# Overview

Dressed Delivery is a grid based battler. I wanted to make an SRPG but, with only 3 days, I had to demake it significantly.

Everyone tells me it’s just like Megaman Battle Network… which I’d never heard of before, so take that as you will.

# Design

The game takes place on a 3x3 grid. You can move to a different tile, or execute a move, which deals damage and shifts the affected enemies by one tile.

Since we telegraph enemy attacks, this lets you chose between avoiding an attack, or moving enemies to a position where they won’t hit you. The mixture of this and min/maxing damage creates an almost puzzle like flow.

Since this was a 3 day jam, I kept things fairly simple; a small move and enemy set, and some simple mechanics. Bouncing enemies into each other deals bonus damage, and bouncing them off the edges causes them to wrap.

# Narrative

I ended up writing the story for this one, so it’s a bit rough, given I had to write all of the code as well. At a high level, I wanted a wrapper for adding new units to the game, that also helped the player grow an attachment to their little cast of outcasts.

I always find writing short dialogue sequences fun, but often fail to tie up larger narrative works. I tried to do a bit better here, but I’m not sure how successful I was. But making each character feel unique and alive is fun, even if I’m not great at it.

One of the biggest tricks I use is to just latch on to a “feeling” for each character, and get into that feeling as I type. I don’t spend too much time thinking about the specific words and just let them flow naturally. This is a chaotic way of writing and truly not something I would suggest for any proper piece of fiction, but it’s a shortcut I’ve developed for writing in these kinds of deadlines that seems to be mostly okay.

Having key art for your character is critical to making this work though. Players will automatically infer things from your character’s appearances, so you want to meet those expectations as quickly as possible, even if it feels predictable. You can break those expectations later through character development, but I feel the initial read is important. For Prez, this was a bit of an issue since I had already written her as a bit of a goof before getting very serious looking art for her, so I ran with it and wrote her to be both. It was a bit rough but I think it works.

# Play now

The current web build can be found here.