Homebrew Jam Winner: Cleaning the Wild

Today we will look at Ramos’s entry, Cleaning the Wild!

For me, Ramos’s entry came out of left field with its emphasis on a cleaning and rearranging terrain. Given how skillfully this was made, no wonder it won Developer’s Choice!

Here are Ramos’s thoughts:

When I originally started working on an entry for this jam, I started with an adventure that would double as a Christmas special. It was meant to be pretty humorous and would arrive at the convenient time of just before December as a nice way for groups to have an unusual one shot. Unfortunately, life then happened and I didn’t have nearly enough time to put together such a large project. So instead I shifted my focus to something smaller and more mechanically focused.

So Cleaning the Wild spawned from two different sources. One, the Halloween one shot I ran for my friends two years back where the gimmick was the maps were randomly generated (along with the characters, enemies, etc). The maps should have been a horrifying mess but thanks to Reclaim the Wild’s terrain system, they were not only usable but very functional and robust. Combine that with using sprites from the Gameboy Zelda games and you’re able to convey a lot of visual information succinctly without overwhelming players.

The second thing on my brain was a new anime series that came out at the time, Akiba Maid War, which despite its name, is a dark comedy crime drama show that pulls from Japan’s long history of Yakuza stories. But mostly I was thinking about maids. What do maids do? Cook and clean. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to get cooking in there (mostly because Reclaim the Wild pretty much covers all the bases already) but cleaning logically slotted into picking up stuff, picking up stuff like… terrain squares.

It was such a simple concept that everyone I mentioned it to immediately intuitively got the idea behind it. Granted, that’s also when everyone started mentioning that sounded like Minecraft and yeah, it is basically Minecraft but I was already enamored by the cleaning theme, so much so that I just scratched off the maid bits because they distracted from the core idea.

If you ever feel like using this system, I’d suggest using a virtual tabletop or a dry eraser mat you can draw on and several different colors of markers. That way terrain can be changed around easily and quickly without too much fuss. And if you do feel like using this system, thank you! I’m glad it proven interesting enough to add to your own game.

If you want to clean the wild using your own two hands, check out Ramos’s Cleaning the Wild!