an honest shot in a Harold Jam. (Show-Stopping Hero doesn’t count, that was an actor.) I’ve always thought she and Harold would make an adorable couple where they’re both stupid as hell but she’s more of a ditzy dorky witch girl than the straight up dumbass Harold and is often his voice of reason.

I also wanted to take a break from balancing stats and enemies and try something without battles. Stuck in the Liminal did a number on me with how much I had to tweak, and I’ve never had good luck with leveling in game jams. Even if I were to do battles in some capacity, I wanted absolutely no stats and no leveling.

About a week later, I was trying to learn the ropes of pixel art and had palettes on the brain. In a stroke of mad genius, I realized that Harold, Marsha, and Fred (as well as an unmentioned Eliza) all had nearly identical color palettes! This made a stylized Game Boy style game a lock for a solid year leading up to Harold Jam 2024, and it eventually led to my first fleshed-out idea for the jam.

Harold Harvest

By September of 2023, I started to cook. I had made a big plan to pull something no one had ever attempted in any Harold Jam before; a GBStudio game! I had just entered GBJam with the homies Violet Spinel, Nateplays95, and Mooglerampage (check out Motel Nebras!), and even if it was kind of a bust it got me motivated to try the engine myself.  The game would tell a tale of Harold harvesting his apples from the fall season only for Fred to steal them all and run off! Harold would shop for weapons, catch a falling Marsha, and ride with her on her broom to hunt down Fred and take back his apples. The game would have been made of four minigames which involved catching falling items and, in the case of the final battle against Fred, launching them. I was very into this idea until October hit, and I did nothing else with it from that point onward. I doubt I’ll bring it back so hey, why not talk about here?

Mistakes Into Miracles

What ultimately decided the gameplay of Harold and The Curse of Teebeyae was a prototype for a battle mechanic that went a little sour. At the beginning of 2024, I made a commitment to have something tangible to show for my full-length game, currently titled Kalyla: Colors of Life and hereby known as KCoL. (For those who have been following my past devlogs, yes. She has a name now.) Around GBJam, I had come up with a battle mechanic during a long drive home where you could intensify or desaturate an enemy’s color using stacking states. While I had initially conceptualized it as a stat change, I later realized it could also affect type matchups! Smitten by this idea, I whipped up a prototype, attached a feedback form to the end, and plopped that sucker in RBT for a few more pairs of eyes.

Didn’t exactly go well.

I didn’t go a good job explaining the already complicated and hard-to-remember mechanics and left a lot of testers confused. Not even half of the testers said they genuinely enjoyed the mechanic, with three voters being indifferent and one straight up not enjoying it at all! Additionally, several of them said it would add too much complexity to a battle system based on a color wheel that could already be tough to understand.

Needless to say, I ditched the mechanic and called it an L. There was one fight in the prototype that stuck out to me, however; an enemy that could not take any damage but would instantly die upon three Saturation stacks being applied. Something about it tickled me for some reason. I wanted to expand on it and even felt like I could do a whole battle system around stacking different states. More RPG Maker experience would be nice anyway.

A convenient snow day on March 14^th forced me back into the kitchen. I had a huge epiphany about the battle system and then immediately stoked it by finding out the Pokémon TCG Game Boy game was free on Switch! I spent the morning playing through it and thinking of battle mechanics. I was relying on the same plot, but this time Harold and Marsha would possess four types of cards; Sword, Fire, Spark, and Plant (later Food). Enemies would have different weaknesses; for example a Slime would take two Sword cards to defeat while a living plant would be weak to Fire cards. We even realized such a battle system could lead to combat where you don’t even need to defeat the enemy; even pacifying them with food would trigger a win condition!

So we have a pair of heroes and a pair of villains. We have an aesthetic, a rare DJ battle system, and a few songs bouncing around in my head to top it all off!  Sounds to me like we have a little something something for Harold Jam 2024!

We’ll be dividing this behind-the-scenes into sections for each voting category and conclude with a postmortem once results drop. Next up is Overall: Trepidation, Belatedness, and... Amusement?!, where all the plans come together! Look for it tomorrow!