#someone who is good at writing please help me learn brevity. my family is dying

[heelycular-manslaughter]

I started making a game for @efangamez's May Mayhem Jam, but I wasn't able to finish it for reasons (getting distracted by other shiny projects). I figure I can make a post about some of the ideas I liked in it - I probably won't stop working on the game, but I'll probably be heavily restructuring things when I start again.

Anyway here's a shitty logo that I can't explain why I like as much as I do (image ID under the cut):

The setting is called Cereba (colloquially known as Rat City), and based on the vibe Jet Set Radio and similar media, with a slight cyberpunk twist. The player characters are Junkrats, a term for anti-establishment artists in Cereba that use recycled materials to make their art. If this sounds incongruous with the game I'm about to talk about, it's because I made the city for an earlier project and decided on a whim to revive it for the game idea I had.

One of my favorite ideas I had was for the layout; I wanted to explain the rules through a cut-and-paste-style collage of words and letters from other RPGs. This would've actually worked great for my original Junkrats project, which was already essentially a mash-up of Savage Worlds, Blades in the Dark, and Slayers (there's a reason I'm describing it in the past tense) - but this new one ended up having more original mechanics than intended. And also desperately searching for a single word in all the PDFs I own wasn't super creatively fulfilling. Also I never bother to look at copyright and I never will.

The mechanical idea I had was to make a Lumen game about the aesthetic of revolution (fighting cops, burning down corpo buildings, etc), and just kinda mix the power fantasy of games like Nova with the power fantasy of getting revenge against a violent system. I figure that Jet Set Radio is already kind of a moodboard of rebellion, so Rat City could fit that theme.

Oh my god anyway. The mechanics. Right. I decided to make the game classless, because I wanted to stay true to the theme of personal expression in my other Junkrats projects. So, each character has a Signature Item, 3 extra items, and two body mods. Items determine the actions you can take during a fight, and each one has its own list of mods that can be added during downtime by spending Scrap (a new possible resource drop alongside Health and Fuel). Body Mods essentially function as passive buffs, applying to anything defined in their descriptions, rather than being set to specific items. There's a lot of ableist baggage in cyberpunk body modification, which I'm not at all qualified to really dig into, so I won't really define much of it beyond that, until I can feel comfortable either solidifying or removing it.

During downtime, you can swap out or add mods based on (undetermined) Scrap prices. You can also turn an item into an (undetermined) amount of Scrap, and add that item's ability or action to your Signature Item. This was honestly the mechanic I like the most, since it takes the simple build-making process of Nova and gives it the personal expression theme and junker vibe I've been trying nail down ever since creating Rat City (so like. a few months.); I might come back to this in a Lumen game without combat and really try to focus on the ramshackle inventions aesthetic.

Scrap can also be used during combat for limited mods, usually the limit being how long the effect will last. This is basically an attempt to bring the idea of hammering nails into your baseball bat or pouring gas onto a weapon and lighting it on fire in the middle of a fight, reinforcing the scrappy and creative fighting style all junkrats have to learn.

[image ID: a series of letters in different fonts, cut-and-pasted from other RPGs' title pages and poorly collaged together to spell out "JUNKRAT RIOTS". The TS is actually just a backwards ST. In the bottom left corner, the phrase "ILLUMINATED by LUMEN" is pieced together in a similar way, but with all screenshots having the same font. The background is a solid bright pink color. End image ID]

The screenshots are taken from the following RPGs (in order because I want it to be): Scrapyard Junkbots, Gubat Banwa, Daisy Chainsaw, Scrapyard Junkbots again, Underground Broadcast, Nova, Bolt, Crust, Daisy Chainsaw again, Bolt again, Crust again. I can't find anything on Crust beyond a reddit post linking to a deleted itch.io page, but maybe its still out there somewhere.