Hey guys,  Kusoneko here.

Thank you for playing my game Being a Support Mage Is Harder Than You Think! This was my first Game Jam on itch.io and it was a great amount of fun. The constraints of having one background, one sprite, one song, one sound effect, and only one thousand words made for several possibilities in "maximizing the effect of what few resources we had". The following is some thoughts on the design process Saitoki and I undertook while making this game, as well as solutions to the puzzles if you could not resolve them.

0. Walkthrough

1. When hit by the Trap of Slowness, the dialogue prompt will have a very low text speed and will loop endlessly until the trap is resolved. Go to the "Spellbook" screen and you will notice that the "Text Speed" slider has been moved to the very left. You need to maximize this slider by sliding it all the way to the right. Hence, the player character says they specifically need to "maximize speed"

2. For the disembodied voices, auto-read is triggered at max text speed. The names are too fast to read. you need to either use Ren'Pys rollback command or check out the history screen to find out who the fourth named character was. In this case, you need to select "Baldr".

3. The Fool's Screen trap forces the player's game to enter full-screen mode. As the player character says he needs to shrink this field, the player needs to toggle the "Windowed" display option.  Failure to do so will result in Isadora's magic failing.

4. The final Dispel requires complete silence. As such, you need to either click the "Mute All" button or to set all three volume sliders to the minimum so no sound can be heard. Failure to do so will result in the player failing the graduation examination.

1. Planning an O2A2 Jam Game

When I first discussed making an O2A2 (Again!)  game with Saitoki, we tried to think of ways to use the Ren'Py VN engine as part of gameplay or storytelling. This way, we could stretch our 1 000 words further. Also, we had the benefit of being able to have a menu/title background that can be different than the one in-game. My initial idea was to have some sort of detective story where both the in-game background and the menu background had various clues or needed to be interacted with. The player would either need to flip between both screens to solve the issue, OR they needed to perform some action on one screen to trigger a new set of possible actions on the other screen. In the end, we decided not to pursue this path. The jam had limitations on how much we could modify the background pictures. Furthermore, we figured that it was not within the spirit of the jam to milk everything absolutely out of the backgrounds. Still, we liked the idea of exploiting the additional menu background. We decided that the Ren'Py Preferences screen was the perfect tool to play around with.

The  Preferences screen should be familiar to most people who have played games made with the Ren'Py engine. Saitoki and I brainstormed the idea to, instead of having an investigation, to make the whole VN take place in a magical setting. This time, the "settings" or variables/toggleable options in the Preferences screen can be thought of as "spells". The player would need to set their Preferences in a certain way to progress through various obstacles. Hopefully, the dialogue would provide enough hints on what the player should do.  With a game-plan going ahead, we decided to create the game with this design philosophy.

2. Crafting BaSMIHTYT

We felt that having Being a Support Mage Is Harder Than You Think! be a romance story was the most appropriate choice because of the one-sprite limitation. We wanted to have a non-visible player character that could interact with the sprite, so the player wouldn't feel too lonely trying to solve the magical puzzles alone. As a joke, we made the main character a Support Mage because the Preferences option has absolutely nothing suited to combat magic, and because I thought it would be funny if the main character needed to rely on others to be effective. I took a look at the default Preferences such as text speed, auto-speed, volume, etc. I contemplated adding more "spells" into the menu . However, I thought this would overcomplicate the design and it would destroy the old "menu" feel for people who are experienced with Ren'Py games. We decided to play with what we had. In the end, I made the spells revolve around the text speed, rollback/history feature, windowed/fullscreen option, and volume. With those four spells, we created the challenges by having the Ren'Py script manually change the slider values when the player reached a certain scene, and then performing checks to make sure the player changed the sliders to the appropriate value. It was pretty fun implementing this logic. Finally, we decided to give the name of the game: Being a Support Mage Is Harder Than You Think! because it was a parody of those ridiculously long titles in Japanese Light Novels. It was an inside joke, I promise.

3. Reflections on the Game

Saitoki and I finished the game with about 40 minutes to spare after compiling the UI and bug-fixing. By the end of the jam, we were pretty tired. We didn't have the time to edit the itch.io page until the day after. I had also run into some bugs in the last weekend, reducing the timeframe to finish other parts of the game. I was worried that some hints might be too hard, so I spent some time polishing up the dialogue to make it more clear. In the end, I think most people were able to win the game, but people who have never seen the Ren'Py framework were at a disadvantage. Thus, it was prudent to create the Walkthrough in this postmortem, in case something I said was not received too clearly. In the end, O2A2 was a great small-scale jam for me to organize my project-planning skills as well as get a deeper understanding of the Ren'Py engine. I felt accomplished when the value checks passed, and when the player failed them as well. Props to Saitoki who did the character and background art of the game, as well as being a great fellow brainstormer and tutor for me in terms of learning how to use itch.io. I highly recommend people to join the next O2A2 jam, as its fun to see the other submissions and its not a big time commitment. I hope that the way I manipulated the Ren'Py engine gave people a fun puzzle-solving experience!

My last words is that you should definitely check out Saitoki's other works. Her art is absolutely beautiful and she has the tenacity to work on not 1 but 2 O2A2 games. Her personal submission for the jam, Crimson Sun, was an absolute gem to play. Thanks for working together with me in turning this idea into reality! Also, special thanks to the organizers of this jam for creating a fun and original concept.

Hava a good one, folks,

Kusoneko