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INTRODUCTION

Jailbird Nocturne was released over a year ago. I originally planned to release this blog post on the game’s anniversary on August 18th, but, naturally I missed it.

I wasn’t able to write much about it when I was making it or when I released it. Now that I have a little space from it, I want to write about what it was like to spend 4 years making a pretty good videogame (and then have next to nobody complete it) (as far as I’m aware).

It’s not that I’m surprised that barely anyone has beaten it – I’ve been making computer games for 20 years, and I mostly knew what I was getting myself into when I started making the game, marketed it (or, rather, didn’t) in the way that I did, and released it with little fanfare. But, along the way, I also think I learned something important about the value of audience engagement and community, having taken it for granted up until this point.

For much of my game-making “career,” especially as a teen and early twenty-something, I had been driven by a mostly misguided desire to be a famous indie developer. I made deliberate efforts to release regular content to maintain audience engagement, market myself on social media, blog regularly, and network with local developers. I wanted to be the next Terry Cavanagh or Increpare or whatever. It kinda worked – while I’ve never been popular, I did attract a tiny audience through social media or in-person events (hello to the half dozen of you who are still reading this blog!). However, the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve tried to let go of the need to be well-known, and the more I’ve tried to embrace the joy of creating for its own sake.

In hindsight, I pendulum-swung too hard in that direction, and Jailbird Nocturne is the natural result of prioritizing creation over engagement. It is a passion project that - when I started writing this draft - had ~45 downloads and zero comments or ratings. This is the level of online engagement that is typical for the less popular half of my jam projects. While I will admit that it is my highest-grossing game of the three games that I’ve monetized to date (thank y’all for your support!), the lack of any feedback on the game outside of three of my playtesters is a little rough. The game has gotten many more downloads since its inclusion in the Queer Games Bundle, and I’ll get to that later, but the lack of meaningful feedback remains.

Missteps in the game’s marketing set aside, I think there are other interesting lessons I learned about RPG design, making personal art, and making a project of such a massive scale as a solo developer that I want to share, some of which I’d been alluding to in older blog posts. Now my secrets will finally be revealed! Mwahaha!

I’ve tried to organize my thoughts in a vaguely chronological, vaguely categorical order. I’ll begin the first part of this series by talking about why I undertook this monstrous endeavor to begin with. While it’s hard to cleanly separate the game’s mechanics from its story, I try my best to do so, discussing the game’s battle system and encounter design, and following up with a discussion of the game’s world design. After that, I shift the conversation to the game’s characters, story, themes, and tone in relation to my personal life during development, and I wrap things up with a discussion of how I was able to produce a game of this scale over 4 years without (totally) burning out, how I made the soundtrack, and how the game’s been doing a year after its release.

I think I was driven to write all of this because I spent more than 10% of my life willing this particular game into existence and I want to scream about it. Some parts of this series will be more interesting to players who have already beaten the game, others will be of more interest to game developers, and some may just be of interest to friends and family who are reading this because they like me (I like you too!). This is a shamelessly comprehensive post-mortem of every aspect of the game and its creation that I find interesting, and while I think that at least one part of it will be interesting to you, dear reader, I cannot promise that all of it will be. This blog post is 28 pages long and is meant to be skimmed.

Without further ado, here is a thorough history and dissection of Jailbird Nocturne and its creation.

PART 1: THE IMPETUS

In 2018, my partner asked for me to make a “cute game with animals in it” for her birthday. That game was Danger Zone Friends, my first complete RPG Maker game and, at the time, my most ambitious game to date, featuring a 2+ hour playtime and a full original soundtrack. I apparently made it in my free time in just 7 months, releasing it in January of 2019 (I did not complete it in time for her birthday, but she still loved it).

Despite originally being made with just one person in mind, Danger Zone Friends would turn out to be the most popular game I’ve made with nearly 3,000 downloads, mostly due to its inclusion in the bundle for Racial Justice and Equality in 2020, although being featuring in the game anthology Indiepocalypse and demoed as part of Underground Arcade at festivals and conventions did not hurt either. People really enjoyed the writing, music, monster design, and thoughtful combat. I felt like I stumbled across something special!

However, as good as it was, I knew I could do better. Because of the birthday deadline, much of Danger Zone Friend’s development was rushed, and I felt like everything from cutscene direction to the battle system could be improved upon. Ideas for a follow-up had been bouncing around in my head for a while, but in 2020, someone had commented on the game’s Youtube trailer that they hoped to see a sequel. That turned out to be the push I needed to actually start making Jailbird Nocturne! Development started in earnest that fall.

Since Danger Zone Friends was constrained by a deadline, my goal with Nocturne was to let the game breathe and for me to spend as much time on it as it needed. Further, since I already had sound effects, art, music, animations, and a somewhat customized battle system that I could reuse from the first game, I thought I could just build off what I had done before and make a larger game (say, 8 hours of playtime) in just a couple of years. Obviously, I was wrong.

Eight hours was the magic target number for me because, while that is short for an RPG, that’s about the length of a single player narrative action game (specifically, I think that’s the length of Halo’s campaign?), so I figured that was enough time to satisfyingly tell the sort of story I couldn’t satisfyingly tell in less time. By contrast, I decided to make Danger Zone Friends 2+ hours long because that was effectively “movie length,” but as someone who really likes falling in love with characters, I generally prefer novels, games, and TV series because 2 hours just doesn’t feel like enough time to really get to know a fictional person! So 8 hours seemed like the next logical number to aim for. For what it’s worth, I think extending the length of the game accomplished what I set out to do – I have never grown so attached to any characters I have written, nor have I created characters who so easily “wrote themselves,” after a while, and I attribute part of that to just giving the characters enough time to exist, flesh themselves out, and grow. I’ll get further into the nitty-gritty of writing the characters later on.

PART 2: THE GAMEPLAY

As far as the gameplay was concerned, I didn’t feel a need to overhaul Danger Zone Friends’ core mechanics, but I did have a few lingering dissatisfactions with the original game that I wanted to correct in Jailbird Nocturne.

COMBAT

The foundation of both games’ combat is their regenerative MP system. Instead of depleting MP over the course of an adventure or dungeon, the player characters start with a low amount of MP and regenerate it over each turn in battle. It was a system inspired by freeware indie RPG’s Exit Fate and Standstill Girl, both of which were among the most influential RPG’s I played as a teen and young adult. (Now that I think about it, I think that Exit Fate set the standard for me for what a fantasy JRPG was – I wouldn’t play Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger until much later – and it shows!) The thing that I like about regenerative MP systems is that it prevents players from spamming their best spells and abilities, forcing them to build up to their most powerful and important skills over the course of the battle. The downside is that it removes the long-term decision making and resource management that a player has to do over the course of a dungeon, and it also means that battles don’t progress towards an inevitable end point – as long as a combatant knows a healing spell, they can persist indefinitely in a battle. I had to find other ways to put pressure on players.

Exit Fate and Standstill Girl, from what I remember, both start their battles with a base set of MP. A mistake I made in Danger Zone Friends was that I let players keep any leftover MP from battle to battle, thinking that I wanted to reward players for finishing battles with surplus MP. However, this motivated some players to prolong battles to farm MP until it maxed out, a process which took 10 turns in DZF! Boring. I did want to let players use their leftover MP after battle to heal up, so instead of resetting MP between fights, I accelerated the MP regeneration so that it only took 5 turns to max it out. That way, if players were tempted to stockpile MP, it wouldn’t take as long, and there really shouldn’t be any moves in the game that should take 5 whole rounds to prepare, anyway.

Other changes to the battle system from DZF are less drastic fine-tunings, such the addition of the “ailment barrier” status as the only new status condition I deemed necessary, replacing one-hit-KO moves with the “lethal” element since some players were confused about how those moves worked (instead of having a move deal set amount of damage and then instantly KO-ing weaker enemies, enemies vulnerable to lethal moves would just take damage equal to their health), and buffing the bind/stun status condition by reducing the target's speed in addition to their evasion, giving the condition more general utility. Giving offensive elemental spells a secondary effect (such as ice moves auto-hitting, and cheese spells ignoring defense) helped provide an additional tactical consideration to magic beyond “what element is the enemy weak to” that I think I will keep in future RPG’s, and it gives each element a unique mechanical identity and allows for some interesting enemy design. For example, the Frost Imp is an enemy that casts invisibility on itself at the start of battle, boosting evasion against all attacks. One way to circumvent invisibility is to cast ice magic, which never misses. However, the Frost Imp, being what it is, resists ice magic, making this a suboptimal solution. Instead, players are better rewarded for lowering the enemy’s evasion with a stun spell and using other attacks instead of reaching straight for the ice.

It was important to me that spellcasters and physical attackers felt distinct from each other – hence, there is little overlap between the utility of spells and physical attack skulls. Spellcasters have access to elemental damage, defense penetration, auto-hit, and high priority moves, while physical attackers have access to lethal attacks, random spread damage, and semi-piercing moves.

All RPG battle systems have their own strengths and weaknesses, and while Jailbird Nocturne is missing the pressure that comes from having one’s MP depleted over a long period of time, I think it makes up for it by allowing for perpetual, duel-like back-and-forths between combatants (more on that later!) and by imposing interesting restrictions on when players can execute certain actions, circumventing the classic problem of the player always just spamming their best attack. In my next game, I want to experiment by combining the traditional and regenerative systems – a given action will cost a certain number of “skills points,” which don’t regenerate, and a given number of “tempo points,” which do. Each party member starts with 1 tempo, and gains 1 each turn. I’m hoping that it provides the pressure and “long game” of the traditional system with the additional tactical considerations of the regenerative one.

ENCOUNTER DESIGN

Another positive change I made between DZF and Nocturne was replacing random encounters with overworld enemies that would trigger battles. I feel like this has been an ongoing trend in RPG’s for a good while now, and enough grievances have been made about random encounters that I won’t relist them here.

(I had actually originally planned on replacing DZF's random encounters with overworld ones, but decided it was too much work to redo the game’s entire encounter progression from scratch. Here’s a secret: I did complete the overhaul for Danger Zone Lv 1, and if you return to the entrance of the level after completing it, you can play through the alternative version.)

The little bits of unique dialogue that display before and after each encounter are inspired by Digimon World, where something similar would happen before each battle. The monsters in that game would often say something nonsensical and decontextualized, like “it’s too hot!” or “it’s good to follow orders,” and a similar tone was perfect for Nocturne. It was a fun way to characterize the monsters as individuals before fighting them, and my playtesters told me they liked the unique flavor preceding each battle.

An unintended consequence of removing random encounters was that every encounter in the game was now unique, deliberately designed, and sequenced – with a handful of exceptions, you only fight each specific enemy configuration once. On one hand, this complemented my design style – I wanted fights in both DZF and Nocturne to be deeper than “spam your best attack and heal,” and I succeeded on that front. However, this meant that I became overzealous in making every single fight in the game a deliberate test of the players’ abilities, and that also has its drawbacks. Jailbird Nocturne’s combat is fun, but it may be hard to play for long periods of time when it demands so much of the player. I wonder if this is one of the reasons why so few people have reportedly finished the game compared to Danger Zone Friends.

I definitely designed fights in this game thinking about how to make them “interesting,” and less about whether they were actually “fun.” This doesn’t mean the game isn’t fun – interesting fights are often fun ones! But I think I underestimated the joy that comes in defeating simple, weak, “popcorn” enemies in-between challenging fights. Not only does this take some strain off the player, but it also makes the tougher fights seem even tougher by comparison. If I have a regret about the combat, it’s that I could have actually made it just a little more braindead.

BOSSES

The upside of so carefully designing each game’s encounter is that I do think this game features my best boss design to date. (Major spoilers for late-game bosses are hidden; minor spoilers for early-game bosses are not. Proceed at your own discretion.)

The Underzone’s Warden is a simple “first exam” type boss for the game’s tutorial level, simply being designed to require the player to use the entirety of the small toolbox available to them at that time, and accordingly, it was the easiest boss to fine-tune – I think the length of the fight, and the pressure it puts on the party, are as close to perfection as I could hope for. Succeeding requires the player to do everything they’ve been taught to do throughout the first dungeon: 1) exploit enemy’s elemental weaknesses, 2) heal when needed, and 3) set up defenses by casting barriers on the entire party, having Bleucifer taunt the enemy and cast a barrier on himself, or both. To add a little more drama to the attack, the Warden’s “Hot Justice” attack strips away the party’s barriers, requiring them to reapply them with regularity, something that no enemy until this point has done.

The Screaming Tortoise Sword, Neo Cheelzebub, Guardian Angel, and High Angel were all relatively straightforward bosses that served as similar tests, although harder to dial-in perfectly as the players’ abilities inevitably vary more as the game goes on. The fight between Bleucifer and the Elite Guard Poggles (a team of 6 relatively weak bosses, each of which performs a specific role) is a unique and hopefully memorable war of attrition – unlike the other bosses in the game, the Elite Poggles don’t have any flashy, high-damage moves, but their chip damage is dangerous if unchecked, and Bleucifer is outnumbered. When I play that battle, I feel like a slow but powerful force steadily but inevitably working through a horde of enemies, like some sort of kaiju.

The Library Zone’s Neo Barbas is one of my personal favorites. The “poison” status ailment is famously useless against bosses in most RPG’s, but I wanted there to be a fight where poison (or “Ache,” in Jailbird Nocturne) was a valid win condition. This led to an interesting design when Neo Barbas itself was vulnerable to Ache, but was accompanied by a defensive sigil that would protect it with a status ailment barrier at the start of the turn every five turns. The player could attack Barbas directly, but it if they took out the sigil, waited for the barrier to fade, and then inflicted Barbas with an Ache, you could win the fight faster.

The Tranquil Queen and her Swords, as the final boss, were designed so that any of the players’ most powerful spells and abilities could be useful. Hence, there are multiple combatants with different elemental weaknesses and status vulnerabilities – a floating metal sword weak to fire and electricity, and an floating organic thorny sword weak to fire and (again!) aching. They use a multitude of different types of attacks, but almost all of them can be mitigated by defensive spells. I am proud of how the swords are effectively disabled at low health but steadily regenerate – damaging them is a necessity, but because they are immortal, they can never fully discounted, and so area-of-effect spells like Scorched Earth are always useful. The Tranquil Sword fight is unusual for a final boss for not having multiple forms – her behavior changes over the course of the battle, but she is fundamentally the same throughout the fight. I think I understand better now why multiple forms are such a common design choice for final bosses. While the Tranquil Queen poses a formidable challenge at the onset, once you solve the puzzle and figure out the strategy, victory feels inevitable. I didn’t want to throw the player any curveballs that would cause them to unexpectedly lose 10 minutes in. The advantage of having multiple forms is that it signals to the player when they need to raise their guard back up, pay attention, and refigure their strategy without threatening them with a game over screen at the worst possible time.

I worried a little that I had made the final boss too easy, but as of the time of revising this draft, I had just finished playing Metaphor: ReFantazio, and that game’s final boss was of a similar challenge level – intimidating, but my victory was never in doubt after the first few turns. It’s just an unavoidable part of the genre – in many RPG’s the player is sometimes locked into a point of no return (in the case of Jailbird Nocturne), or, in Metaphor’s case, the final boss form is preceded by 3 other fights and what was probably a half hour’s worth of cutscenes. I think as long as you can make the player feel awestruck for just one moment in such fights, then that is enough.

But before you fight the Tranquil Queen, you fight Olivier, which was my biggest design challenge.

The player first battles Olivier one-on-one in Chapter 2 and gets crushed. By the time they rematch him at the end of Chapter 6, they are more equal footing (Olivier is a level 20 character, and the player is typically around level 17 or 18). It’s a simple and maybe cliché way to make the player feel like they’ve grown over the course of the game, but it works.

However, unlike most boss fights, I did want this to feel like a duel between two similarly-matched opponents, which meant that all of Olivier’s actions and stats – including his hitpoints – were plausible for a level 20 player character. Because his hitpoints were so low, extending the fight to proper boss fight length meant that Olivier had to be able to use healing magic on himself. And, so long as Olivier healed himself when appropriate, because of the game’s regenerative MP system, this meant that the fight, in its first iteration, continued indefinitely.

And he did heal himself when appropriate. Olivier’s battle logic is the most batshit crazy thing I have ever done in RPG Maker. Every move he makes is decided by a number of factors – his health, his MP, and the number and type of status effects on the player and himself. He uses attacks that circumvent the player’s defenses, and shreds those defenses when he can’t. No matter what status ailments and damage the player inflicts upon him, he will counter perfectly. If his health is low, he heals. If you lower his defense with physical break, he’ll counter with barriers. If you hit him with multiple status ailments, he cures them. He is ruthless and perfect and has 20 different moves at his disposal.

None of this is scripted in Ruby – I used a mix of the default enemy behavior system, and visual event programming to determine his actions. In a normal game engine, his logic would be easy to code yourself: heal yourself when damaged, cure yourself to remove status ailments, remove the player’s status buffs, and use attacks that bypass the player’s defenses. Easy. However, in RPG Maker, writing my own code wasn’t an option, and having Olivier change his behavior based on the status buffs that the player placed on themself in itself was a headache. I don’t know how to impress onto people who haven’t used RPG Maker themselves what a technical achievement this was.

Anyway, Olivier’s highly reactive behavior and self-replenishing MP meant that he was basically invincible. He would always be able to heal himself when needed. Ultimately, the solution I came up with was that his logic would become increasingly imperfect as the battle went on. At the start of the battle, he prioritizes survival over defense, and defense over offense. By ~20 or 30 turns in, he prioritizes offense equally to defense, and if he’s still alive by turn 40 or 50, he will be so careless as to occasionally risk attacks in spite of needing healing. A line of dialogue every 10 turns signals to the player when his patience degrades. Until Olivier slips up, the player must play perfectly.

Have Olivier ostensibly kill a party member right before the fight and set it to what is probably the best battle music I’ve ever written, and voila! You get the game’s most memorable boss battle, or at least a unique one, if nothing else. Players often seem to die in the first few turns during their initial attempts, but they quickly figure out the rhythm, and when they do, the fight turns into a dance of moves and perfect countermoves between the combatants that I think feels awesome.

I remember, when I finished implementing that battle and beating it for the first time, thinking to myself, “I think I am making a good video game.”

PART 3: WORLD DESIGN

Most RPG’s can be split into fighting, exploring, and talking. So let’s talk about the exploring next. (Minor spoilers for the entire game world follow, but I don't think I show off anything that isn't already in the game's trailer)

The world of Interzonal Space, a shadow dimension formed from the collective subconscious of the “real world” (or whatever), is surreal, empty, and unnatural. I think the inspiration from Yume Nikki is obvious (see also: I’m Scared of Girls and OFF), but I think the reason that 2D indie RPG’s often have Yume Nikki-esque worlds is that they’re relatively easy to make in RPG Maker, especially for how cool they look. Natural environments and detailed interiors are time-intensive and boring. A cool brick staircase in the middle of outer space, by contrast, can be whipped up relatively quickly and makes a strong impression.

THE VOID

All of the gameplay areas fall into one of two types – “normal” dungeons and The Interzonal Void. In the normal dungeons, players can save their progress, most enemy encounters are mandatory, and when an enemy is defeated, it is removed from the world permanently.

Connecting most of the in-game destinations, however, is The Void. These areas feature entirely optional enemy encounters that respawn when you revisit the location, and because such enemies could respawn on top of a player upon reloading their save file, and I'm limited by the constraints of RPG Maker, saving is disabled.

As with all of my RPG’s, I designed Jailbird Nocturne to discourage grinding, mostly by implementing as steep an EXP curve as RPG Maker would let me have, but also by making encounters in the dungeons non-repeatable. However, I did want there to be some set areas that were grindable in case a player really needed experience or money to proceed, as a failsafe. This is why enemies in the Void areas respawn, but aren’t mandatory. Further, these areas were originally designed to be revisited as part of the game’s “sandbox.” Part of my intention of having optional encounters was that, as areas were revisited, players would learn the movement patterns of the enemies and not only get better at fighting them, but avoiding them, facilitating travel (this was inspired by the enemy encounter design and exploration in Digimon World). There are a few instances where players are forced to, or rewarded for, revisiting parts of the Void, but overall, there weren’t as many opportunities as I originally planned. I had intended for there to be an optional post-game side quest that would require the player to revisit parts of the Void, but I ultimately decided to cut that content – more on that later

The only major landmark within the Interzonal Void is The Abyssal Glass, the bar for Hell Creature defectors. It was actually a later addition to the game. I really wanted to stray away from having any sort of moral essentialism with the species in my fantasy world, so I wanted to establish that Bleucifer wasn’t the only Hell Creature to defy their demonic overlords, that devilkind wasn’t inherently evil and Bleucifer wasn’t some special exception. I’m glad to have broken up the route to the Danger Zone while fleshing out Bleucifer and his relationship to the rest of the world a bit more.

THE HUB AND THE APARTMENT

If a player wasn’t in a dungeon or The Void, then they were probably in the Interzonal Hub, serving as the game’s main city, with the Danger Zone Hub being the only other comparable settlement. The four buildings you can enter each serve an explicit purpose – an apartment for a home base, an office for learning skills, receiving hints, and teleporting between locations (you know, normal office stuff), a clinic for free healing between adventures, and an item shop. Having fan-favorite inexplicable dinosaur shopkeeper Astrodon Johnstoni return in Jailbird Nocturne was a given. I was going to add a courthouse that would allow the player to change their name and pronouns mid-playthrough, but it was one of many things that I decided to drop from my to-do list by the end of development.

When the player levels up, instead of learning new skills through the menu, they instead must walk through the basement of the office and find the book for the skill they want to learn. The initial reason for this is simply that RPG Maker doesn’t have a built-in skill tree system, and making the skill tree a physical space to be explored instead of a menu screen was the easiest solution. I quite like this – taking time to walk around and peruse the skills instead of just pressing a button helps break up the action and exploration.

The apartment, however, is the real centerpiece of the Interzonal Hub. It’s a fully mapped out four story rowhouse with four bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. I made it as detailed as it is purely out of spite for a reviewer on RPGMaker.net who complained that Agnes and Lulu’s apartment in Danger Zone Friends was literally just a kitchen. Like, dude, have you ever played a 2D 90’s JRPG? The player’s house in those games is almost always just the player character’s room, a living room, and maybe a kitchen. The mom doesn’t have a room of her own, daddy is out of the picture, and don’t even think about going to the bathroom. So my almost fully rendered 4-story rowhouse is mostly just a big middle finger to that one reviewer.

I’ve always enjoyed the home bases in Bioware and Atlas’ RPG’s (i.e., the spaceships in Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, the dormitories and homes in Persona games). It was important to me to have a recurring space where you could just chat up your comrades during the downtime between missions. The relationships that develop between Nocturne’s characters are one of the most important aspects of the story, so the game benefitted from having a physical, recurring space where the characters would just repeatedly return to and co-exist in.

THE DUNGEONS

The Underzone was originally supposed to serve double duty as a prison and an afterlife (the Underworld) – hence the fire and red brick hell-ish aesthetic. However, it quickly became just a prison, but the name stuck. Probably one of the more confusingly named places in the game, honestly.

The Library Zone is thematically self-explanatory. I did want to make sure that each dungeon in the game felt unique, and so the Library Zone was the first to be differentiated from the baseline I established. While the Underzone was a vanilla dungeon mostly made of a linear series of small screens, the Library Zone was front-loaded with a puzzle (finding a way to sneak into the Deep Stacks), and defined by sprawling, nonlinear, continuous floors filled with bookshelves, bisected by a “library catalog” puzzle where the characters have to make an informed guess as to which section the villain would be located in. It’s simple, but it’s enough the make the Library Zone feel distinct in a thematically appropriate way.

The Danger Zone, of course, is mostly lifted from Danger Zone Friends. It was fun to edit the pre-existing dungeons and show how the place has changed between the two games. It was partly just a way to save time on level design while rewarding players who played the prequel, but it also felt appropriate to take the setting of the first game and recontextualize within the second, to establish continuity.

The Canyon Zone is themed the way it is because, at this point in the game, I had realized that there were no natural spaces in either Danger Zone Friends or Jailbird Nocturne – everything has either been real-world city or fantasy-world brick, asphalt, and concrete. So, to mix things up, I threw some grass and rock walls at the player. Design-wise, it is a vanilla walk-and-fight sort of dungeon consisting of small connected areas, akin to the Underzone, albeit less linear.

The Subvoid underneath the Canyon Zone, however, is much more distinct with its propulsion tile puzzles, and between the two alternating dungeons of Chapter 5, it is the one that more decisively checks off my “distinct gameplay gimmick” checkbox.

OFF has been a huge influence on my games, and nowhere is that more obvious that in the design of the State Zone. You want a creepy office with unsettling workers? I got you covered. This dungeon is distinctive for being relatively heavy on the exposition and narrative and is light on combat.

Finally, there’s the Hole in the Heart. I always wanted an excuse to make a non-euclidean RPG Maker maze level that loops seamlessly in all 4 directions, and this was my chance (lots of games have those sorts of mazes, but I think I had recently run through the one in John Thyer’s Facets, so that was at the top of my mind). The infinitely continuous decaying castle structure with giant staircases suspended in the sky overlooking the traintracks between worlds is one of my favorite environmental aesthetics in the game. The main path through the maze is linear enough, and the branching paths dead-end quickly enough that it feels harder to navigate than it actually is.

PART 4: CHARACTERS AND THEMES

I did not intend for Jailbird Nocturne to be a personal game; I just wanted to tell a cool fantasy story. In the end, it turned out to be the most personal game I had ever made. (spoilers for the second half of the story are hidden)

That Agnes and Lulu reflect aspects of myself and my partner was not surprising – they were the protagonists of Danger Zone Friends, which was originally made as a series of inside jokes between us. But at some point in the middle of Nocturne’s development, it occurred to me that Bleucifer and Grace were facets of me too.

My own take on my story is as subjective as anyone’s, and I care more about what stories actually do than what the author intends for them to do, and, honestly, I went into this game with few thematic intentions. But to me, Nocturne’s story grapples with themes of identity, freedom, labor, and the pressure to do something great. In one or another, these subthemes all tie into a more general message of “being true to yourself.” If the game means something different to you, I love that.

Given my life trajectory during the first half of the 2020’s, this all makes sense. Jailbird Nocturne’s development began just a year after two significant life events: my coming-out as trans, and the beginning of my PhD program in political science. Development ended a year after dropping out of the PhD after struggling and failing to produce a dissertation prospectus. So, while I was coming to terms with my gender and learning how to “be myself” in a very literal sense, a lifelong drive to be an ambitious, highly accomplished person in a way that would be recognized by friends and family at the expense of pursuing my actual interests had reached its natural conclusion: I not only pursued a PhD, but did so in the field of political science instead of games or media studies, choosing a field I had mislearned as a child would be valued by my family over a field I had learned would not. That drive to be someone I wasn’t also reached its inevitable breaking point – the final year of the PhD was one of the worst years of my life. I began Jailbird Nocturne’s development after I decided that I could no longer sustainably live life pretending to be a man, and I ended its development after I decided that I could no longer sustainably live life pretending to be a political scientist.

Despite my complicated relationship with poli sci, the political subplot of the game is eerily prescient. When I released the game in the summer of 2024 – before the American presidential election - Nocturne featured a villain who deliberately crippled the Poggle government by replacing its workers with a bunch of incompetent mindless husks in order to usher in the end of the world. A year later, the deliberately destructive gutting of the American Federal Government under the second Trump administration feels disturbingly similar. Maybe, when I wrote the game, I had more of a pulse on this current moment in American history than I thought. While it was not the most fulfilling path, I have nonetheless become a trained political scientist, and I can’t take that out of me, or my art, apparently!

(And I don't think its a suprise to anyone that our heroes' plot to destroy the Underzone - to literally wipe a prison off the map - is inspired by BLM. Again, development of the game started back in 2020)

In any case, whether it’s through Grace’s coming to terms with her identity, or Agnes’ self-destructive drive to single-handedly save the world, most of the characters’ arcs are connected to my own journey in the first half of this decade. Let’s dig into each of our protagonists.

BLEUCIFER

Bleucifer was my favorite character to write in Danger Zone Friends, originally an anti-villain of sorts. Imagine Strong Bad from Homestar Runner, except constantly screaming and self-deprecating and floating around in a giant ball of cheese.

So I had to bring him back in a major role for Jailbird Nocturne. Given that his whole schtick in DZF was that he had betrayed his master, the Dairy Demon Cheelzebub, from ending the world, and he was trying to stop the protagonists from accidentally doing the same, it was easy to write him as a proper hero this time around.

However, his original visual design – a tiny devil skull head attached to a giant feta cheese ball by skinless flesh – would not work for a party member, primarily for its size, but also because it was a design more suitable for a villain. So, I had to come up with a redesign that was smaller and more sympathetic, but still recognizably Bleucifer. I made him a humanoid, threw him in armor because the party needed a tank, changed his coloration from red to blue to match his name, and gave him a smile. I justified his change in appearance by establishing that he lost his powers after being defeated in the previous game and called it a day. No, he is NOT a Papyrus from Undertale rip-off, and if anything, his original iteration was probably subconsciously inspired by OFF’s Dedan.

A central part of Bleucifer’s characterization is that he tries to be cooler than he actually is. That is because Bleucifer is similar to teenage me, who was a gender dysphoric nerd who was bad at making friends and tried (and failed) to play off the social isolation and unstyled long hair by being a cool, strong, silent, lone wolf type. Bleucifer spent 100 years in self-imposed social isolation due to shame of his origins and purpose – the servant of a cheese demon whose sole rasion d’être was to bring about the end of the world by turning into a block of cheese - but when he’s presented with an opportunity for friendship, he can’t resist. As soon as he encounters the player during their jailbreak, he doesn’t hesitate to join them and stay by their side for most of the remainder of the game. He is starved for meaningful companionship and his façade of being a violent tough-guy easily crumbles.

Accordingly, the pose of his battle sprite is based off of the key art for the Digimon Beelzemon, because I thought of what I thought the coolest thing was when I was 8, and it was probably that. The gunchucks are a reference to Strong Bad’s alter-ego Dangeresque from Homestar Runner – another character who tries to be cooler than he actually is. Does Bleucifer attack with the gun part or the nunchuck part? The answer is yes.

His playstyle and role in the party is mostly what it is because “tanky physical attacker who can cast defensive buffs” was unfilled by the other characters – Agnes and Lulu’s roles were set from the previous game, and Grace had to be an offensive spellcaster. The result is that he is the one character who is the most mechanically dissonant from his previous iteration, but given that his physical body itself had fundamentally changed between the two games, I think he is the character for which that dissonance can make the most sense. In retrospect, I think that the narrative justification is that what he says at the start of the game about being “more of a fighter than a lover” is mostly false – more than anything, he wants to protect his friends.

Bleucifer is my precious son and I love him. He is a sweet boy.

Did you know? During the last scene with him in the game, if you talk to him enough times, you can give him a hug. I don't think enough players know that out. Hug him. Okay?

GRACE

I don’t remember the reason why I wanted Grace to reappear in Jailbird Nocturne beyond thinking it was cool for antagonists from the first game to reappear as protagonists in this one. Ultimately, I think it was a good decision, as it creates tension between the two ex-enemies (Bleucifer and Grace) and the two returning heroes (Lulu and Anges) in the party, although Lulu and Agnes forgive Grace far more quickly than they do Bleucifer.

Grace is DZF’s secret boss. Her backstory is hinted at by an NPC in the original game, she randomly attacks the party, and that’s it. Her original sprite was a hasty mash up between two enemy sprites – the Hero Mage and the Hairy Cat. Her redesign is Nocturne is faithful to her original rendition as a cat in a blue robe and a wizard’s hat, although I wish I had given her robe some armholes (sorry Grace!). The lack of armholes is especially funny given that Grace does things in the game such as: hold books, cook breakfast, administer first aid, and attack enemies with claws.

Both she and her mother, Isabelle, are named after my partner’s family’s cats (the cat herself was named ‘Gracie,’ and that is the character’s name in DZF, but when I started writing her dialogue in Nocturne, I decided ‘Grace’ fit her better, and so I had the character refute her given name between the events of the two games). When I made DZF, Isabelle had recently passed away, hence her character being deceased prior to the events of both games.

The earliest outlines of the story actually had her as a rival to the villain Olivier, with her also seeking to be possessed by the demonic Tranquil Queen, hence her interest in the Geography of Desires (the book which revealed demon’s locations), but eventually I settled on a different subplot in which she seeks out another demon to confirm the nature of her species (is she a cat monster or cat person? Turns out there’s a big difference between the two!) Her story is a thinly veiled queer coming out metaphor, drawing upon my own experience of wishing there was some objective third party who, in the year leading up to my coming out, would just tell me whether or not I was trans. Unlike me, Grace actually did have an objective third party confirm the reality of her existence, although, in both our cases, persistently asking the question “am I actually such-and-such?” meant that we both already knew the answer.

It wasn’t my plan to make Grace’s story a queer allegory, but once it became clear to me that Grace was fundamentally different from the “other” monsters in the game, I couldn’t write her subplot any other way.

Otherwise, Grace was actually one of the hardest characters for me to write. I knew she was an orderly intellectual type, the typical straight-laced straight-A student type of character, but when I wrote her as such, she felt stiff and 2-dimensional. In a game with a blank-slate protagonist, I thought it was really important to have the remaining cast have stronger, more realistic personalities to compensate. So I thought about my actual nerdy “honor student”-esque friends and how they acted, and thought of one friend in particular who, yes, was smart and took things very seriously, but was also funny and sarcastic and quick to pass judgment. So I went back over the first few chapters and thought to myself, “what would this friend do,” and the result was Grace’s compulsive habit of muttering nonsensical “yo mama” jokes at inappropriate times. But the “yo mama” jokes serve double duty here because they also foreshadow Grace’s mother issues! Aha! Once I started writing Grace this way, she not only felt like a real person and became much easier to write, but she shot up to becoming one of my personal favorite characters.

As far as gameplay is concerned, although Grace uses all sorts of spells as a boss in DZF, I designed each party member in Jailbird Nocturne to fulfill no more than 3 different roles in combat. Attack and healing magic both took advantage of the same “magic” stat, so it was natural to give both types to her. I ultimately decided that inflicting status ailments, and not granting status buffs, would be her third role once it became clear that Bleucifer would be an all-in-one defensive package who could boost his own defenses while redirecting attacks to him. Since Lulu already cast spells that hit multiple foes at once in DZF, I decided that Grace would fulfill a different niche and instead specialize in dealing heavy damage to individual targets.

LULU & AGNES

When I made Danger Zone Friends, Lulu and Agnes were inspired by my partner and I respectively, with my partner historically being more extraverted and chaotic, whereas I was have been more introverted, straightforward, and (at the time of making Danger Zone Friends) depressed. I do think Lulu takes a little more after me in Nocturne than in DZF – her decision to abandon the “Super Wizard” adventuring life before Jailbird Nocturne, and her rationale for doing so, mirrors my own decision to leave grad school (as well as Agnes’ decision to follow suit by the end of the game).

While not directly acknowledged in Jailbird Nocturne itself (outside of a reference to Agnes having chosen to rename herself to Shelly Alicia Agnes), it is canon that Agnes is trans and came out between DZF and Jailbird Nocturne. When I made Danger Zone Friends, it was during a time when I was actively questioning my own gender identity, in the liminal space between being in-denial and coming out. Agnes was originally written as female in DZF, but when my partner played the game before I published it online, she thought it was weird that my stand-in character was a girl (only because me being trans was not yet on her radar; she has been incredibly supportive since then), but it was too late to change the character’s name, so I rewrote Agnes as a “gender nonconforming guy,” John Smith Agnes.

This last-minute change in Agnes’ birth name and assigned gender lead to a few running gags where Agnes tells folks not to refer to her by her full name because it was “sucky,” eventually leading to the scene where she explains to Gum-Gum that she goes by Agnes because she is less invested in her masculinity than she is in not being “John Smith.” Inadvertently, I had transcribed my own feelings about my gender at the time to the page and had written an egg. So when I made Jailbird Nocturne, which was set three years (I think?) after Danger Zone Friends, I decided that Agnes would finally just be out as a woman. And I also made Agnes and Lulu a couple because of course they are.

I thought about whether or not to make Agnes’ trans-ness more explicit in Nocturne, and I ultimately couldn’t in a way that was natural, satisfying, or justified. It isn’t something that is relevant to Nocturne’s story. While I do look forward to (finally) putting queer themes at the forefront of my next game, there is something that feels radical about writing a trans character who just happens to be trans and not have the story revolve around it. Agnes just gets to seamlessly be herself. It’s a form of representation that is less often discussed but is just as necessary as the loud, explicit coming-out stories and day-in-the-life-of-a-queer-person stories.

As far as her visual design goes, Agnes went thought a much more dramatic change than Lulu between the two games. Despite her shell, I thought it was weird that she would be the only animal-person in the game to not be wearing any clothes, so I threw a poncho on her, tattered from years of battle in Interzonal Space. I tried to think if there were any other physical or stylistic changes she would go through as a result of her transition, and I decided there wouldn’t be. I wasn’t about to do research into the secondary sex characteristics of turtles, and even if I did, I decided that I wasn’t going to give Agnes shell curvature surgery or whatever (“wow, congrats on your flat undershell, you absolute bottom!”). And I definitely wasn’t going to take the misstep of “slapping a bow” on a character, especially one who was already visually androgynous in the original game.

The one change I did make to Agnes in light of her transition was that I softened her default facial expression a little bit. Agnes’ frown is not as strong as it used to be. She still has a lot to figure out before pulling herself out of her chronic depression, but transitioning has gotten her a little closer to actually being happy.

Meanwhile, Lulu’s visual design has been more subtly changed between DZF and Jailbird Nocturne. A lot of players thought she looked more like a bear than an otter in DZF, so I tried to shorten her snout accordingly. I also evened out her facial expression to a much more subtle smile – given the tonal shift between the two games and the hell I send Lulu through in the game’s later half, having her keep her original grin throughout the game felt inappropriate.

Mechanically, I love the niches that Lulu and Agnes play in the party in both games, with Lulu tanking and dealing damage and Agnes focusing solely on healing and status ailments. They complement each other perfectly, which is thematically appropriate for the couple. Bleucifer and Grace’s movesets were not designed as deliberately, and it shows – they feel clunkier by comparison, and I regret that.

Players of Danger Zone Friends may be wondering why Lulu and Agnes were demoted from the protagonists of the first game to party members who don’t appear until nearly halfway through the second. To answer, that question, we have to talk about…

THE CROW

(there are tagged spoilers for the game's ending in this part)

We can finally talk about the crow in the room - the main character themself.

As mentioned before, Danger Zone Friends was made with a very specific audience in mind (my partner), and the fact that anyone else enjoyed the game was a pleasant coincidence. My goal for Jailbird Nocturne was instead to make a game for “everyone,” whatever the hell that meant. So, instead of having stand-ins for me and my partner serve as the protagonists, I decided not only to make space to focus on different characters (Bleu and Grace), but also for the game to feature a blank-slate protagonist of any name or gender with fully customizable stats and moves. This protagonist doesn’t have a default name in-game, but as I took promotional screenshots of the game over the course of its development, I eventually settled on “Crowley,” so we’ll refer to them as such.

With the (debatable) exception of Card Games vs Literary Characters, Jailbird Nocturne has been my only game with a conventional linear narrative that featured a blank-slate protagonist, and it was a struggle for me. Conventionally, good stories feature well-defined protagonists with clear motivations, flaws, and identities. Games, when used as a storytelling medium, are unusual for often featuring silent, passive heroes for the player to insert themselves into. Obviously, for certain types of games, I think this makes sense, but going forward, I don’t think blank-slate protagonists make much sense for the kind of stories I want to tell. Generally, I’m less interested in providing the player with a sandbox and choices than in telling stories about specific characters, which means that Jailbird Nocturne is a game where the side characters outshine our protagonist. This leads to an interesting question of whether or not this is a story about Crowley, or whether they are simply a lens through which the “actual” protagonists’ stories are shown, but if it’s the latter, then I have to justify why Crowley is leading the rest of the characters through the story.

While I gave the player full reign over Crowley’s specific dialogue over the course of the game, ultimately, their broader actions (until the very end) are set in stone, although the motivations are vague (whether or not Crowley is genuinely invested in helping their new friends or saving the world, or whether they are simply coerced into doing so, is left up to the player, but any of these motivations lead to the same outcome). Ultimately, Crowley’s passivity and the coercive circumstances surrounding their mission became the basis of their characterization. Their motivations for saving the world are called into question by the Nameless Demon’s voice in Chapter 5 (“are you really so eager to prove yourself useful?”), and the Tranquil Queen, at the very end, gives Crowley a choice to abandon the party at the last minute in exchange for their guaranteed safety.

The position that Crowley is put into at the start of the game is unjust. They are abducted and forced to bear the heavy burden of saving the world in exchange for their freedom. And yet they arrive at the end of the game as one of the few people with the power and position to prevent a demonic apocalypse. While I present the player with a choice to either, one, stand by their friends and accept the weight of the burden imposed on them, or two, abandon an unjust responsibility that never should have been imposed on them to begin with and leave the responsibility to others, the correct answer, in this case, is the former – abandoning your friends to save the world on their own is a dick move. But I wanted to present the choice to the player to ensure that, at the end of the day, preventing the apocalypse was genuinely their/Crowley’s decision, to ultimately establish that they weren’t just a passive actor at the mercy of everyone around them. Sometimes the point of giving players choices in games isn’t to challenge them or to establish equivalency between the options, but to give the player the chance to reject the bad option (regardless of Toby Fox’s intentions, I’ve always interpreted this as the function of the “genocide” route in Undertale. See also the easily avoidable “bad” endings in Persona and Metaphor Re:Fantazio).

The ordeal that Crowley and the party undertakes – having to save the world – is a metaphor for my own failed pursuit of my political science PhD during the game’s development. As I mentioned before, among the reasons I chose poli sci as my field of study is that I thought it would garner the approval of my family and friends, largely because I was born to a community of activists. As absurd as it is in hindsight, on an emotional level, I felt like I had an obligation to pursue a career that “saved the world,” to fight the good fight, and there were certain ways of making the world a better place that arbitrarily satisfied that criteria (taking to the streets; political education), and certain ways that didn’t (making art; just doing my best to be good to other people in my day-to-day life). There are many, many differences between Crowley’s situation and mine, but one of the more relevant ones is power – Crowley and their party have the power to save the world, and, by virtue of being a single ordinary person with a modest-as-hell income, I don’t. Crowley needed to keep to their mission and help their friends prevent the apocalypse, but I needed to abandon my mission and escape grad school before it completely wrecked me.

Like the stories of many of the games at the turn of the 2010’s that influenced me (I’m looking at you again, OFF), Crowley’s story is the sort that questions why game characters do the things that are normally expected of them and, more importantly, whether they even should. Maybe this makes Jailbird Nocturne feel dated. Maybe after a decade and a half these sorts of game stories are interesting again. Maybe they never stopped being interesting. I dunno. Maybe RPG Maker games are a dead genre, and no matter what you make, you are inevitably accused of ripping off Earthbound, even if you didn’t play or didn’t like Earthbound, or even worse, you’ll be accused of ripping off Undertale, even if you’ve been playing weird indie RPG’s well before Undertale, so you might as well just make whatever you want anyway. I gave Earthbound a shot last year and could barely make it three hours in without getting bored.

I just recently learned that Mortis Ghost was not inspired by Earthbound when he made OFF, contrary to the standard narrative that every “weird” RPG Maker game draws lineage from Earthbound, as though it somehow would never have otherwise occurred to anyone to make a turn-based RPG in a modern setting without big spikey anime hair. I feel vindicated.

Where was I?

WE WERE TALKING ABOUT THE CROW

Right. Okay, regarding Crowley’s visual design…

I think crows are really cool and smart, so that’s why Crowley is a crow. Very deep reasoning there. As for their weapon, I made both DZF and Jailbird Nocturne with the intention that they would be more or less PG-rated, which in my mind meant all the protagonists wouldn’t use swords or any other slashy, stabby, piercey weapons that necessarily break skin, because heroes bludgeoning people into submission is somehow more okay. So I took a cue from FLCL and gave Crowley a bass guitar as a weapon (As a bass-playing, scooter riding woman, FLCL’s Haruko was probably more foundational to my adult self-concept than I would like to admit).

I tried to make Crowley’s body sexually androgynous, and my animal characters’ designs were inspired by children’s literature and not by furries (no matter what some random people on the internet may think – yes, I will subpost anyone who says anything disparaging to me online, for you have broken the social contract and entered into a state of war), so I wasn’t ever going to give a non-human character boobs, but the result is that people tend to read Crowley’s body as more masculine than not. Ah well.

OLIVIER

I was originally going to limit the scope of this discussion to party members, but I can’t talk about Crowley without talking about their counterpart, Olivier.

The original decision to make the villain analogous to Crowley – another bird wielding a guitar – was not a deep one. I just wanted to signal to the player that the villain was a rival to their character, and to draw direct comparison between the villain’s powers and theirs at multiple points in the game – Olivier easily defeats the player at the start of the game, but later meets his match and is defeated. If I were a full dev team, Olivier’s battle sprite would have been drawn from scratch instead of being an edit of Crowley’s, but I think I made enough changes that they feel like a different person.

Olivier is a representation of someone who has conformed nearly perfectly to the social expectations of straight, middle-class, monogamous, 2.5 kids, suburban life at the expense of their own true desires – hence the office worker getup. He represents a sort of peace - they are a dove, and their name is derived from “olive branch” – but it is a false peace, a surrender to societal pressures. This is also why Crowley wields a bass, while Olivier wields a normal electric guitar, a potent but more common instrument. Crowley is black, while Olivier is white, ostensibly pure and virtuous. Olivier may be a sprite edit, but every way in which he deviates from Crowley is deliberate.

While Agnes and Olivier are both brought to a breaking point by their duties as “Super Wizards,” Agnes is able to break free and pursue a more independent life, while Olivier fully subsumes to the whims of other people and institutions, becoming a puppet of the Tranquil Queen. That his white wings double as angel wings when the Queen takes over and restructures his body was something that worked out nicely.

POGGSON

I’m not going to talk about every Poggle in the supporting cast, but I did want to talk a little about Poggson, the office intern and revolutionary who, by the end of the game, is set up to become the next president of Interzonal Space.

Poggson originally played a much more minor role in the story – he was just a random Poggle NPC who would tell the player how many skill points they had, and that was it. Hence, unlike Wizard Maker, President Poggle, or Sibyl, who were designed to be proper characters from the start, he is visually indistinguishable from every nameless Poggle in the game.

But then I needed a character to introduce to the player the plot to destroy the Underzone, and Poggson was in the room when that needed to happen. And from then onward, he became entangled in the story. Before I knew it, he was the leader of the anti-Underzone league, and then he replaced Wizard Maker as the party’s support. And then when President Poggle made his exit and the government totally collapsed… who would better fill the hole in leadership than Poggson?

As Poggson became an increasingly important character, it raised the question of whether to give him a unique visual design. Ultimately, I actually liked that he begins as a seemingly innocuous NPC, physically identical to nearly every other member of his species, but is, in fact, more than that – he (like everyone else! Shocker!) is a complete person with history, motives, and personality. I wanted to subvert the neat distinction often in videogames between “actual characters” and nameless “non-person” NPCs. And on top of that, what better metaphor is there for idealized democracy than for someone who is seemingly identical to other members of “the masses” to represent them? Poggson has the interiority of a singular person, but the external appearance of the collective people.

PART 5: THAT ONE SCENE IN CHAPTER 6

Most of the relevant parts of the game's story were covered in the discussion of the characters themselves, but the most important part of the narrative that hasn't yet been covered in depth is the scene in Chapter 6 where Olivier nearly beats Agnes to death, which I think is reasonable to say is the most shocking part of the story. I wanted to discuss it because an earlier version of the scene was one of the first ones that I had even envisioned for the game.

The original plan was that, toward the end of the game, the party would find themselves in a room surrounded by enemies that are flooding in through 4 entranceways. Bleucifer, Grace, Agnes, and Lulu would each go to each entrance to hold off the enemies. The player would assist each of them in turn, closing the door to each entrance after turning the tide of each battle, but after rescuing three party members, it would be too late to save the fourth, who would be killed by the villain.

I was inspired by the scene in Mass Effect (oh no that was almost two decades ago) where Shepard must choose between saving Ashley or Kaiden, but I wanted to play with the idea of the player choosing to sacrifice one of their party members without understanding, at the moment, that they were making a choice, having them deal with the guilt of “causing” a party member to die without being truly responsible for it.

Despite being the original basis of the whole game’s story, I ultimately decided against this version of the scene for many reasons. The first was practical – giving the game 4+ different ending sequences based on who died would have been an insane amount of work. The second was more thematic – if the game were about loss, tragedy, or responsibility, then having someone randomly die based on an unrelated choice would’ve made sense, but after making the first couple of chapters, it became clearer that this wasn’t that sort of story I was trying to tell.

When it came time for the party to be ambushed in Chapter 6, it decided that if any character were to be “killed off,” the correct answer was Agnes. Lulu and Agne’s story focuses on Lulu’s concern about Agnes risking her life in her line of work, so it made sense to explore what would happen if Lulu’s fears were realized, but until I scripted the cutscene where she’s attacked, I wasn’t actually sure whether or not I was going to commit to Agnes being dead.

Ultimately, I decided that Agnes’ “death” would be a fake-out. I wasn’t done with the character – she and Lulu needed closure. So Lulu saves her. Maybe I’m just too used to the ending the way I wrote it, but I have a hard time imagining a version of the story where Agnes dies and Lulu isn’t overcome with grief, loses the will to live, and dies in battle herself. Best case scenario is that she’s a depressed walking shell of her former self for the remainder of the story. I think a tonal shift of that magnitude would require me to have laid a different foundation than the one I had already laid.

After Lulu saves Agnes, I also considered having Agnes spend the rest of the game in the hospital instead of rejoining the party, making Lulu rejoin the remaining three party members sooner. However, after Chapter 3, I found that I didn’t actually enjoy the game all that much with four party members! Danger Zone Friends was designed with a three person party in mind, and expanding it to four felt a little bloated – appropriate for the final boss perhaps, but not most fights. This is why, starting in Chapter 4, the party gets split so often throughout the game. Limiting the player to different unique combinations of party members was fun, narratively and mechanically. Having Bleucifer spend most of Chapter 5 alone with Agnes and Lulu was not part of my original plan, but the tension between the three of them resulted in some of my favorite bickering in the whole game and, ultimately, Agnes and Bleucifer forgiving each other for the conflict between them in DZF.

But, yes, keeping Lulu out of the main party for most of chapters 7 and 8 meant that she needed another party member to assist her in the battle in the Interzonal Hub, resulting in Agnes’ return to the party for the remainder of the game, albeit in a sorry state. Maybe it’s a little cheap, but I do like the gag about Agnes stealing an adrenaline shot and busting through a hospital window.

TONAL SHIFT

In any case, the attempted murder of Agnes signaled a turning point for the game’s tone. But first, some context.

When I was making games from 2017-2019, I was showcasing my work as part of Underground Arcade Collective at conventions and festivals. These events were overwhelmingly family-friendly, which meant that any new game I wanted to exhibit had to be rated PG. It was a fun challenge during this era to learn how to tell jokes, surprise players, and convey intensity without relying on graphic violence and swearing. Especially swearing – it is a frequently used tool in my kit when writing dialogue!

Danger Zone Friends was no exception to this rule, and for the sake of tonal consistency, I had kept Jailbird Nocturne similarly PG-rated as I worked on it up through Chapter 5. And then, in chapter 6, Olivier nearly beats Agnes to death. As we’ve been discussing.

This was the first time in my “family-friendly” games era where I found it impossible to keep things sanitized. What was Lulu going to exclaim in response to her girlfriend’s apparent murder? “Aw, shucks?” Of course not! And since I needed Agnes’ body to be off-screen, the only way to show the severity of the harm done to her was with blood spatters and smears.

The scene constitutes a “loss of innocence” of sorts for the story. I wasn’t trying to be cynical about it –I didn’t want to game to devolve into dark fantasy edgelord territory, especially when I didn’t set that expectation to the audience – and while it did give me permission to go back and be more flexible with language in the rest of the game, I liked the sharp contrast between the more whimsical vibes of DZF and the first half of Jailbird Nocturne and the heightened sense of danger in Nocturne’s second half. Inadvertently, by maintaining a family friendly baseline at the start of the game, I (hopefully) made the stakes feel even higher during the climax.

That tonal shift ultimately provided the impetus to draw different facial expressions for the main cast – something I can't imagine the game without now but did not implement until I made chapter 6! To save time, I tried to get away with just having a single image for each character’s portrait, but once Lulu starts freaking out, it became clear that I couldn’t rely on dialogue alone to properly convey each the characters’ emotions – they needed to be portrayed visually as well. I’m so glad I did – going back through every cutscene and updating every characters’ facial expression was an ordeal, but the game is so much better for it.

PART 6: SCALE (OR, MAKING THE GAME)

IN DEFENSE OF LARGE GAMES

I want to take a step back and talk more about what it was like to actually make a game of this scale, as a human.

I’ve made reference at least once on my blog to a post by John Thyer on the merits of making short games and another by NARFNra on the perils of making long games as a solo indie developer, both of which were influential to how I think about indie dev. By and large, I agree with the points in these blog posts (that making small games is profound and making long games is rarely sustainable), and in many ways, Jailbird Nocturne was the exception that proved the rule. Typically, making a full-length videogame in your free time as an individual (or even a small team) is a long, miserable experience, and there were definitely stretches of making Jailbird Nocturne that were slogs. Just about any person making games in their free time should embrace making short games.

And yet! I made a full-length RPG with entirely original graphics, music, and sound effects, and while it took longer than I would have liked (I was planning on two years of work, not four!), and it came at a cost, I would not have done things any differently. I love the game that I made, even though it is imperfect, and even if some of those imperfections are because it’s overscoped. The more stuff you have in your game, the greater the chance that you’ll get something wrong. But I think part of what makes Jailbird Nocturne uniquely special out of all of my games is the fact that you get to spend so much time with the characters. They are my favorite bozos I have ever written, and getting to know them takes hours. (Honestly, the only reason I haven’t switched from making games to writing novels yet is that I’m still not done exploring what can be done within an RPG battle system. And I love writing music.)

While I agree that small games are valuable, do things that are impossible in larger works, and are the most sustainable ways for solo devs to create, I do wonder if there is some pressure to downscale that comes from the expectation set forth by social media to be prolific, to build an audience, to be a constantly producing content creator. To go silent for long periods of time – to not release a game for years – is a form of social death on the internet. But to whom do I owe productivity? Let me spend 4 years making my RPG epic in peace and barely post about it! I wonder how much of the pressure and stress experienced by solo devs working on massive indie games, as detailed by NARFNra in their aforementioned post, comes from the necessity to sell a game to a necessarily large audience. If you remove the market pressure, I think long-form solo game dev becomes more sustainable, although challenges persist. It’s not the type of creative project I recommend unless you’re an experienced developer who has a deep understanding of what making a game from start to finish entails. And the downside of spending more time making games is that you’re spending less time engaging with the community and building an audience. But at this point, I am so disinterested in networking that I am mostly okay with that. I have friends in meatspace and I am happy.

There were a number of creative decisions and personal circumstances that made this long-form project succeed where my other attempts at making a full-length game failed. Let’s go through ‘em:

1) I MADE A SHORTER PREQUEL FIRST

This was huge. Spending a year making Danger Zone Friends gave me a snapshot of what making an RPG with this level of audiovisual fidelity would entail. I still underestimated how long the game was going to take me to make, but I wasn’t surprised when I missed my original deadline. I more or less knew what I was getting myself into.

More importantly, I already knew that I liked making DZF, and I knew I would like doing more of “that sort of thing” for a couple more years. Where previous attempts at “full-length” games had failed was that I outgrew the projects faster than I could finish them. I got bored or made a fatal design flaw early in development that I had to live with. Working on a project stopped being enjoyable before the end of the first year.

So, if there is a single piece of universally applicable advice I’d give to any developer trying to follow in my footsteps and make a giant game by themselves – please, please, please do yourself a favor make a stand-alone smaller version first. Not a demo. Not a first chapter. Make something short, self-contained, with an ending. Doing this will give you a chance to correct design mistakes you made in the smaller version, and if you find that you’re creatively satisfied by making a smaller version of the project and don’t want to revisit it, then that is a telling sign that you never should have made a larger version to begin with! Worst case scenario, you have a game that is actually done. If you finish that smaller project and are still hungry for more, then that is a sign that a larger version of that game is actually compelling enough for you to follow through on for a 2-4 year development period.

Starting a large game from scratch is a gamble and a commitment – it’s like marrying someone you’ve never met. You should date for a little bit first!

2) I USED RPG MAKER (AND I RELIED ON THIRD PARTY PLUGINS)

Normally, when I make a game, I like to do everything myself. Sometimes I collaborate with a musician, and I lead a 4 person team when making Bloodjak II, but most of what I’ve made I’ve made alone. For a project of this scale, however, I had to think about what parts of the game I was most particular about. Music, sound, art, and design were all things I was fussy about. UI, underlying battle mechanics, and code were not.

I have no shame about using a tool that primarily uses visual programming and already has built in menu, dialogue, movement, and battle systems. Yes, I missed the freedom and control and expression that comes with programming everything from scratch. Yes, some things were more cumbersome to implement in RPG Maker than if I had coded it by hand. Yes, in a post-Persona 5 world, RPG Maker’s default battle UI is horribly outdated. However, by using RPG Maker, I also cut out 6-12 months of work scripting systems that are, on a technical level, absolutely boring to me at this point. I’ve been programming character movement and text boxes for nearly two decades now. I’ve made turn-based systems in games and they’re interesting but tedious. If I worked as part of a company, I’d be ideally be delegating that work to someone else at this point of my career.

Getting some specialized functionality in the game – most notably, the side-view battle system, which is not a normal feature of RPG Maker VX Ace – required me to use third-party plugins, and I’m glad that the RPG Maker community is thriving enough that so many scripts are freely available! Thank you to all those talented and generous programmers. I was able to get my hands dirty myself to fix some bugs and add some features myself, but I don’t know Ruby, and the result is a game that, while more polished than Danger Zone Friends, is still a little jank around the edges (the way the rest of the party awkwardly follows the player when jumping around in Chapter 5 is something that just would not have happened if I had programmed that myself). I definitely found myself hitting the limitations of RPG Maker when making this project, but it was the only way to finish this game in a reasonable time span. It was a necessary tradeoff that I would happily make again.

If you’re making an RPG and aren’t too fussy about the UI and battle system… use RPG Maker. It’s a good tool for the job, and if it didn’t do a lot of the heavy lifting for me, this game wouldn’t exist.

3) I LIBERALLY REUSED ART, SOUND, AND CODE FROM DANGER ZONE FRIENDS (AND MY OTHER GAMES)

This is one of the great advantages of making a sequel – I already had a ton of graphics, music, and sound effects ready to go that were relevant and stylistically consistent with any new content I would create. When I started Jailbird Nocturne, I literally just copied the project file for Danger Zone Friends and worked from there, deleting the prequel’s levels right before publishing the final game. Lots of leftover art, sound, and music from DZF are still in Jailbird Nocturne’s files.

Most of the new content for Jailbird Nocturne was music, with me creating more new songs for Nocturne than I originally did for DZF. Moreso than other assets, the songs used in DZF had specific narrative and thematic associations that I couldn’t ignore, necessitating a lot of new music. On top of that, I felt like creating a mostly new soundtrack would do more to give Jailbird Nocturne a distinct identity than anything else. It was fun to repurpose old motifs into new tracks as appropriate – for example, Grace’s theme is an edit of the café theme from DZF (since she used to work there), and Bleucifer’s theme is a rock remix of the theme from his fortress level. The final boss theme contains motifs from every battle track from both DZF and Nocturne, signifying that this is the climax not just of Jailbird Nocturne, but of both games collectively (while there are some plot hooks at the end of Nocturne that naturally lend themselves to a third installment, I’m very more eager to move on and explore new territory in my next game).

While I reuse nearly every enemy and character from the original game in some point in one way or another (I think the Colby Cretin is the only enemy from DZF that doesn’t return), I still ended up having to create more character art for Nocturne than I originally did for DZF, as necessitated by the story. New environmental art was less necessary – I think the amount of new background art and objects I had to make were comparable to what I originally made for DZF.

The one downside to reusing old character art from DZF was the stylistic limitation – the battle sprites were inspired by the second generation of Pokemon games, meaning I had arbitrarily limited myself to only using 4 colors for a battle sprite (two of which were usually black and white). There was no justification for this decision in DZF besides that I thought it looked cool (true) and that using fewer colors would save time (false). It’s stylistically inconsistent with the rest of the game, and that bugs me a little bit, but maybe it shouldn’t, and at least battle scenes are internally consistent.

I was also able to reuse about half of the dungeons from Danger Zone Friends for the game’s third chapter, where the party visits the Danger Zone. The spaces are reinterpreted, rearranged, and repurposed into very different levels, but nonetheless, editing levels is a lot faster than making one from scratch, and having players return to the Danger Zone and see how things changed was a lot of fun and worked well as a way to reintroduce Agnes and Lulu to the story. Recycling assets between games is one thing; recycling levels is a whole ‘nother level of unorthodox that is even harder to typically justify, but I think it strengthens the game here. It shaved another 2-4 weeks off of my development time right there! With seven of the eight chapters featuring entirely brand new environments, it was hard to lose sleep over it.

Finally, there are the sound effects, very few of which were newly recorded for Jailbird Nocturne. I recorded a comprehensive enough sound library for DZF that I only needed to record maybe a half dozen new sounds for Nocturne. I have fun recording and generating sounds, but it is the part of game dev I am least passionate about, and I very frequently reuse effects from across all of my games. There’s a wind sound effect I originally recorded for the Morphine Western Revenge in 2016 that I’ve shamelessly used in at least four games and counting! I absolutely plan on continuing to abuse my growing sound library in any games I make going forward.

Overall, somewhere between 1/3-1/2 of the game’s art and audio is repurposed from DZF. That’s a lot of stuff to not have to make for a new project, especially given the gargantuan amount of assets I had to make from scratch anyway.

4) I HAD A FLEXIBLE SCHEDULE DURING THIS TIME OF MY LIFE

As I’ve mentioned repeatedly – I was a full-time grad student for about ¾ of Jailbird Nocturne’s development. During the third year of development, I was on University Fellowship, meaning that my full-time occupation was just to work on my dissertation, which I ultimately failed to produce a prospectus for in a timely manner, leading to my “early graduation,” as I like to think of it. So while my mental health was hitting rock bottom as I beat my head against the wall struggling to produce a dissertation that wasn’t materializing, I at least had free time for game dev – in theory. However, much of that free time was wasted – again, it was a shit year, I wasted a lot of time staring at my prospectus, and when I look at the evidence on Twitter, it was actually one of the least productive years of working on the game.

The two years prior to that, however, was when most of Jailbird Nocturne got done (about the first five of eight chapters). Even though I was a full-time grad student and instructor, my schedule was very flexible, and we were in the heart of the pandemic, so I was doing a lot of work from home. This often meant that I would do game dev during the morning and afternoon when I had energy and motivation and wasn’t on campus, and then I would procrastinate on homework and lesson planning which I would do in the evenings. It wasn’t a healthy or sustainable way to work, but it did mean I was one of the few times in my life when I was able to work on games as I naturally felt like it. I was able to hit a good rhythm. There were many reasons why I dropped out of grad school, and I suspect that I would have failed to produce a dissertation in any case, but working on a game during that time when I could have been iterating on my prospectus certainly didn’t help me! I sometimes think of Jailbird Nocturne as my “actual” dissertation.

About 5 months had passed between me deciding to drop out of my program in the spring and finding a new job, and I was still funded by my fellowship for 3 of those months. I don’t remember how much I had gotten done during this time, but being unemployed for such a good stretch, and still having an income for most of it, did not hurt the game’s development.

During the last eight months or so of working on the game, I had found a 9-5 job, and I lost the ability to make decent progress during weekdays. My life was stable enough during that year and my social calendar empty enough that I was able to stick to a schedule and finish the game’s final chapter and conduct playtesting during the weekends.

The pandemic and the circumstances of my employment during the first half of the 2020’s were instrumental in getting Jailbird Nocturne done, and I don’t think I’ll be able to replicate those conditions again any time soon. I was just lucky enough.

PART 7: THE SOUNDTRACK

Between the game’s art and it’s music, I actually don’t have much to say about the game’s art. Besides the stylistic influences I previously discussed, my thoughts about the graphics basically boil down to “I like drawing monsters, leave me alone.” 2D game art is mostly instinctual for me. Like, I could talk about the influences behind some of the monster designs, but even I don't find it that interesting, so I'll just let their whimsy speak for themselves. I have more to say about the music.

Part of the reason the game is titled Jailbird Nocturne, and why Crowley fights with a bass guitar, is because of the special importance that my games' music has for me. The game's title went through a few iterations: “Interzonal Jailbird Jam” was the first one, and while it was a good literal descriptor of the game (a bird escapes from jail in interzonal space and finds themselves in a jam), I felt that the word “Interzonal” was meaningless fantasy mumbo-jumbo (what the fuck is an interzone?), so I then changed it to “Starlit Jailbird Jam.” But since “jam” had a double meaning here, ultimately collapsed the concepts of “starlight” and “jam” into “nocturne.” I'm still honestly not sure if this was the best title for the game, but I still haven't thought of anything better.

While Danger Zone Friend’s music draws more upon indie/alt rock and other midi game soundtracks, for Jailbird Nocturne, I wanted to more explicitly incorporate other genres – most prominently, jazz. I mostly listen to rock music, but I went through a brief jazz phase as a teenager (I still listen to Mingus and Brubeck on occasion). However, both as a teen listening to jazz and as an adult composer drawing upon it, I mostly do so as a way to connect to my late grandfather, a lifelong professional jazz musician and arranger. He played woodwinds. The game’s credits track, “Nocturne for Ray,” is a tribute to him. It was supposed to be the game’s main theme, hence it being remixed as the title theme “Nocturne for Computers,” but the swinging rhythm didn’t quite translate well to the synths and increased tempo in the remix. If I had more time, I think I would’ve redone the title theme altogether, frankly. The riff in the latter half of the track appears in a couple of other pieces, most notably in “The Tower Duel,” and I think that is a much more successful incorporation of the theme.

Among the jazz-influenced tracks, “Battle Jam,” the game’s main battle theme, takes the prompt the most loosely. I imagined a small group of musicians performing it on a stage in the corner of the club – hence, the instrumentation is just piano, upright bass, and drums. It features jazz instrumentation without being a jazz song, although there is a little bit of “Blue Rondo a la Turk” in there. It’s an ambitious song - the time signature switches repeatedly between 5/4 and 7/4 – but I think it pays off and makes for a memorable battle theme. Definitely one of my favorites from the soundtrack.

The track that became “Boss Jam” was originally written to be the normal battle theme, but felt too intense for that purpose, and became the boss theme instead. It’s a rock song – I drew upon the Strokes’ “Reptilia” for initial inspiration – but I think the fact that it went “too hard” was what prompted me to fall back to an acoustic vibe for “Battle Jam.”

“Bureaucratic Nightmare” – the theme for the State Zone offices in Chapter 6 – is another of my favorites. Moreso than the rest of the game’s music, this one was inspired by the dark technoswing of OFF’s soundtrack, which is fitting given that Chapter 6 is my most shamelessly OFF-y level. I think I tried to sprinkle a little bit of Radiohead’s King of Limbs in there too. The acoustic jazz remix of the track, “Interzonal Anthem,” is one of my more successful remixes – it feels smooth. It’s a shame that I only use it twice in the whole game, for President Poggle’s two appearances in the story.

“The Tower Duel” is one of the most batshit compositions I’ve ever written. The first two minutes are tense and orchestral, and are meant to inspire a sense of caution and apprehension. During the first encounter with Olivier, this is the only part of the song that plays – he is out of the player’s league, and the player should fear him. During the rematch, the same two minutes plays before it transitions into a rock song that loops for the remainder of the fight. I wanted the song to mirror the player’s apprehension and Olivier’s confidence at the start of the duel, then devolve into more frantic, conventionally action-y and dramatic music as the player realizes they have a chance and Olivier grows more frustrated and desperate, with the “Nocturne for Ray” motif making an appearance to represent the player and one of the “Bureaucratic Nightmare” motifs representing Olivier.

Around the time I had written “The Tower Duel,” I had watched a video breaking down a boss theme from one of the Megaman Battle Network games, and one of the take-aways from that was that there were random accidentals sprinkled into the bassline that made parts of the track sound more ominous. During the opening two minute intro to the track, I not only tried this technique myself, but I made the accidentals occur more frequently over time to create a sense of progressive unraveling before the tension breaks at the two minute mark and the main loop starts.

“Two Holy Swords,” as the final boss theme, features motifs from just about every battle theme used in DZF and Nocturne back-to-back. I really like how most of it turned out! The very end of the track features, in very rapid succession, the character themes of each of the protagonists in a fanfare that I sometimes wonder might have been a little too triumphant. What is now dubbed “Two Holy Swords Part 2” was originally the whole piece, but all of it, including the sinister intro, the intense rock-inspired middle, and the fanfare at the end, would play while the player was still taking their first turn. So I created a creepier, stripped down version of the track’s intro that I christened “Two Holy Swords Part 1” that would loop during the first few turns of the fight to establish an emotional baseline before switching to “Two Holy Swords Part 2” in the middle of the fight. It was a little clunky, but it was a better solution than having to rewrite the song from scratch or just having the song play as originally written.

PART 8: THE CASE OF THE MISSING POST-GAME

Danger Zone Friends had a couple of secrets in it – the most notable of which is the hidden boss fight with Grace - so I originally planned on giving Jailbird Nocturne a postgame. And by “a postgame,” I meant two radically different postgames, since the game has two divergent endings. Needless to say, spoilers follow but are tagged accordingly.

The postgame for the canon ending (where Crowley helps the party save the world) would have required the player to revisit different parts of the Interzonal Void throughout the game, following a trail of breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs went through a few iterations, but my original intent was for the player to find all five volumes of the manga that Bleucifer was reading. Whatever macguffins the player pursued, the final “key” they’d need to actually access the postgame would be found in the final dungeon, the Hole in Heart. Once the player defeats the Tranquil Queen and returns to the apartment, they could exit through the gaps in the crowd that surround the building to freely explore the rest of the world and enter the post-game dungeon. Even though the post game is missing, the option to escape the crowd and aimlessly explore the world remains as a vestigial limb of sorts.

Upon entering this dungeon, the level cap would’ve increased by about 5 levels or so, giving the party more chances to learn any powerful late game moves (like Meteor, Scorched Earth, etc) that they hadn’t yet learned.

I went back and forth on who the secret boss (or bosses) in this route would be. Some days, I leaned towards the resurrected cybernetic corpse of Tiamat – Neo Tiamat. In the context of Jailbird Nocturne, Tiamat is the “demon from whom all other demons are created,” slain by Grace’s mother Isabelle well before the events of either game, only mentioned in a couple of cutscenes. Given that the player had already fought the resurrected cybernetic corpses of Barbas and Cheelzebub, Tiamat’s presumed power as the mother of all other demons, and her status as a rarely mentioned historical legend, Neo Tiamat would have been a perfect candidate for a secret boss.

The other candidate was Astrodon Johnstoni, the state dinosaur of Maryland and absurd shopkeep of Danger Zone Friends, Jailbird Nocturne, and my mini-RPG Vaudeville and Sword. My friends who’ve played any of those games have mentioned that they either expected or wanted to fight the fan-favorite dinosaur, who apparently has a shady past as a gangster and used to drive a truck (like many things in DZF, he was originally an otherwise-would-have-been-forgotten inside joke between me and my partner that now has a life of his own over half a decade later!). One of his attacks would have been running over a party member with a jpeg of a truck. In some iterations, Astrodon would actually be the demon of capitalist excess, Astaroth Johnstoni, the secret mastermind behind the events of both games.

However, if players chose the “bad” ending where Crowley is left to wander the Hole in the Heart by themself for an indeterminate amount of time, then that would unlock the more interesting masocore-difficulty postgame where the level cap is raised from Lv 20 to Lv 100, and the player wanders a densely packed dungeon with hundreds of hastily designed encounters, intermittent item shops, and the ability to accumulate literally every learnable skill in the game. The player would beat the secret boss of this route (some sort of uber-powerful mirror form of Olivier, was what I think I was rolling with?) and then… nothing would happen. They’d still be trapped in hell.

I wanted something that felt brutal, lonely, and pointless but also something to give to players who wanted a weirder, harder postgame a reason to choose the bad ending.

It would have been really cool to have had both of these secret routes in the game, but by the time I hit the end of development, I looked carefully at the project and made tough decisions about how much work was really necessary to bring the game to completion. So, this meant that while I spent a day drawing the exterior of the train that shows up during the game’s ending, its entire interior was a remix of already existing assets (it’s fine, move on!). As cool as the secret postgame content would have been, it was ultimately unnecessary to my deeper mission of just getting the goddamn game finished.

PART 9: RELEASING THE GAME/EXPERIMENTS IN MONETIZATION

By spring of 2024, after three and a half years, the game was not yet done , but it was playable from start to finish. During following months of development that remained, I enlisted friends to playtest the game while I made final revisions (mostly, me fussing over the audio levels and still getting it wrong), made the trailer, and created the bonus content (more on that later). Of the four playtesters who actually offered any feedback, only two beat the game. They liked it! So that was good news.

Given the nature of the game as a “feature-length” project, I wanted to experiment with monetization just to see what would happen. I was torn between my beliefs in free artistic and cultural exchange versus my belief that artists should be fairly compensated for their labor. Putting a price tag on the game itself was a no-go – I tried that with Bloodjak II and was so frustrated with how few people were playing the game that I ended up making it free months after release. Making games isn’t my job, and, when the chips are down, I don’t believe that art should be commodified by default.

However, I wanted to give people the opportunity to pay for the project if they so wanted, and many of my friends actively did (one of the first questions some of my friends asked me when I told them about the game was “how and when can I give you money for this?”). If the game somehow caught on and I made enough from donations to become a full-time dev… well, I didn’t want to prevent that from happening, no matter how unlikely it was. I am at a tough position where I am certain that I will never be a full time indie dev, but the only way to sustainably make the kind of art I really want to make, at this point, would be to become one.

So I gave folks a couple of ways to pay for the game. The first was to make the game pay-what-you-want and provide bonus content to players who paid $4 or more. I originally had a ton of ideas for the paid downloadable goodies – the soundtrack, a walkthrough, an artbook, and a behind-the-scenes video or essay (this is that essay, I guess). However, among the ideas that were most interesting to folks, the soundtrack and walkthrough were all that I had time to make before the end-of-August deadline I had set for myself to release the game. This was the first time making a walkthrough for one of my own games, and it was more work than I expected!

This ended up being enough to encourage people to donate – something that, despite making some of my games PWYW in the past, had never happened before. Not only that, but most people donated more than the $4 I asked for - $10 was typical. I wasn’t sure how much my game was worth to people – now I know!

I also reached out to Andrew of Indiepocalypse fame to sell Jailbird Nocturne (with the bonus content) as a USB in a cassette case for $10 as part of his indie game tape market that he brings to conventions. Thank you Andrew for producing and selling my game!

Between the donations and tape sales, I’d made about $110 or so, making Jailbird Nocturne my best-selling game to date, beating out Bloodjak II and the Indiepocalypse royalties for Danger Zone Friends (it’s a low bar, but it stumbles over it with flying colors!). However, for most of the year following Jailbird Nocturne’s release, it had only gotten ~45 downloads, which is very much on the low end for my games. By this point, Danger Zone Friends had thousands of downloads by comparison. Most jam games I make get more exposure than that.

That changed somewhat with the game’s inclusion in the 2025 Queer Games Bundle, which got a lot of eyes on the game, and also got me a few hundred dollars more in royalties (thank you to Caroline Delbert for including me!). Danger Zone Friend’s inclusion in the 2020 Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality and Indiepocalypse were key for any sort of engagement it’s had after its release, so I knew that getting Jailbird Nocturne featured in an anthology or bundle would do more to get it out there than any sort of marketing I could do myself, and I was right. If there’s anything I’ve learned after spending years releasing and showcasing games, it’s that community participation is much more effective (and fulfilling!) way to get people to play your game than conventional marketing on social media.

Despite the exposure, I am still waiting for any sort of evidence that anyone besides two of my playtesters actually beat the game. By comparison, Danger Zone Friends has a handful of Let’s Play videos on Youtube, comments, ratings, and verbal feedback. I haven’t gotten any of that for Jailbird Nocturne yet. I think I underestimated how much a barrier the game’s length would be to people completing it. Until now, most of my games have been short enough that even people who didn’t like them would at least beat them before dropping them, but the longer a game is, the more opportunities there are for them to leave. The more you ask of a player, the more you have to promise and deliver to them in return. This is one of the hidden costs of making long games that isn’t often discussed. Short freeware indie games are in competition with their ilk, but feature-length indie RPG’s are in competition with feature-length AAA RPG’s, and it’s tough to compete with that if you can’t set your game apart. Maybe I should have billed Jailbird Nocturne as a mini-RPG and let it be a surprise to players when it keeps going after the third hour?

In the end, while I did not make enough money from the game to quit my dayjob (which is fine), and I have yet to receive evidence that more than two other people actually beat the game (which is disappointing), I am pleasantly surprised by the monetary support that had been shown to me with this project. I had zero expectations that I would make anything at all from this project, and I am grateful for the material support.

CONCLUSION

Nearly 30 pages later and I am finally asking myself - why did I write all this?

Part of the reason is to impart wisdom to other aspiring devs and make my dent in the discourse about amateur indie dev, polish, and scale. Again, I do think that making small games is absolutely the default course that most individual hobbyist devs should take almost all of the time. Not only is it the most sustainable way to create, but short games do things long games can’t, and thus individual amateur devs can do things that studios cannot. Poems are not novels, comedy sketches are not feature films, and all of these forms have their own unique strengths. Embrace the power afforded to you as an individual creator of short games who is unbound from profit motive!

But, the inverse is also true – long games do things short games can’t. I’ve been making shorts for 20 years, and it’s a form of expression that I honestly feel like I’ve exhausted. Something that wasn’t clear to me before until writing this was that so much of my creative work has been in conversation with a cultural moment that has long passed – most of my indie game influences are from the late 2000’s and early 2010’s. At this point, all work I’m motivated to create is in conversation with itself. Jailbird Nocturne was my response to Danger Zone Friends. My next project – currently titled “Motor Oil and Sword” – is a response to Jailbird Nocturne. (What if I refined the battle system further and mixed resource systems? If I’m making such personal stories now, why not make a game that is intentionally informed by my life and not one accidentally informed by it? Why not finally make something with queer themes at the forefront? If a 10 hour RPG is too long, but a 2 hour one is too short, what if I made a 5 hour game this time?)

When I finish – or abandon - Motor Oil and Sword, I will likely either make another RPG in response to it, or I will switch to writing fiction or recording music. I feel like I’m running out of ways I want to express myself through games, and it feels freeing. I’m used to having a half dozen competing ideas for my next game bouncing through my head at a time, and now I’m down to one or two.

What I’m trying to say is – I’m at a point in my life where the gamble of risking years on a large-scale projects I will likely abandon is more reasonable than it once was. I created a prolific body of work. I don’t need to pump out a steady stream of… “content…” (ugh) to appease a large audience or “The Algorithm.” It feels like my creative career had an apocalypse in 2020, and I’m now creating under the anarchy of post-apocalyptic conditions. Does this metaphor make any sense? I don’t care, dear reader. I think the way most people would put it is that they’ve “retired.” But I’m still young, so "retirement" can’t be the right concept.

So, yes, there were specific conditions that made making Jailbird Nocturne less risky – and more successful – than my previous two attempts at making full-length “magnus opuses” roughly a decade prior. Decades of experience finishing games and knowing how and when to do that is huge. Making a prequel and reusing assets from it was also huge. But I also think Jailbird Nocturne was the type of insane project that made sense for me at this time of my life. Making a full-length game didn’t make sense as a college student. It makes sense for me now that it’s one of the frontiers of game dev that I’ve explored the least. I’ve done arcade games, art games, altgames, trashgames, notgames, glorious trainwrecks, interactive fiction, 3D games, 2D games, multiplayer games, tabletop games, netcode, solo projects, collaborative projects, freeware games, monetized games, a music game, a rom hack, a Quake level. Dear reader, I have dabbled thoroughly in the craft. What is left for me except for RPG epics? It’s either that or making a freemium corporate tie-in real time strategy gatcha hentai game, I guess.

Beyond that, I want to remind people that, if you’re making art, being part of a community is really important. Maybe it goes without saying. My biggest regret while making this game is that I’ve fallen out of touch with game making subcultures post-pandemic.

And beyond that, I just hope that, whether you’re a game designer, a player, or just a friend, that you found some of my thoughts here of value. Jailbird Nocturne was a thesis of sorts on many things: on RPG battle systems, on the worlds and storytelling typical of small freeware RPG’s, and on the past five years of my life. Any wisdom I have about making games comes from people talking about their own creative decisions, and if anything I wrote here inspires anyone to think about their own creative process differently, then that’s all I can hope for.

In conclusion, I just now realized that I made a Persona clone. Thank you.

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