Why "Little Burned Maiden" is a Scrappy Game Project--A Critical Analysis of My First Game's Flaws

Clickbait Title: Why Fake Gamer Girls Shouldn't Be Allowed to Make Video Games

As it turns out, being in eight college-level courses in High School and being told your future career is a waste of time turns one into a bit of a workaholic. That's me. I'm often at my happiest when I'm working on something "productive" and as such, I feel guilty whenever I play games. (We're working on this problem.) In the meantime, though, that means my relationship with games is almost exclusively academic. For me, "Wouldn't it be interesting?" is more or less the same as, "Wouldn't it be fun?" and that's why Little Burned Maiden sucks. That's it! That's the whole article!

Just kidding.

The primary gameplay loop began: Kill people to get money, spend money to eat food, and eat food to stay alive and kill more people. If you hit anything that isn't an enemy, you're a barbarian and not an assassin, so you lose money. The game's hook, however, is focused on the worldbuilding and character relationships.

In theory, this sounds totally workable--the primary gameplay loop is a complete positive feedback loop that propels the player onward through the game. It also encourages precision over barbarism--playing into the ludonarrative of being an assassin. The issue arose when I started trying to tie up loops. 

What happens if you fail to eat? The game will destroy your save if your health reaches zero--this plays into the ludonarrative of "you must eat to stay alive" nicely. 

What happens if you fail to have money? Your supervisor is displeased and tries to kill you--playing into the ludonarrative of the cutthroat world as well as creating an obvious incentive to stay out of debt. 

These sound like answers that might work in hypothetical game. But are they FUN in practice? And fun for my target audience who I want to be interested in quirky indie games and narrative? Probably not, to be honest. They're too "hardcore gamer" focused, even though they make sense on paper.

The next biggest issue is with the secondary gameplay loop. On paper, the concept is you need to get to know people to learn their schedules, isolate them from the other townsfolk, and then kill them at an optimal time in the day. 

However, during implementation, I faced a number of technical issues that rendered this more or less unfeasible. To begin, my dialogue system did not support new conversations being revealed after old conversations or any other sort of dating-sim-style progressions. This means I was reliant on NPCs which could spit out any line of dialogue randomly. My only option to balance when you saw any dialogue was to create more lines about the things I wanted the NPC to talk about the most and keep their deep reveals to one or two lines. This barely works.

Now let's add on top of that issue the way the schedule system works--on the hour, every hour, NPCs teleport somewhere. It sucks. It offers no player feedback. Add on top of that issue that the town is small enough that you can brute force run around and find them (though, I wanted to enable this to a degree, seeing as meticulously tracking people's schedules sounds like a design risk I'm unwilling to take atop all my other ones) and you have a mess of a system that just causes the game to be more of a mess.

My friend described it as, "SWERY game design"--which is basically where you take a bunch of good ideas, put them in a pot, and ensure they no longer connect. I would say this is my biggest design flaw. Could it have been better with better implementation? Yes. But that's like saying, "The dress would have fit well if it had been cut and sewn correctly". The dress still doesn't fit well. So, it's bad.

Okay, lightning round now:

How is this a life-sim if there is eating and like three mini-games, one of which is eating? Answer: I didn't have time to do everything I wanted within my scope. That being said, I probably should have just called it a "narrative-based hack-n-slash" instead of a "life-sim"...

The UX is terrible. Between the bugs and the lack of sound variance and the weird colliders, there are just a number of unfriendly things throughout the experience. Oh, the controls? My playtesters universally hate the game's controls. I stubbornly didn't change them because I wanted to prepare for a mobile release. But you know what a good game dev would do? MAKE TWO SEPARATE CONTROL SCHEMES. 

What is the purpose of being able to push things? If it is meant to hinder combat, why are there so few objects in combat arenas?

Why is the camera is so close? Why does it never look at the right person during cutscenes?

Why aren't there any black characters with dialogue?

Let's not even begin to discuss how you can't tell the ground from the walls about 40% of the time. What even are the stairs? Why do they look universally awful?

This and many many other flaws plague this game and rot away the potential engagement one might find with it.  The game stands distinctly as an odd piece of outsider art--a demonstration of technical ineptitude and the understanding of someone who doesn't really understand the medium beyond the paper. Good ideas does not a good game make.

This isn't the first time I've done this. I don't think there was any game where I HAVEN'T done this. But I think I've learned a lot from pushing through this experience and, quite frankly, I'm just glad it's almost over. As I write this, the game has a week before it is released.

Will she every learn? Well, you'll have to LIKE this post and FOLLOW ME on here and on Instagram to find out!

Thanks for reading!