January’s Featured Game: Wishbone DEVELOPER(S): Skitty, Kwillow, Ellie, NatashaENGINE

January’s Featured Game: Wishbone

DEVELOPER(S): Skitty,Kwillow,Ellie,Natasha
ENGINE: RPGMaker VX Ace  
GENRE: Western, Drama, Farming Simulation
WARNINGS:  N/A
SUMMARY: Wishbone is a character drama-slash-farming sim game that takes place in a wild west-inspired setting. The player takes the role of a farmer, fresh off the wagon in a new town and tasked with building a successful ranch. Wishbone might seem sleepy and mundane at first, but there’s trouble brewing on the horizon: a fierce, prolonged standoff between the lawmen and the outlaws that will decide the fate of the town itself.

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! 
*Skitty: Hello! I’m Skitty, a scruffy weirdo whose hobbies include drawing, programming, and cooking. I also happen to be the coder, project manager, and one of the main artists. In 2014, I released my first game, Theo’s Big Adventure, but actually haven’t really been involved in the community… I’m a bit of a hermit.

*Katie: Hi! I’m Wishbone’s portrait artist, and I also do some other less easily categorizable stuff, like writing, spriting, concept work and research! This is the first game I’ve ever been a part of the team on, if you don’t count an unfinished choose-your-own-adventure game I made in Flash when I was 13.

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially?
*Skitty: It’s kind of a funny story. Several years ago, I used to be part of the Fallout: New Vegas roleplay community on tumblr. Just for fun, a few of my friends and I came up with an alternate universe where instead of living in the post-apocalyptic desert, all the characters lived in the wild west instead. We ended up having a lot of fun with the idea! My friend, Ellie (who is also working on this project as a writer), suggested the idea of an Animal Crossing-esque game based on that setting… and I, having coding knowledge and having made a game before, volunteered to make it. The struggle between the four central characters remains the same as the initial concept, but the project and the people of the town have evolved a lot since then.

How long have you been working on your project?
*Skitty: I started it around April 2015, so it’s a few months short of two years old. Progress has been slow because I’m also juggling a job and other obligations, but even during busy times, I typically manage to work on Wishbone every week. Every couple weeks, new features get done and updates are posted to the dev blog.

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project?
*Skitty: The three biggest ones are Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and Red Dead Redemption. From Animal Crossing, we have have befriending townspeople and decorating your house. From Harvest Moon, we have the farming mechanics and romance. From Red Dead Redemption, we have hunting, foraging, and outlaw bounties. And I suppose Fallout: New Vegas deserves a shoutout for kicking the whole project off, albeit indirectly.

*Katie: I’ve liked Wild West settings for a while, but this project has made me go big on trying to absorb as much information from both the actual time period and from media as I can. Lately I’ve been trying to cram as many old Westerns into my eyeballs as I can so I get a good picture of the (romanticized) aesthetic and shorthands that have been used for this genre in the past.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them?  
*Skitty: Honestly, we’ve been fighting against RPG Maker’s limitations since the beginning, since the game we’re making is quite unlike a top-down RPG.

I would say that the biggest difficulty so far has been the patch of code that manages animals aging, getting sick, eating, giving birth, etc when the day rolls over. Originally, each animal event had an autorun page that would process that information when the player entered the barn map, but that would get very messy if the player didn’t enter that map all day. It got even messier if the player sent the animals in the barn out to pasture! To solve this, I first had to learn the order in which autorun events are evaluated (tip: it’s determined by the event ID number!). But that wasn’t enough… as more features were implemented, it became obvious that that approach just didn’t work. There were too many conflicts, and every time I’d fix something, I’d have to go through 20+ animal events, each with 40 pages, and change something over, and over and over… it was incredibly inefficient, typo-prone, and hard on the wrist.

Eventually, I got sick of it and recoded the whole animal system to use “generic” Common Events for interaction (basically I copy the animal’s specific stat variables to “generic” variables used by the function, then call it), with the aging/giving birth/eating/etc handled by a single event that was called once when the player slept. In hindsight, it seems so obvious… but my previous project didn’t use Common Events at all, so the first year of Wishbone’s development was largely dedicated to learning how to use them effectively.

*Katie: My biggest obstacle has been myself. I’m both a procrastinator and a perfectionist, which is just a horrible combo for ever getting anything done. Thankfully Skitty keeps me as on task as she can, but I still get mired in fixing-loops, and you would not believe the amount of times I’ve sent her revised images just because I moved a nostril two pixels to the left because it had been bothering me so badly.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept?
*Skitty: It actually hasn’t changed a whole lot. In the beginning, we had this core concept, basically just Animal Crossing plus Harvest Moon. But even back then we knew we wanted a big plot and minigames and sidequests and stuff… it was just a matter of figuring out if those were feasible to program.

I’d say it actually has more features now than it did in the original concept, too. I think in the beginning we had maybe five minigames, now it’s more like 8-10ish (depending on what you consider a minigame).

*Katie: It’s far larger than we had intended, that’s for sure! The art style has also shifted quite a bit, from the switch to wholly original graphics from borrowed sprites to subtle alterations in the sprite and portrait style. I think the biggest, most significant change, aside from making all-new sprites, is the inclusion of the sky in most of the game’s maps.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team?
*Skitty: It’s pretty much the same as it always was–me as the programmer/project manager/spriter, Katie as the portrait artist and other spriter, Ellie, Dax, Jester, and Reuben as character/plot contributors. Oh! I guess the big difference now is that we are in the process of hiring a composer?

What was the best part of developing the game?
*Skitty: Seeing it all come together into something finished and cool. Sometimes I like to just lovingly look at the maps and videos and such I’m proudest of and think “wow, I did that! And it turned out almost exactly how I’d imagined!”

*Katie: Agreed! The little bits and pieces don’t seem like much, but when they’re part of a whole it’s like they’re completely transformed. I’m also happy to be working in a group - it makes me so proud to be part of this effort!

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently?
*Skitty: Man, I’d definitely be craftier about how I handled the code for the animals. I didn’t know a lot about scripting at first, MONTHS worth of headache could have been avoided if I’d known how to use script calls.

*Katie: I don’t want to say ‘I wish I could change everything!’ because that’s not true, but it’s hard to keep myself from feeling I can always improve the parts I’ve contributed to the game. I’m doing a lot of learning on the job, and when I look back on things I’ve done before - even just a couple of portraits or sprites ago - it feels like I need to do everything over and make it better!

Once you finish your project, do you plan to explore game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is?
*Skitty: We definitely have plans to use the characters again, but when they’re revisited, it’s going to be in different contexts. You won’t see the desert of Wishbone again, but the characters will absolutely be popping up in future projects.

*Katie: Yeah, these characters are sort of like… actors, in a way. Type-cast actors. We like to put them in different scenarios and see how they adapt.

What do you look most forward to upon/after release?
*Skitty: Gosh, it would be amazing if people liked the game enough to call themselves a fan! I’m definitely looking forward to people’s reactions to discovering plot twists and easter eggs and such. I hope people like the characters, too.

*Katie: Having something like this done would feel amazing. I’ve never been part of something this big before, and it’s a lot to be proud of. After that - if even a handful of people like the game, I’d be elated!

Is there something you’re afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? 
*Skitty: I hope there aren’t too many bugs in it when I release it! I mean, I’m testing it as I go, but it’s a really big and complex game… there are going to be things I don’t catch. I’d be really disappointed if I released it with a glitch that broke people’s save files.

Also, I really do hope people actually like the characters… I’d be sad if they didn’t.

*Katie: I hope the art does justice to the game… I’d hate for it to be distracting or off, it’s something I worry about frequently. And boy I hope the story and characters come off okay!

Question from last month’s featured dev: What’s the biggest turn off you can get on an RPG maker game?
*Skitty: Hmm… honestly, using the default sprites tends to be a pretty big turnoff. As an artist, it is very important to me that the game have an “aesthetic”, a sense of atmosphere, that the characters feel like individuals… that’s what really catches my eye and makes me want to learn more. I know not everybody is an artist, but like, a simple 8-bit sort of style, or even a “shitpunk” style like Space Funeral is more eye-catching than the default tiles.

Also, I find games made with the default tiles tend to be very easy to get lost in due to the generic nature of said tiles… if you gotta use those, at least make sure your maps are tightly-built and easy to navigate. I’ve played several RPG Maker games where the player spent a lot of time in huge, empty green fields with little or no landmarks. Add some stuff to make the area memorable… players will thank you for it!

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs?
*Skitty: Try to set realistic goals for your first (or second, or third…) project. It’s so tempting to want to tell your magnum opus immediately, but that’s usually a recipe for ending up frustrated, disappointed, and quitting. My first project, Theo’s Big Adventure, was fairly short, used mostly ripped sprites from Mother 3 and ripped music from other video games, and still took a year and three months to complete.

Also, try to make working on your project a habit. I find that the hardest part is often just getting started… but once I get in the zone, I can work for hours. Set goals for yourself (whether it’s as big as “I’ll finish Chapter 5 by April” or as small as “I’m going to work on my project for at least 30 minutes today”) and reward yourself if you complete them. If you don’t complete them, don’t beat yourself up… just set the goal again (adjusting it to be more reasonable if needed) and give it another shot.

Oh, and one more thing… it’s alright for something to not be perfect. One of the biggest killers of a long-term project (aside from overambition and having it not be a habit) is perfectionism. Don’t get caught up in the cycle of continually revamping the same pieces over and over again–just let it be imperfect and move on. Nobody’s first project is perfect, but future-you needs the experience and confidence you’ll gain from finishing it to pull off the project of your dreams in a few years.

*Katie: All of the above, but from someone who’s less disciplined, to people who perhaps have similar issues: get somebody who’ll keep your nose to the grindstone and get you working and finishing things when all you want to do is either chase butterflies or toggle an eyeball back and forth to make it “perfect”. You would not believe how much it helps.

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We mods would like to thank SkittyandKatie for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved! 

Remember to check out Wishbone if you haven’t already! See you next month! 

- Mods Gold & Platinum