Stand by Me

Stand by Me

Stand by Me is a short narrative that tells the story of two isolated brothers, Arick and Sigurd, as they search for the blade of their heroic father. The game emphasizes choice and branching paths in the story as the player decides how each brother responds to situations presented before them, ultimately culminating towards their fateful meeting at the game's end.

If you are interested in playing Stand by Me, you can download it with this link!

This game was created in RPG Maker MV as my semester project for an Interactive Storytelling college course. Throughout my studies in the course, I've designed Stand by Me to incorporate a simplified, but effective branching narrative. The underlying theme was that players want to have agency in the choices that they're presented.

In the narrative, players switch between the individual stories of two brothers entrapped in the midst of a terrible war between their kingdoms. For each situation that each brother encounters, the player can select how that respective brother responds to it, which will, in turn, affect their morality. At the end of the narrative, players observe both brothers reach the resting place of their father's legendary sword, where the result of all their choices will determine a unique ending.

RPG Maker MV comes pre-packaged with default assets for character sprites, environment tilesets, UI, and more. To streamline the process and to focus on developing the narrative of the game, I took advantage of utilizing these default resources.

I did, however, design the main characters of the story: the brothers Sigurd and Arick. The Eastern Kingdom, where Sigurd resides, is characterized by whimsical, but peaceful ideals, using magic to revolutionize the world. Sigurd's outfit reflects this culture. The Holy Empire in the west, however, was recently transformed into a totalitarian rule, its tyrant enacting a "holy crusade" against magic. Arick is one of the captains of the Holy Empire, and his outfit similarly reflects his ruler's mandated ideals.

I collaborated with a close friend and artist to assist with character design and to illustrate both Arick and Sigurd, making sure that both characters are distinct for the player, but appropriate for their homeland.

To create the transitional loading screens, I used a free image-editing program called GIMP. I imported the artwork and overlaid text atop it, using a color scheme that represents the character.

Dialogue presented a challenge when initially designing the game's narrative. It is essential for the brothers to react to the situations before them, however, having dialogue be implemented alongside the prose proved to be tough to follow along. In addition, I also implemented brief reaction bubbles that convey a burst of emotion from a character. Having character dialogue appear directly above the character's sprite within the world only helped to be a natural extension of the reaction bubbles. Plus, it helps guide players in differentiating dialogue from written prose.

RPG Maker MV is generally intended to be used to create role-playing games, but is also used to build games of several other genres. Stand by Me features no combat, for example, and can be considered an interactive story with visuals. The software possesses an editor where I can paint maps with environmental tilesets and implement objects to provide functionality. In a typical project in RPG Maker MV, players can interact with these objects to varying degrees, but for Stand by Me, they are used to automatically display the dialogue and prose on the player's screen.