I Made A Computer Video Game And Here's How That Went

I am a master of title screen design.

 Yeah. That blog post title is 100% accurate. I made a computer game! I'm going to talk about everything that went into it, and also "spoil" my own game, so it would probably be best to experience the game before I do all that. Here is a handy link to my game, Tower Of Truth. Here is a video playthrough if you are unable to run that file (like, if you're a Mac user, for instance). It's a short game, only 10 minutes or so, but still very valid and from the heart. I'm going to pad out this paragraph for a moment longer to give you time to play the game and also to make this intro look a little good. Okay? We all on the same page here? Good? Good. Now we can get into it.

You may be wondering how someone with so many hats like blogger, writer, podcaster, award-winning video game reviewer, and published author (All of those are true, by the way) was able to add "game designer" to that collection. The small domino that led to all of this was... Super Street Fighter II Turbo. In September, I took part in the Dot Lvl SSF2 Turbo Beginner's League, a month-long event in which a handful of VTubers/streamers who were new to fighting games fought it out in a Street Fighter tourney. It was a fun time, and I did well enough for myself. I even made a few new acquaintances! One of them was a neat streamer going by the handle of Goopie, a slime girl VTuber with an affinity for RPG Maker games. Cool lady. We had plenty of sparring matches over the month of the tourney between my Chun-Li and her Cammy. My shoutouts have a point, and it's to place me in Goopie's Twitch stream during the holiday season. A random giveaway happened there while I was present, and I won it. The prize? A copy of RPG Maker XP for Steam. Hmm. HMMM. The ability to make my very own computer role-playing game? I wonder what that would be like.

My brain, as it so often does, proceeded to cook a little. I was out for festivities on New Year's Eve, and while I was sitting there with a drink in hand and live music playing, my brain was in full creative overdrive. I saw the scope of the entire thing as 2025 bowed its last. Holy fucking shit, I have the sauce for an RPG! Let's get in there and learn how to do this shit! I was stoked, I was ready to go... and then January 2026 happened. Absolutely awful month. Multiple snowstorms made me anxious about power outages and thus made me not want to go onto the computer. There was a goddamn death in the family, and that took precedent over any of this dumb bullshit for about a week or so. (I'm doing okay, by the way.) Thanks to people getting into my personal space to give me condolence hugs during that time, I caught a cold and it absolutely kicked my ass and left me couchbound for another week. The cough is still lingering and that's a real pain in the ass when your hobbies include streaming 2 days a week for 2 hours a night, and doing a podcast every Saturday. I don't say all this to bitch about my life, just to illustrate why the creative process stalled a bit.

Then the perfect opportunity came to me during the month of February. I've got many a game designer pal, and one of them is a cool fella named John. John started an itch.io game jam, called the Cookie Cutter RM2k3 Jam. The idea is that John made a selection of maps for the game, and you have to only work within the parameters of those maps. No making new shit and no altering the map tiles. A stock canvas for you to create whatever you wish. This was it, gang. A project where a bunch of the work was already done meant that I had less to learn for making my own game. This could be the perfect entry point for me to get into the world of game design. All I needed was an idea, and that hit me when I was reading John's explanation. In saying you could do whatever you wanted, there was a passing remark about making a game all about climbing the tower map that was included. Something shifted in my brain, and I was once again cooking. All it takes sometimes is that little idea seed, and here is the one which got planted in my head that day.

There's a sequence in the iconic Square RPG, Final Fantasy IV, where the protagonist Cecil climbs Mt. Ordeals and does a class change, shedding his job as a Dark Knight to become a holy Paladin. In the context of the game, it's very stirring and thought-provoking. Something in my brain connected the tower climb idea with that, but gave it my own spin:

What if I did the climb up Mt. Ordeals, but instead of becoming a paladin you became a girl?

The whole thing just came to me in a flurry of inspiration then. A brave Hero whose quest was to climb the mysterious Tower Of Truth, to find their own personal truth. The alchemical ideal of continual growth and change made manifest in a quest that was different for everyone, a quest of self-discovery and improving one's self. A quest that would lead this Hero to confront the fact that they wanted to be a Heroine, to face the darker aspects of themselves preventing them from finding that truth... and accept themselves with love and grace. To then be accepted by the people they protect, welcomed home with open arms. Oh, and to blast the personification of their negativity with the self-affirming power of fucking rainbows. 

Alright! We got something here! It's a little short, sure: partly because, in lieu of learning the intricacies of balancing and creating an entire RPG battle system, I opted to use RPG battles as more of a story enhancer: one unwinnable fight against your doubts as a Hero, and one fight against it as the Heroine where you beat the piss out of it with your rainbow spell. It's my first game and I had until the end of the month to learn a lot of shit. Think of this as little game designer Frezno Inferno riding their bike with training wheels. I'm not ready to go with two wheels and fall on my ass a bunch. Unfortunately, even with such a simple scope of a project, I fell on my ass a bunch. This was a real learning process, and sometimes that learning involving bashing my head against RPG Maker's systems before asking for help. Which is okay to do! 

I owe a massive debt to my two game designer pals, John and Thom. We're all part of a whole community, SMPS, that is filled to the brim with cool game designers. My stubborn ass did not consult that gamedev chat at any time, opting instead for private DM with John and Thom. Why? Because I was obsessed with the mild dopamine hit of surprising my community friends who I'd known for years by going SURPRISE, FUCKERS, I'M A COMPUTER VIDEOGAME MAKER NOW TOO! So I just bugged them a lot whenever I hit a roadblock, and I once again thank them for their infinite wellsprings of patience when I popped in multiple times a day going HELP, GAME NO WORK GOOD!!!. I figured some things out all by myself once I got rolling. Adding NPCs to the town, cave, and forest was an easy enough process. You place them down, you set what text pops up when you interact with them, and by default there's a whole crew of character types to place down there for variety! 

I especially enjoyed writing Cynthia the alchemist, who lives in a cave to the north. Thanks to reading Elizabeth Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum one too many times, alchemy is extremely important to me, and it felt good to have it be present in a game that was very much about continual growth, change, and transmuting yourself into the ideal beacon of Truth that is becoming a girl and living that Truth. Also as a fun aside, Laura the slime is a deep cut reference to an absolute disaster tabletop RPG I took part in where one of the players, named Laura, impulsively leapt into a slime in an attempt to become a slime girl and died. This is partly my fault. I was also playing a generic fighterman based on Brian Blessed from Flash Gordon. He got triple critted and obliterated in one hit. All of that is besides the point. We're adding NPCs! They say things! Everything's going good! 

And then I tried to implement a cutscene. Oh no. Oh good holy God no. In my hubris I thought I had a handle on this. I did not. God almighty did I not. For the uninitiated, let me explain the secret sauce that makes RPG Maker tick: Events. These little pink squares you can plop down will activate anything and everything you deem them to. In the case of the approach to the Tower Of Truth, here's what I wanted to happen. I wanted a cutscene to play as you walk up to the doors, where the Spirit Of Truth (aka the Heroine) appears as a ghost and talks to you. The Hero automatically walks to her, you hear a spiel about the quest of Truth you're about to undertake, she vanishes and you can enter the tower. 

Now, here's the issue I was having and my first bit of learning. I wanted this cutscene to trigger when you walk up to the door, but I also want the event to not trigger after you speak to the Spirit. There are these things you can program in called switches, which you can switch on or off at will. I tried doing things on my own, but I was hitting this insidious catch-22. If I put in a switch to turn off the ghost cutscene after talking to her... How am I turning that switch on in the first place? It doesn't default to on. You have to have another event do it. If I put one off to the side that only turned on the switch, some autorun process would cause the Hero to be frozen in place. I banged my head at this for about an hour or so and I wanted to scream bloody fucking murder at those goddamn fuckass pink squares. 

The solution, thanks to John, was twofold. First, I was overcomplicating shit by trying to run separate events between the cutscene trigger and the actual Spirit on the map: I could just have all the text run on the former, and only use the latter event as a sprite that triggers her to appear when the cutscene switch was flipped on. Secondly, I needed to use a second page for the cutscene event, one whose sole purpose was to do the thing I wanted to do: turn off the event after you're done talking with the Spirit. It was very important that this event: A) has the condition for a switch being on and B) has nothing set as its graphic. It took a bit more fiddling from me to learn this, but I got it. By the grace of God and smart game design friends, I got that shit working.

(If you're wondering what the four event tiles that are directly below the two in front of the door that I've been bitching about for the last few paragraphs: They're a surprise tool that will help us later.)

With that skill in my toolkit now, on to developing the Tower climb. Now that I had perfected how to make the spectral images flash the screen and disappear with a whooshing noise, I hit a little rhythm of populating this place with them and making them say things about the Hero's past. My main inspiration, and the one I started with here, was the mysterious bookshelf that has a "book for girls" called The Six Sirens Of Salvation. This is basically just a combination of resonances: the bit in I Saw The TV Glow where Justice Smith's dad, Fred Durst, calls The Pink Opaque "a show for girls", and my own experience being mildly chastised for watching Sailor Moon as a 17 year-old lad. I proceeded to pepper the tower with similar ghosts from the Hero's life, all of them basically offering the same reflective memories: either "Wow, Hero, you really understand girls!" or "HERO THAT THING IS FOR GIRLS AND YOU'RE A MAN!". 

I worried a little here about hammering this shit in too bluntly and repeatedly, killing subtlety dead. I rationalized this to myself by reminding myself that this was a microfiction, and if I took time to make a longer game I'd still be making this shit in April. I was on a time limit and part of that was my fault: I was cooking this shit in the final week of February because I had gotten goddamn obsessed with Etrian Odyssey on the Switch. Hey, if the pressure of looming deadlines worked for Douglas Adams, it can work for me, ha ha ha. Nobody to date has called me out for being so unceremoniously on the nose, so I guess I got away with it? This time?

At this point I want to puff myself up a little bit, because I learned how to do this next part all by myself. Let's talk about Conditional Branches. My entire game hinges on a magical transformation from Hero to Heroine, and I knew I wanted the end of the game to be all the townsfolk congratulating and supporting you on finding your Truth. Ergo, they have to say different things depending on if they're talking to the Hero at the start or the Heroine at the end. That's where the Conditional Branches come in. All I had to do was set it so that if you were the Hero they would say X, and if you were the Heroine they would say Y. 

It's here that I should mention some of the wonderful little shortcuts I made for myself during testing. I had three placeholder NPCs put on the map who just activated effects in order to test those parts of the game quicker. For the battle system, there was a knight who when spoken to yelled "FIGHT ME SLUT" and triggered the Shadow battle. For testing the climactic cutscene atop the Tower Of Truth, there was a girl who would go YEET and instantly teleport you to the top so I could check that the cutscene played out correctly. For testing this Conditional Branch stuff, I added something special. In the final build of the game, there is a cow in the village. The cow was not part of the initial populating of the village. For testing purposes, this was the Gender Cow. The Gender Cow's sole purpose was to trigger a character swap, changing the Hero to the Heroine instantly so I could make sure all the NPC dialogue Conditional Branches were working right. When I told the SMPS Discord about the legendary Gender Cow upon Tower Of Truth's release, I got something unexpected. Courtesy of user Schmeev, here is Gender Cow fanart.

Delightful. Now the climax, however... This was going to be tricky. Let me lay out the gameplan here. You reach the top of the tower and are accosted by a spirit which looks like the Hero, who tries to dissuade you from finding your truth because the people will never accept you, it's a folly, just live your life as the Hero you were meant to be. It would only be slightly less blunt if I just had him scream STAY IN THE CLOSET FUCKO before trying to kill you. Anyway, he then tries to kill you. It is an unwinnable fight where you can never do enough damage to defeat him, and after a few turns he uses an attack called Untruth that kills you in one hit. (I will discuss battle system programming woes later.) You then appear in a mysterious void where the Spirit Of Truth appears, tells you that your truth is that you're the Heroine, and that you should accept your truth. You do, the Hero becomes the Heroine, you then go out and beat the hell out of your self-doubt with your new magic spell, RAINBOW TRUTH.

Got all that? Good, let's go over the mess that was programming this shit. I originally thought I would have events surrounding the magic circle there which would make the Shadow appear and stop you. That would be one hell of a hassle, especially since I'd have to program different automatic walk cycles for every square, and then figure out how to turn off all the other events you might have to walk through for each one of those. WELL FUCK THAT!!! The row of three events on the bottom just walks the Hero upwards (with an added turn for each of the ones on the edges to get you in the middle) and then the Shadow stops you and the cutscene plays out. With the fight, I was able to add a handy Conditional Branch for if he beats your ass, and play another cutscene instead of Game Overing you. This did take some more banging of the head: I originally tried to just drop party HP to 0 and then fully heal when you teleport to the Pinnacle Of Truth map. The effect this had was causing an instant Game Over before the full heal could activate. WHOOOOPS! Anyway, since I love my diagrams, please take a look at the spaghetti that is the final Shadow cutscene:

Game design is my passion. Now for the scene at the Pinnacle Of Truth. The actual writing of this scene was the highlight of the project for me. I knew what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, and everything just flowed from me. The writing part is the part I'm good at. It's the programming that's another fucking story. I initially wanted this to auto trigger as soon as losing to the Shadow yeeted you into the Pinnacle room. I could not make an event trigger immediately upon being teleported in, so I just made it so that you check the tablet at the top of the room and that activates the cutscene. This would lead to its own minor problem, but we'll get to that. One thing I wish I asked for help on, though: I wanted the dialogue box that says the Hero became the Heroine to linger until the fanfare played out. I did not know how to do this and felt I was bugging the gang enough, so I just left it. You can mash through it as it stands. I implore you to let it linger for dramatic effect. 

Now that we're on the part where you beat the hell out of the Shadow, let's talk about my battle system woes. My original idea was to make the Untruth spell from the Shadow do a ridiculous set amount of damage, like a 9999. I did not know how to do this and again did not ask for help. Later, when I played Thom's Corris entry for the Game Jam (Spectacular fucking game, by the way), I noted that he managed to code an attack that did 9999 damage late into the game. Kinda wish I asked him how he did that now. Scuff queen that I am, I got Untruth to one shot the Hero by just... mucking with the strength of the spell until it did enough damage to do that. This is also how I got Rainbow Truth to work for the climax: I just tweaked its numbers and the Shadow's HP values until it was A) doing 2000 damage or so and B) letting you do it three times for dramatic effect. There was still another headache looming for me, and it had to do with Untruth again.

My goal was to have the Shadow always use Untruth after three turns, giving you enough time to try and attack it, realize nothing was working, and getting obliterated. This, predictably, turned out to be a pain in the ass. The little fuck would either not use it at all, use it too late, or use the goddamn thing instantly. The answer was once again a switch that flipped on after turn 3, but this looks deceptively simple. In actuality, it took a lot of monkeying around to get to this point, and trying various turn counts until I got the length of time I wanted. The fun scuff queen secret for how I got a version for the Heroine fight with more HP that does an Untruth attack that doesn't one shot you? I just made a second Shadow enemy, and a second Untruth skill with a normal attack value. If it works, it works! All that was left was to put in some dialogue for when you win, teleport you out of the tower, and give you your little victory lap! The ending cutscene is a little scuffed and a little rushed: I was at the finish line, the end was in sight, it was only 4 days to the end of the jam and I wanted to spend my time dungeon crawling in Etrian Odyssey again. 

Speaking of the victory lap, I want to talk about the alchemist and the Hermit for a bit. I wanted to have a contrast between opinions about climbing the Tower Of Truth. Cynthia the alchemist thinks it's a good thing which promotes growth and the continual sense of self-discovery. The Hermit who lives in the forest with a bunch of sheep (the "baa" gag I do with the last sheep is one I find funny, and I'm kinda sad nobody mentioned it), by contrast, once climbed the Tower Of Truth but thought what it had to say was a pack of lies. Upon returning as a Heroine, there's a little line of lament there from the Hermit. Again I'm as obvious as a rainbow-painted brick, but my idea here was that the Hermit faced a Truth not unlike that the Heroine did, but chose to reject it in favor of living as they are for their own reasons, and now there's a tinge of regret. I did have a comment or two expressing sympathy for the Hermit so I'll leave them with some powerful words from, once again, I Saw The TV Glow: There is still time. I could always do a Hermit Quest and flesh out this concept with more subtlety and detail, so that's on the back burner.

It was here that I had some last minute event planning and switching to work with, a process I will dub "idiot proofing" the game. I don't use that term to refer to the player, but to myself. There had to be things in place to make sure that you couldn't bust this narrative wide open. I had to anticipate players trying to leave instead of advancing shit, and plan accordingly. Like, what if when you got teleported to the Pinnacle Of Truth, you just left? To that end, I added a conversation with the Shadow to tell you that you can't win, to go home, and to not fuck with the monolith at the pinnacle. Okay, but what if you tried to leave the Tower? That'd be bad, right, especially if you had become the Heroine already. Then you'd get your victory lap without vanquishing your Shadow. I debated making this optional, but it felt wrong to not have the catharsis of beating his ass with Rainbow Truth. Hence the five events above the three that trigger the Shadow battle, which basically "but thou must!" you back up. I was stuck for a moment wondering how to flip a switch to make it refer to you as Hero or Heroine, depending on what you'd done so far. The far simpler solution was just to say "Wait!" instead of "Hero!" or "Heroine" depending. In the same vein, the four events on the outside of the Tower are so you can't just climb back up the thing upon being teleported out.

I only missed one bit of idiot proofing, and it was caught by John, who seems to have been a very good tester in actually trying all of this shit of his own accord to see if I had slipped anywhere. Nothing was stopping you from interacting with the monolith at the Pinnacle Of Truth after becoming a Heroine, and playing the cutscene out again. So that was a quick fix, just adding in a switch that turned it off during that whole cutscene. Except it wasn't, because after I'd put out the game one of the players on Itch found that little bug, and thought it was amusing. Gang, I swore I patched that shit out, and this is when this fucking program started to gaslight me. I would go into RPG Maker and playtest through the program itself. The switch works, you can't talk to the monolith after becoming Heroine. I export the game to an executable and test it as its own program. YOU CAN STILL TALK TO THE MONOLITH AND TRIGGER THE CUTSCENE AGAIN WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?

As it turns out, I was exporting the new version into the same folder as the old version, assuming that it would overwrite the old files. That's not the case. Exporting the game in a new folder as a 1.01 version made it work, and I updated the game on Itch fairly quickly. That was that. With that fix, my first computer game was officially done and dusted. Folks played it, they enjoyed it, I got really sweet comments on Itch and in Discord that made me feel good, I got the mild dopamine hit of shadowdropping a game and revealing that I too was a game designer pal... All in all, it was really great! What's been especially fun has been playing some of the other entries in the Game Jam, and looking at them with a new lens. Before, I'd just take them as they are, enjoyable short RPGs between 1 to 2 hours long. Now I not only appreciate the craft and expertise of them, and how they make just a few maps really last... but I see all these cute little flourishes they added in. Things that make me go "HOLY SHIT I WANNA DO THAT IN A GAME!", and make me write them down. I'm sure if I asked for specifics, they'd be happy to help, but it has given me a whole new way to engage with this specific genre of game.

Truth Found

This went on for a hell of a time, I know, but I wanted to document not just how Tower Of Truth was made, but my headspace and the challenges I faced in learning how to make it. There's still a lot to learn when it comes to RPG Maker games, like building my own world maps or battle systems or gold economies or adding my own items. I can do it, though, because I've got the chops to and I have good help from great pals. Not everyone can say they made a video game, even one as simple and to the point as Tower Of Truth. I had a story I wanted to tell, a limited canvas with which to tell it, and I like to think I crafted a fun 10-minute piece of microfiction that struck a chord with folks and made them enjoy it. I hope I can use those tools, and the fun tools I was inspired by others to implement, to craft bigger and better stories in the future.

Until then, thanks for listening to my big rant. May you at home find your own Truth, and live it well. Have a good one, and we'll see you in a month or so (hopefully) for more Simpsonsposting.