June’s Featured Game: Living Playground: The Witch’s PuppetsDEVELOPER(S): MeakaENGINE: R

June’s Featured Game: Living Playground: The Witch’s Puppets

DEVELOPER(S):Meaka
ENGINE: RPGMaker XP 
GENRE: Supernatural, Puzzle
WARNINGS:   Both implied and shown violence to the children, Emotional abuse, Blood
SUMMARY: With what starts as a simple day at the park, siblings Tony, Pablo, and Octavio are once again caught up in a series of strange circumstances such as strange pocket dimensions, coordinated monsters, and more geese than anyone could ever want to see in their lives. Stranded with them are Haze and Seal, two witches who seem to be connected with whatever nonsense is going down. As witches tend to be.In the simplest of terms, this game is about friendship and relating to others, both the good and the bad. With an unfortunate focus on the bad. It will be mostly straightforward with only one ending. 

Download the demo here!

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! 
*Hi hello I’m Meaka. I’ve been kicking around the RPG Maker scene since like 2012 with my first game release in 2014. Whether that makes me but a wee RPGM baby or a seasoned veteran is probably dependent on how “long” you’d consider that h-haha. I’m an animator and illustrator, so visual development is my strong suit.

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially?
*Meaka: The Witch’s Puppets is best summed up as “a game about friendship.” Part of my motivation for creating it was simply personal catharsis: it deals heavily with circumstances that impacted my own life greatly and affects how I interact with people to this very day. Beyond real-life experiences, a big inspiration is Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star in terms of how emotionally raw and powerful it is while also carrying on its sense of humor.

How long have you been working on your project?
*Meaka: Far too long oh man. As a reference, my first game took me maybe six to eight months on and off to complete. I’m. almost 3 years into The Witch’s Puppets and while I can probably hope for the best in terms of my completion rate, it’s been a wild ride. (Did you know I thought it’d only take a year? 2014 me, how innocent you were…)

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project?
*Meaka: I say this like everywhere and I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself, but a huge inspiration for my art in general is the Kirby series. It has such a flawless blend of cute-to-macabre that I absolutely love and hope to capture that same feeling in my own work!
Living Playground was inspired by the usual “RPG Maker/ Wolf RPG Editor” games (mostly Ib and Alice_mare) which led to it’s “kind of horror but not really” flavor.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them?  
*Meaka: In all honesty, just staying motivated three years into a project is difficult. I’m absolutely ecstatic to be making this game and bring it to people for them to play, but it’s so easy to be excited about the cool parts and hit a wall production-wise when it comes to the mundane and tedious parts, particularly programming events that tend to be made up of a ton of conditional branches, variables, and occasionally will crash RMXP. So I give myself breaks on occasion and try to switch it up between whether I work on visual assets or RPG Maker programming, and sometimes I flip over to side projects (be it jam games or just other art).

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept?
*Meaka: From my initial concept, beyond certain themes and characters, they’re two entirely different storylines. I actually gutted the entire script and started over at least twice during the course of production because of things not flowing well, weird writing choices by me, or just ideas that I slowly realized weren’t that good.
In particular, a very big part of some rewriting came from having some friends look over my script + game doc and pointing out some flaws that were from too much personal investment. If you’re ever in a tight spot and not sure if stuff reads right, get some friends to beta read for you!

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don’t have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone?
*Meaka: In my first game it was just me until I threw it at some people to beta test. That was an interesting experience.
For the Witch’s Puppets, I commissioned music from the absolutely amazing ProjectTrinity and needing to consolidate my ideas and express them in a way for someone to create music for it helped me commit to my ideas and also helped me put into words what I couldn’t really describe well beforehand.
I haven’t really had the chance to work fully on a team. I’d sure love to, but I fear my hectic life schedule would hold back whatever team I would want to join.

What was the best part of developing the game?
*Meaka: I may be an animator and used to this by now, but there’s something really magical about making your characters and putting them into a thing and then they move around. It just feels really nice.
Also for me, I love telling stories and entertaining people, so I hope that my games allow me to do that! Whenever someone offhand mentions they enjoy something I make, it fills me with the warm fuzzies. (And don’t even get me started on fanart. I literally cry.)

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently?
*Meaka: I absolutely want to 100% go back and remake Living Playground one day. It was the best I could do at the time, but now that I know so much more about what RPG Maker can and can’t do, I want to go back and fix all those little things and make it more of what I wanted it to be.
… Also cut back on the ham-fisted attempts to be scary, maybe.

Once you finish your project, do you plan to explore game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is?
*Meaka: I’ve already kind of done that! The Witch’s Puppets is a sequel-but-not-really. And also Retail Hell, my Horror Funhouse jam project, is set in the same universe. As for the future, I can’t say for sure that I’ll make another game with the same characters, but I love the playground kids so I would never rule out the possibility of making something containing them again. Whether it’s a game or not, that’s a problem for Future Meaka to figure out.

What do you look most forward to upon/after release?
*Meaka: It might be conceited of me, but I hope to see it give some sort of positive impact on people, even if just a little! I’d like to hope my little Friendship Game helps someone out if they’re in a rough patch and at least makes them smile for a bit.
Also I cannot wait to shitpost with wild abandon. Bad memes, here I come.

Is there something you’re afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? 
*Meaka: I always low-key fear my files corrupting and losing everything, but since I am paranoid and keep a ton of back-up copies, I don’t think that’s going to be an issue.
There’s also a small part of me that is worried about people completely missing the point, but at that point I guess it would fall on my writing…!

Question from last month’s featured dev: Which of your characters do you feel like you’d get along with the most?
*Meaka: Strong Pickle. There is no other answer.

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs?
*Meaka: Google Drive, Dropbox, and Mediafire are good friends and back up your stuff!
Also, there will be days when making your game will not be fun. You will open your version of RPG Maker and look at it with dread. Keep going. Even if it’s just one event a day, one spriteset at a time, keep on poking at that game. It just seems daunting because you know what you want it to be and you’re looking at the beginning of the beginning. You can do it!!!

We mods would like to thank Meaka 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 Living Playground: The Witch’s Puppets if you haven’t already! See you next month! 

- Mods Gold & Platinum