I Didn't Have Time To Write A Short Postmortem, So I'm Writing A Long One, Pt 1: My Inspirations

So.

Hi, I'm Talia, the designer, director, and producer of Isekai/Online: Beta Test Blues.

The past month has been like a trip to another world for me and my team.  This wasn't the first time I've tried to make a game at a My First Game Jam, but it is the first time I can really say I'm happy with the results.  Sure, it went up buggy and unfinished; sure, a single dumb error led to the most memetastic softlock in the history of stock music; but in the end, a proof of concept proving that I could gather a team and produce a game - the I/O Beta Test Blues vertical slice - went live two days before the deadline.

Let's talk about what went right, what went wrong, and where we'll go from here.  But first, let's talk about where I/O came from.

A Diversity of Source Material

The heart of the game was my friends noting the many deficiencies of isekai light novels and anime - a dirty pleasure of mine - and thinking, "I can tell a way more interesting story with this premise just by making the characters queer."  From there, I gathered source material, playtested tabletop versions, and gathered source material for three years- all leading up to the team sitting down to start scripting, writing and coding for 15 days to make 1 hour of gameplay.

This Is Just Like My Japanese Animes

My main anime inspiration was Log Horizon, my favorite of the modern wave of MMORPG inspired anime, which is where I got the premise of it being an entire server that's spirited away, not just the main character.  (Sword Art Online did this too, but the antisocial main character and lack of meaningful stakes in SAO made it more of a useful counterexample for me). Konosuba, for it's many faults, got away with murder by being about funny incompetents rather than about boring staid heroes; when people laugh, they care. The importance of playing with the distinction between real life and the game experience I learned from .hack//SIGN and the .hack// quadrilogy for the Playstation, and  from the high-tech acid trip to liminal space that was Serial Experiments Lain.  But I also drew on older versions of isekai, back when isekai was strictly shoujo and firmly about female wish-fulfillment - with the exemplars of Fushiigi Yuugi, Magic Knight Rayearth, The Vision of Escaflowne, and even goddamn Inuyasha (It's Isekai.  Fight me).

Gamer Anthropology

My personal experience playing MMOs, and tabletop games, and going to conventions, and staffing conventions (Sup, BABSCon?), and from watching Drakanous bumble through high-level raids (from whence came Meatball Parade; more on that ominous dooting note later), taught me how these kind of gamers - my tribe - acted and talked to each other.  Not to pick on SAO, but it becomes glaringly obvious that the creators didn't do the research; my background in geekdom meant  I wouldn't have this problem.

Did You Find The Red Key?

My love of Games Done Quick, speedruns, and watching people get owned by kaizo games in general lead to a serendipitous finding: the secret endings of Guy Collin's Kaizo Trap, and the attached subreddit - which I would, literally, never have found on my own as this was well after YouTube threw the annotations out with... actually, nothing it changed was a good idea.  This lead me down the rabbit hole towards the (shockingly nasty and NSFW, though not gratuitously so) story The Metaphorphosis of Prime Intellect, from which I took both the quote at the beginning of the game, and major inspiration for the deep lore of the game and what's really going on in the heart of Mundus. 

Let Me Pitch You This Game of Valor...

Finally, I knew that I wanted to adapt the game into the TTRPG Valor: The Heroic Roleplaying System by Valorous Games, the single best tabletop RPG for simulating anime physics and morality in print today - and you can tell the authors, Austin and Quinn, that Talia said so.  Since this was going to be a pitch to licence Valor, that meant I had the math right there to refer to, and I could start making characters ahead of time.

It's All Been Done Before - But Not Your Way

A wise old GM once taught me, "Don't convert - create!" Mailanka didn't mean to make something wholly original; he meant you should analyze what you enjoy and why you enjoy it - and figure out what those creators used for thier touchstones, until you have a genre to draw on rather than a single work.  Seriously; adapt or remake something for your first project, and let your creativity shine through your own spin on it.  There's no shame in using an old saw like "The princess has been kidnapped by dragons.  Are you a chivalrous enough knight to rescue the princess?" to learn, and to make it original you can study it's predecessors and remakes to come up with something original anyway.  

Until Next Time...

For my next post, I'll talk about gathering the team, writing the documentation, and how I learned to stop worrying and love being the Producer.

Until then, if you enjoyed the proof of concept, I plan on expanding it over the course of the next three months.  Isekai Online: Mundane Visions, the expanded demo, will feature:

• Exploration of a city and at least one wilderness area; hopefully also a dungeon
• A more naturalistic story and tutorial with more room to breathe
• A better look at the other Adventurers, the major factions, and the people of Mundus
• Deedee's four goddamn different builds and outfits
• At least two regular fights and one miniboss battle; hopefully a second

And, with a whole lot of hard work and luck,

• A tactical combat system with movement on a grid, so we can truly show off what Valor was going for.

If you'd like to make that more ambitious game a reality, please consider visiting my Patreon and supporting me and my team financially.  I don't feel comfortable putting a tipjar on this version of the game, but would like to gauge interest with my Patreon and earn enough so that no one in the team has to face an empty fridge while we make this labor of love.  

In addition, I have a Discord channel discussing the game and where it's going, including a discussion of it's tabletop forebears.  Check it out if you enjoyed it, to tell us what worked.

And Now, A Casting Call

I would be very interested in finding voice actors for the  expanded demo and for the full game.  We can't pay much, and then probably not until October, but we can and will pay then.  If you are interested in playing any of the main characters in this game, or of finding out about the secondary characters and the rivals we plan on including in I/O:MV, please come to my Discord, ping @Moderator, and request the role "Voices of Mundus."

Thank you, and I hope y'all have enjoyed as much fun and glory this month as I have.