Behind The Dreams Pt. 1: Game By Game By Game Boy Game

Flipnote RPG

I’d really hate to spill the beans on this one, but I doubt I’ll have time or motivation to do this one so here you go.

My first big idea of the year was a game done in the style of Flipnote Studio on DSi, my mainstay for quick concept doodles. I’d be reusing character sprites from Harold & The Curse of Teebeyae but with hand-drawn maps done in Flipnote. I wanted to go as ham on the aesthetic as I could, using fonts from Flipnote Hatena and crunchy music and sound effects. A Flipnote-style RM game is surprisingly not a completely novel idea, but I was digging it.

The big surprise behind this one was that joining the duo of Harold and Fred would be Kalyla from KCoL! Flipnote was my mainstay for sketching KCoL concept doodles so she was a shoe-in. This would have made the Flipnote game yet another opportunity to try and prototype something about KCoL. Unfortunately it didn’t get very far, although I did have the neat idea of colored tiles having different effects and being able to change the colors of each tile to essentially redesign the map.

The Disappearance of Harold Miku

Another idea I had was one which in retrospect is a little self-referential and quirky for what I usually do. It would be about me making a Harold Jam game but Harold has disappeared from RPG Maker!  Since I would be so busy with other stuff, I’d send off who else but Kalyla to try and find him. This would be yet another KCoL prototype, but the game didn’t get much further than that. Almost like KCoL is very very hard to plan.

Regardless of what I made, I did have a goal. I wanted to level up my storytelling in the vein of Grave Secrets and Rage Against The Dying. I figured that maybe I had one more showpiece in me where I could take every weak point in my skillset and send it to the stratosphere. I could even try and flex some newfound pixel art chops as I slowly worked my way up!

The Dream Is Dead

One problem; I ended up doing that for a completely different jam. I joined forces with unlikely teammate Lumi for the RPG Maker 2025 Game Jam and cranked out a number called The Dream Is Dead. I did most of the narrative, some of the character sprites, most of the soundtrack (Lumi did two tracks), and even created a new OC named Koma! The Dream Is Dead was a smash hit, placing 5^th out of nearly 200 entries, placing runner-up for Best Gameplay, and somehow winning Best Music! I only have two regrets, that it really didn’t lead to much afterward (although that’s not really in my control) and that I blew a month killing all my momentum on my biggest creative revelation in a long time.

Codename Teebeyae 2

After finishing Harold & The Curse of Teebeyae, I mentioned I really wanted to try and perfect its battle system while creating an entirely new IP for it. I had the vision of some kids duking it out in a schoolyard in some crazy form of item-based combat. Not much more, but it could be a fun side project. In early February, I thought about a Teeebyae sequel again. I had a few key goals; streamline that battle system while keeping the broad strokes, make it an earnest Pokémon clone with its own identity (something I had been wanting to do for a while), and pull it off in GB Studio which would require learning a new engine not optimized for turn-based RPGs. While RPG Maker MV is still around as a fallback plan, something about this game actually being on a Game Boy really speaks to me.

I was already starting to fall in love, but it was what I settled on for the in-game form of combat that really made me obsessed; competitive video gaming inside a video game. The in-game game is sort of a blend between Pokemon Pikachu and Digimon where you walk with your mons to level them up and battle against others. Mons come on thin cartridges that would double as trading cards and you can swap out the mon you want to walk with. The game would be relatively casual at its core but with a surprisingly high skill ceiling. While your crowd is semi-casual and runs weekly tournaments on school grounds, the thrill of competition lights a fire inside you. The plot of the game then becomes training to become the best in the world, working your way through your state's local tournaments before attending regionals and finally the World Finals. I used to both compete in and run tournaments for Smash 4 and Ultimate and making it about playing another game opened up a world of opportunities based on my own experiences. I’ve never toured the world as a royal diplomat, but I sure as hell have worked my way up from being the most embarrassing Jim to running the whole Jimsville.

What really made me love Teebeyae 2 was how easy it was to plan compared to KCoL. Due to its realistic American setting, characters, plot elements, and locations came to me near instantly. I would pull stuff out of my ass and it would just work. It was the most I had loved being creative in a long time, possibly ever. While I had to choke out this momentum due to The Dream Is Dead, the moment I finished I had to come back. I had to make this game.

Kalyla: Colors of Life

And I guess we know what that means. KCoL is indefinitely on hold. The game none of you know anything about except you play as a chameleon girl and fight by changing colors because all my ideas were so vague and abstract. I didn’t realize how complicated a game I was trying to start with until TBA2 came along. It’s been about seven months since I really started planning TBA2 and I’ve done so much more with it than I have in four years of KCoL. I even started making the actual game! I’m doing sprites and music and characters and bringing them all together in the engine! I’d still love to make something out of KCoL, but I do think it has a lot of room to change and grow and it’s better to let it keep slow cooking while actually gaining the experience of making a game through TBA2. At its peak, KCoL could be an incredibly powerful statement about understanding the world around you and making it a better place augmented with a colorful narrative, intricate gameplay, and of course a banger soundtrack. I just need to become good enough at making games to execute it to its fullest potential.

I Dream Of Harold

Obviously the one-two punch of TBA2 and The Dream Is Dead changed how I looked at Harold Jam. I was beyond sick of deadlines. Not even anxious about them, just sick of them. I just wanted to make my game at my own pace. No pressure, no expectations, just make the game. This made Harold Jam practically meaningless to me, to the point where I considered just doing the first chapter of TBA2 without battles and subbing in RPG Maker characters for my entry.

Unfortunately, Harold Jam is a parasite in my mind, constantly forcing me to come up with new ideas. A few weeks before the jam began was when I came up with my final idea; what we know as I Dream of Harold. I had been wanting to do a Harold walking simulator just to avoid the hassle of creating and balancing battles; hell, one I had codenamed Harold Nikki. Considering The Dream is Dead is very similar to Yume Nikki and Harold is missing in this jam, just have a game where Koma goes through TBA2 land and inside RM characters’ heads looking for Harold! The goal was just as much to learn GB Studio, make assets for TBA2, and use it to build momentum on the real deal as it was to make a Harold Jam game.

Making the Game

The jam began. I made the game. The jam ended. This was far and away the least eventful Harold Jam I have ever participated in. I made the game entirely solo, save a logo my little brother made. Nobody even said anything in the Harold Jam thread in my server except when I asked Sawyer something about the objectives. Even RPG Beta Testers, the home of Harold Jam, was far quieter than usual for Harold Jam season. Fourteen games made it in and thirteen made it out, half of the usual turnout at most. At one point, I realized I may not be able to finish in time halfway through and I got a little concerned. That’s right, I didn’t even have an anxious episode this jam.

One thing I did differently was start with the ending! I came up with the big shocker moment at the end where the graphics switch to RTP a few days before the jam period started. I wanted to execute it as well as I possibly could on the Game Boy. This taught me a fairly advanced technique that took a while to perfect early on; layering sprites to get twice the number of colors. I’m thankful I did this first, as it may have gotten axed had I saved it for the end. Even later in, I had issues with sprites disappearing due to the limitations of the Game Boy. Additionally, laying down the intro cutscene right after meant I could scope as much as I liked while still having a definitive start and finish.

The rest of the process was very straightforward. I made sprites, I wrote dialogue, I wrote music with four hours to go. I made some maps in Tiled (which I learned for this jam and plan to keep using) and some in RPG Maker MV and Aseprite. I adjusted my scope based on how much work and time I had left. There really just isn’t much to say when you’re just kinda making the game with no one around to talk to. To be honest, it kinda made me go insane a bit. I know the game development gods have fated me to be locked in a prison cell slogging away at a game entirely by myself just so it can be consumed entirely by myself, but bouncing ideas around is fun! Putting multiple perspectives into your game is fun! Sharing joy is fun! I don’t know if it’s me or if no one around me seems to get that.

Throughout this process, I wondered what it would be like to lose someone like Harold. I wanted to explore how that would feel from the perspectives of the townsfolk and use that to help guide their character. How must Marsha feel, tossing and turning over the whereabouts of her loved one? Would Reid be more or less exasperated at the fruitless search? Did Fred even care considering he just went right to bed? What would it mean to have something so central to you gone in a flash? I quickly learned how that felt eight days into the jam.

Toontown Rewritten

I am no longer on the Toontown Rewritten team. I got the news very abruptly when I noticed the TTR Team server missing from my list the day I planned to finally put more time into my tasks. For those out of the loop, I had a two-year stint as a composer for an established community remake of the MMO that defined my childhood. In my time with TTR, I had become part of a passionate and positive team, reunited with old friends from a decade ago, wrote music with genuine emotional weight behind it, led the audio team on the Under New Management update, and positively impacted and inspired the thousands of people that play Toontown Rewritten daily. I got to take my childhood into my own hands and reshape it for thousands of other childhoods happening right now. I cried real tears of joy when I realized my music was finally part of the game. I even made an unforgettable voyage to Toonfest in Oklahoma City last year where all of this hit tenfold. I am writing music for a game I love and it is making a bunch of people happy. I waited decades for this.

Unfortunately, a combination of full-time work, lack of time and energy, technical difficulties, and other priorities left me unable to commit to the Toontown team this year. While this was stated as the sole reason for my dismissal, I can’t help but wonder if there were other reasons behind it. I admittedly started to get friend group A humor with friend group B-level comfy with the team and lost my initial professionalism and grit that quickly sent me up the ranks before. Loose cannons don’t fit on the tightest ship I’ve ever seen.

I’ve mostly come to terms with it now, but as I ruminated on it I realized this was the most heartbreaking thing that has ever happened to me. I know it sounds silly, but I’ve had kind of a cushy life and haven’t faced many significant losses. When I lost TTR, I lost a five-digit audience that genuinely loved what I did, an incredible team I could not only learn from but trust and depend on, a talking point with far more internet strangers than I anticipated, and a rock-solid queer space at that. Seriously, I could trust them with anything related to my sexual and gender identity more than my own immediate family. Now I fall asleep to someone’s epic new game idea where your girlfriend is secretly a tRaP and wake up to some rando I’ve never met having a transphobic meltdown because he is designed to not see people like me as human. Nice community, guys. Shocked none of you told me to 41% when I won Harold Jam on Nonbinary People’s Day right after coming out.

But I digress. I made my mark. It’s not like my music is gone from the game or everyone I knew is erased from history. I’m irrevocably a part of a game that has had a huge effect on my life, and that’s something no one can take from me. I just wish I got to do more, you know? It’s been incredibly hard for me to make a genuinely positive impression on people throughout my life, at least not without it coming at the cost of me being seen as lesser. I’ve had to settle for being a joke or a lolcow so many times because hey, someone’s laughing at me and that’s bringing them joy I guess. RPG Beta Testers and another community I joined around the same time helped me break this streak, but Toontown Rewritten was the first time I really got to do that on a huge scale without the “Well you’re good for a…” or “Screw you, it should’ve been me instead” or even “I do not expect you to be mentally competent enough to do this” that I’m so used to. The four months between Under New Management’s first closed beta and its public release at Toonfest were four of the best months of my entire life, and it’s a high I’d love to chase again. It was a hell of a ride and my heart goes out to the Toontown Team, which despite my dismissal I hold zero animosity towards and will always admire for their limitless passion.

Toontown: The Grindworks

And on that note, I want to conclude this Toontown section by stating how grateful I am to be part of Toontown: The Grindworks. Grindworks is a single-player rouguelike take on the Toontown formula by my good buddy and former TTR coworker Evan. I was initially invited as its first composer, but I had to turn it down due to my remaining commitment to Buffet Knight. The game then exploded in popularity. I was graciously offered a second opportunity once I finished the BK soundtrack which I leapt on without a second thought.

Through Grindworks, I still have the privilege to work alongside some of my closest friends from the TTR team, write music with co-composers that challenge me (huge shoutout to Unfinished and Buck), and still contribute to Toontown as a whole while having more creative flexibility than I did at TTR. It feels like a beautiful blend of the passion and dedication that goes into TTR and the casual atmosphere of the Axial team. Making and sharing art that people genuinely love just hits so different, especially when surrounded by a team that shares your passion. I know the new hip thing is to embarrass yourself and everyone around you, but when that’s been your entire life a little shared joy is such a breath of fresh air. Funnily enough, the Grindworks team seems to understand this more than anyone else I interact with. On top of that, it’s just a really good game! And it’s free!

So what the hell do I do now that I don’t have TTR? Do I try and avenge myself by expanding my horizons as a composer? Do I stick a fork in my half-illustrious composer career and focus on Teebeyae 2 instead knowing barely anyone will ever care about it? Most importantly, how the hell am I supposed to care enough about Harold Jam to finish I Dream of Harold when all this is going on? See how the story ends in Part 2: Dreams, where I scope the hell out of this game just to get something over the finish line. Coming out tomorrow!