This summer I made a point to connect with new kinds of data nerds: indie video game developers. I gravitate towards video game genres I like to play: horror, visual novels, and RPGs. Yet, a good chunk of my new friends like Japanese Role Playing Games (JRPGs). I’m between major jams where I’m the main developer, and I wanted to stretch my game dev comfort zone. I teamed up with my friend Wujak and others in the Robot Party Discord community to make a JRPG in an engine called GameMaker.
“The Smoke Box: Big Birthday Quest,” is not a horror game. It reminds me of the “Rocky and Bullwinkle” movie from the early 2000s. I feel this is in part because this game jam had plot constraints, which I’m not used to for my game jams. Regardless, I had fun writing puns and fighting dialogue between the player and mascot characters.
Play the game for free with your controller on itchio: https://wujak.itch.io/the-smoke-box-big-birthday-quest