Raw Inversion

About

Raw Inversion is the first game I ever made in RPGmaker for the fourth (You)RPGM GameJam. It's about a young college graduate studying magic that comes home to an empty house. Dead tired, she goes to sleep and finds herself in a fantasy world (at least, more fantasy than the one she came from) and is told only the relic, the Dust Petal, can bring her back home. The game's bad!

The original concept for Raw Inversion was that the protagonist, Evette Aloiv (or Viola), was a socially detached depressed college dropout who goes to sleep after coming home, only to wake up in another world. The game only had one town and dungeon with the obvious goal of reaching the bottom of said dungeon, Umbra. There were three other party members (also from different worlds) that would gradually be added to the party as the game progressed. For some reason I decided there would be no leveling in an RPG so instead the party's stats primarily came from their gear. I wanted skills to be "powerful but with tradeoffs" in some vain attempt to make vanilla RPGmaker combat interesting. The town would change as the game progressed with NPC dialogue changing as you progressed through the game, and certain events resulting in the prices for items being altered. Monsters dropped items that would be sold for money.

How did this turn out? Surprisingly, most of this stuff made it into the game. Some of it in a non-functioning, barely finished state! The thing that changed the most from my original idea for Raw Inversion is Evette's character. Early on, I found that Evette being a depressed loser with a ton of convenient knowledge that would ultimately choose to reside in the new fantasy world was boring (and overdone when it comes to isekai) so I flipped her character to being a top student that was well-liked that's seemingly aloof and careless, but far more attentive to things than people expect, though only bits of this come across in the actual game. Instead of a party of four like I'd originally intended it's only three. The two other party members you get being View Larn and Enoph. The final party member was supposed to be Ahha who still shows up near the end of the game as a shopkeeper. The town changes as the events of the game go on and the final layer of Umbra was completely redone. Instead of defeating the goddess of an otherworldly domain only for Evette and company to find the entire situation is the Harmonic Clergy exploiting "otherworldly adventurers" the final boss would've been the first group of adventurers to actually make it to the bottom of Umbra.

Overall, I was happy that I finished making a game in RPGmaker after messing around in it off and on since I was in school even if the first game I made was an unbalanced buggy mess with a nonsensical story and RTP assets. I like Evette and View as characters and still plan to have another game with them eventually. Enoph was a character I didn't like much, and I ended up recycling aspects of her character into Mary Day in School Says Six Senses. Evette and View were in Raw Inversion's sequel, Reverse Inversion, but ironically were just major NPCs.