What is this?

Summon a Sweetheart is a sample game project made by myself, in (roughly) a month, using the RPG Maker MV engine.

This sample project served as a learning experience, where I taught myself how to use the engine from basically nothing. The game itself is not much of a "game" in terms of fighting or combat- though instead, the main objective of the game is to search the main protagonist (Penelope)'s room to find a gift for an eldritch monster she summoned. Depending on the gift you find (or craft), you reach a different ending. The game is incredibly short, but if you're going through all the endings, I suppose around 15ish minutes would be the runtime.

The themes of the game are somewhat dark and depressing, though it's handled in a somewhat lighthearted manner. Not to make light of such things, of course- but to try and find some sense of humor or laughter, in a reality many people can't seem to escape. Or at the very least- not without a great amount of effort and support.

You can't really "win" the game, as all endings, in some form or fashion, end badly for Penelope. It's only a matter of how bad it will be.

Penelope

Penelope is intended to be an amalgamation of all the terrible coping skills, thoughts, and experiences one person could possibly go through, all at once. Condensed into a character that doesn't have the mental bandwidth to handle it, or do anything to fix the sorry state she's in. Thus, she accepts it- falling further and further into brokenness, where all she wants to do is alleviate some of the pain, without actually fixing the problem(s) that's causing it.

She lives in a shitty, run down apartment, has hoards of trash all over the place, and can barely muster up the energy to eat something aside from liquid sugars. She flips and flops between wanting to erase herself from the world, and desperately wishing she had the desire to stay. Due to this uncomfortable mindset, she often makes rash, unwise, spontaneous choices, in an almost manic state. Which is how she found herself in the events of the game, spontaneously summoning an eldritch monster, without knowing- or caring, about the risks.

Galatea

The eldritch monster, Galatea, named with the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea in mind- is meant to represent a toxic partner that people who are suffering often find themselves dating, or wed to. At some points, she is explosive and reactive, her anger sometimes makes no sense at all. Other times she takes everything personally, deeply offended by simple offerings. Sometimes she's unnaturally calm and lucid, seeming normal despite her volatile behavior. Most of all, she reads Penelope like a book. She is far too knowledgeable of what makes her tick, what gets her upset, and exactly what kind of bait she needs to put on the hook, in order to make her bite.

Pygmalion had made Galatea perfect, exactly as he wanted. His "ideal woman," if you would. She, in a sense, is the same to the mythological Galatea in that way. When individuals who aren't in a healthy state of mind or body, dream up someone they think is "perfect" for them, often times, I would assume, this perfect person isn't actually all that nice. Due to their self image being so low, I'd assume, their ideal partner would reflect that, giving them a temporary sedative for the emotional pain, but still treating them the same way they treat themselves- badly. It's simply the four crumbs of attention or affection they would receive from them, that earns them the title "ideal." Galatea is intended to be Penelope's "perfect person."

First Steps . . .

Feb 15th screencaps

At this time, I finished basically all of the sprites, save for the book and poster placeholders. This is where most of the work was basically done, and I started to lose steam since that sense of progression started getting smaller and smaller now. I planned a few stupid short endings, and 2 "long" endings. I had done one long one at this point and a few stupid ones. I still needed the last longer one and like 2 more dumb ones.

I also need to start adding sound at this point, since everything thus far is dead silent save for a sting that plays when Galatea speaks and some intro sfx.

First Steps . . .

Feb 10th screencaps

The grand rewriting... A lot of the dialogue wasn't very... good? Make no mistake, it's not like I'm Shakespeare or anything, but I think that even if this still sucks, it sucks way less than what it was before. So, improvement! I finished up some more of the cutscenes, and put a placeholder one with Galateas sprite since I redid her design at this point. I also did a few more stupider endings.

First Steps . . .

Feb 4th screencaps

I worked quite a lot since the last screenshot I took. I did all of the tile sets for the room (with some placeholders still) and this screenshot is actually the updated room tile set. I didn't end up getting a picture of it beforehand, but because of the way some of the trash tiles were interacting with other furniture and the player, I needed to shuffle around what was on which tile set sheet, so I basically needed to redo the whole room. I also figured out (feverishly googled) how to make light effects, and ended up doing the only thing that I could understand and looked decent without plugins. So that's what those solid color events are. A majority of the endings are written at this point.

First Steps . . .

Jan 29th screencaps

Some of the cutscenes have been finished, the top-down sprite is complete for Penelope, and, you get to see Galatea's old poo poo design that I hated so much I did 2 other drafts of it before reaching the one I decided on. I believe I also started the tile sets but I didn't finish them yet at this time, and wrote a few more endings and interactables.

You can also see the text formatting is terrible. I unwisely continue like this before fixing it later on, same thing with spellchecking since I was just raw dogging the dialogue right in RPG Maker. (Do not do that, for the love of god, learn from my hubris, do not. It was SO annoying and tedious to fix.)

First Steps

Jan 19th - 27th screencaps

Ah, the beginning... As you can see, I slapped together a bunch of placeholders, since I'm the type that HAS to see what the final product is going to look like, empty boxes wont do for me. I also wrote some notes in one of the screenshots for myself in the placeholder files. Galatea was original supposed to be more liquid-y. More acid-trip-y.

For those wondering, yes, that placeholder sprite is NOT something I made, it's the sprite from Dreaming Mary that I slapped the word "placeholder" over, since... well, I was using it as a placeholder. Games like dreaming Mary were a major inspiration for me while making this- and more specifically, not only was it an inspiration, but Mary's sprite is 2 tiles high. Not one. The creator of dreaming Mary answered an ask here, answering how she made Mary's sprite such an odd size. She also provided Mary's sprite sheet, giving the ok to use it as a playtest file. Due to the ways different versions of RPG Maker sizes the tiles, when I used this for a placeholder, she was actually off center. I ended up fixing it for MV later on for the placeholder, but it was really helpful to be able to play with another sprite sheet that already did what I wanted to do, and all I had to do was figure out how they did it.

I also overcame my fear of plugins. The message Busts is GALV's Message Bust plugin. The textbox for the name is the YEP_MessageCore plugin, but I ended up not liking how it looked (and lord knows I'm not messing around in the plugin code since I don't know what I'm doing) so I ended up removing it.