Knights of the Pun - The Dev Story

In Knights of the Pun, you lead a group of puny adventurers with a mission: To make the king laugh. However, they’ll have to gain the confidence before embarking into their ultimate quest, by making people laugh using the power of pun.

Sadly, people are bitter and mean, and they may not laugh at their jokes. Luckily, they have each other to cheer themselves up and raise their spirits.

Knights of the Pun is a small game I made for Global Game Jam 2024 as my entry for the Tan Grande y Jugando virtual location. It’s clearly inspired (inspired?) by early Final Fantasy titles. It’s a turn-based pun-bat game. You can play online at https://slash.itch.io/knights-of-the-pun

Saturday, January 20, 2024

The theme for Global Game Jam is announced: Make me laugh

Tuesday, January 23.

I don’t remember why or how I decided I wanted to make a parody of Final Fantasy 1 where you attacked using jokes, maybe just wanted to experiment a bit more with the non-violent interactions? In any case, this day I started considering what would be the best tool to use for the job. I had always felt curious and was looking for an opportunity to use the modern versions of RPG Maker, so maybe this is it?

After briefly examining them, I noticed they might be too big of a tool for what I needed and at the same time might not have the flexibility for what I wanted (or may have required digging a lot into them just to produce the tweaks I needed). They are also not cheap, at least not for a “for fun” project like this one.

So I decided to instead take the codebase of Monte del Diablo, designed to look and feel like a Gameboy Color game, and NES-ify it.

I copied the codebase and start hammering at it, changing the base resolution and altering the logic to display the Super Gameboy frame which will no longer be needed. Instead will look forward to have a TV frame similar to CatCafe.

Wednesday, January 24

The cleansing continues, all old maps have been removed, and Final Fantasy tilesets are loaded. There’s an overworld (which I didn’t end up using) and an empty town.

Thursday, January 25

Instead of working on making a game, I spent a lot of time on the TV frame gimmick, wrangling with the positioning of the overlay.

However, I also finished cleaning up stuff from Monte del Diablo to have a baseline to work over (when, tho?). I made the first commit to the repo, now that everything was working and NES-ification was well underway.

I had called it a day already, but late night woke up and pushed to add animations when walking, something big that is missing in Monte del Diablo and I’ll eventually backport. Of course it makes the game feel much more alive and polished.

I had to make some compromises to make the NPC animations work fine; the way Monte del Diablo and JSRL (and Emerald Woods) map rendering works is: everything is relative to the player and is ultimately updated every time there’s a turn end; this works fine when there are no sprites moving around but once I start adding movement things can easily get out of control. There is no concept of “camera”.

With what I made it works fine as long as the movement of the NPCs takes less than the movement of the player. If I want to change that for Emerald Woods in the future, I’ll have to redo a lot of stuff.

QuietGecko, of Emerald Woods audio fame, is deeply involved with the organization of Colombia’s Global Game Jam virtual location and Tan Grande y Jugando in general. This year I didn’t ask him to work together because I knew he was going to be busy (and I didn’t want to be a pest), however he announced the “Rinconcito del Audio” initiative (The Audio Nook) where developers in need of audio for their projects could request help from a team of audiophiles.

Friday, January 26

I’ll be hitting a physical GGJ location over the weekend, so I’m running out of time to work on this and there’s still no game.

So I decided to continue wasting time in the TV thing, trying to give it some personality similar to how the mobile version is branded as a “SlashieBoy color” (I kept that from Monte del Diablo).

After considering SANY and SLASY as fake brands for my TV set, I settle for SLASHIEVISION.

Last minute I added some foundations for the Battle UI, just to feel some real progress.

The game is completely silent and chiptune music will be very important for the experience. I submitted my form for Rinconcito del Audio, not really sure if I’d get legit-sounding NES-style since I wouldn’t be able to direct the efforts, just trust.

Saturday, January 27

Gecko asked for references for the music tracks I requested; I made some time in the middle of the day to send a bunch of Final Fantasy 1 tracks; one special thing is the boss battle, which instead of energetic and epic should be pretty gloomy and sad, because the king is sad and you must make him happy. I sent him the game over theme from FF1 as reference.

Some hours later I was contacted by “Soliman”, who was assigned to make the music. He already had an initial version of the town music which I instantly loved and knew he was the right person for the task.

Got home around 10PM, exhausted. Didn’t manage to code much other than improving the battle screen a bit.

Sunday, January 28

Around 1am I was contacted by “Juan Pedreros”, he had been assigned making the SFX for the game in the Rinconcito del Audio, and sent me some initial samples. He continued working on them during the morning. I made some time to select the most adequate ones from the options he sent me.

Meanwhile, Soliman continued working on the music tracks. I was super busy with my other entry so I couldn’t talk a lot with him; luckily they were perfect to me, both in composition and technical aspects. I know there was some back and forth internally at the Rinconcito del Audio server where they suggested him some improvements, which was the main idea behind the initiative.

GGJ finished around 4PM in the physical location (UPB Medellín), but then I attended some family meetings and only managed to be on the PC around 9PM to do the final push.

I remade the town map, and managed to integrate the music tracks made by Soliman for the intro, town and battle.

I pushed forward to integrate the battle system, and ran out of time to add much needed content. Last minute got some help from QuietGecko to try to change the sprites a bit so that they are not the exact same from Final Fantasy 1 but still keep the spirit (in the end didn’t manage to put it much of his edits). He also added some more puns into the game.

Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to include the sound effects before 12AM….

Monday, January 29

…but just some minutes after the deadline, I added them in. Sadly, they didn’t make it to the official GGJ build.

So, I had managed to submit but there were some things I felt I had to improve. I worked a bit more the next day and released version 0.2 with a greatly improved font (real monospace, was not easy to find!). As well as more content and an improved system to hand out the jokes to avoid repetition.

Tuesday, January 30

It didn’t stop there though, v0.3 fixed the enemy sprites so they matched their map appearance, and also made it so that they looked grumpy until you made them laugh. It also improved the battle messages, reduced the impossibly boring high laughter resistance from the king, and added checks for the willpower and spirit in order to be able to PUN or CHEER.

ToranaPH, a local twitch streamer, was invited by TGYJ to take a look at some of the games from the jam. I suggested my game and they played a little bit.

Saturday, February 3

Inspired by ToranaPH’s gameplay, I decided to put a little bit more into it, some last touches.

v0.4 added MORE puns, updated the hero sprites to better match the personalities of the heroes: Gaby (my daughter, wearing the green cape of Mikecrack), Slash (matching more closely the depiction made by Sephko, the Chilean artist), and Adri (my wife, looking beautiful as always).

I also scaled down the resistance of the enemies so that the game wouldn’t drag on as much, and improved the texts of the ending, based on the single gameplay I had seen.

So, that’s the story of Knights of the Pun, a small little experiment which already made some people laugh, so that’s good!