Development Notes

Notes on the Story

When the jam this game was made for started on January 1st, I had no idea what I was going to do and scrambled furiously to come up with some sort of idea. Two weeks later, I (somehow) came up with the idea of doing something ghost-related- not a horror game, but a narrative containing the particular Halloween-y brand of super-fun spookiness. Since I'm a big fan of classic '60s-'90s cartoons (AKA a grown adult who overanalyzes storylines made for small children and criticizes animation errors in hand-drawn cartoons that were made in a few weeks), it was a natural next step for me to emulate the writing style of the two most famous "safe-yet-spooky" 'toons- Scooby-Doo and the cartoon version of Ghostbusters. (Fans of the iconic mystery-solving Great Dane might recognize a line in the Dungeon area as being a callback to a certain Mr. Norville Rogers and his observation of a haunted house in one of the original '69 Where Are You? cartoons.) I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the influence of the original Stan Lee/Steve Ditko Doctor Strange comics on this game's storyline (favorites of mine since childhood and a great influence on almost everything I write- I can't praise those books enough), specifically the early story The House of Shadows, where Strange investigates a haunted house only to find that the house is in fact a ghost itself! Some of The Psychic Youth's story beats (stepping into an empty hallway, the general appearance of the castle's interior) are inspired by House of Shadows. As for the characters, fans of MegaMan Star Force might recognize that some of Delphi's character traits and general role are reminiscent of the EM Wave-based superhero's alien mentor Omega-Xis- his speech pattern was almost that of an old war veteran, but I realized quickly that he'd be a bit too similar to Omega-Xis if he talked like that and changed it to that of a laid-back surfer dude. (Star Force is another series that was massively influential on me as a child- frankly, any mentor character, especially a non-human one, that I write will be somewhat similar to Omega-Xis- he and the series' incarnation of MegaMan rank among my favorite fictional characters ever.) Aero is a bit of a generic "hero" character- I regret that the jam's time limit prevented me from fleshing out his character a bit more, although I am very proud of the banter between he and Delphi. The two characters' names came last- almost at the end of development, as the 20-hour clock was ticking down- Delphi is obviously named after the mythological Delphi, where an all-seeing oracle was said to reside, and Aero is just a name that I've been wanting to use for a few years, and I slapped it onto this character due to the time crunch.

...I realize that the large paragraph above may make it look like I planned The Psychic Youth's story very meticulously, but that is ABSOLUTELY not the case- I wrote it all out one afternoon in a flash of inspiration. I never, ever say this- but this story truly wrote itself. I have never experienced such a thing before- the narrative came to me in an instant, completely fully formed. It usually takes me several months to have an idea, flesh it out, and decide who the characters are and how they act- but this really came to me in a instant one day. How the combination of ghosts, dinosaurs, and psychics came to my mind I have no idea and by all means it's a very strange storyline- but I'm honestly very, very proud of it and would change very little.

Notes on the Gameplay

The gameplay is very, very inspired by (i.e. copied from) the little-known Chrono Trigger spin-off Radical Dreamers. When I played that game a few years ago via a fan-made, web-based recreation, I was absolutely astounded by how the game created a foreboding atmosphere and gripped my attention so completely using only static images and text, and I've been wanting to make a game like it for a while now. This game jam was the perfect opportunity to do so. I also sighted Moghunter's LMBS battle system plugin a few weeks prior to the game jam and wanted to try it out due to its similarity to games such as the GBA Kingdom Hearts- this contest served as my guinea pig. I'd originally planned to have more enemies as well as a random encounter system similar to that of Radical Dreamers (but with a much lower encounter rate), but the time limit prevented me from implementing either. It's probably for the best anyway- such a system wouldn't have done much more than increase the game's length artificially and make it overstay its welcome.

Overall, I'm very proud of how The Psychic Youth came out- I can say it's probably one of the best things I've ever made. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I did making it!