The Perks of being a Weaboo

Published in

shiftcreatorspace

6 min readApr 16, 2020

Welcome! By the end of this article, you’ll have more than enough evidence to prove I wasn’t bullied enough as a child. Let’s get started.

Lame Origin Story

I’ve been making games for the longest time. Started with GameMaker: Studio way back in middle school and it was loads of fun. Most of them I never finished and most of the games were stuck with crappy programmer art because I never bothered learning how to draw or do artistic things.

For all of the small little games and demos that I made, I always felt a little distraught that I never actually finished something substantial. Sure, I’ve done a few game jams here and there so I’ve technically finished games before, but I’m talking something that’s bigger than a 48-hour game.

One day after watching a mini crime documentary, a devious little idea came into my head. What if I made my own murder mystery game? What if I made it unique while taking inspiration from a game series I was a fan of, that series being Danganronpa?

And so it began.

The Project: Inspiration

For those of you who don’t know what Danganronpa is, good. Unless you’re a weeb like me I suggest you stay away from it unless you want to find your virginity again. But putting jokes aside, Danganronpa is a series of really cool murder mystery story games developed by Spike co. that has visual novel and action (kind of) gameplay. It’s pretty darn popular because of how bizarre, fun, and disturbing the game and its characters are, along with its iconic courtroom trials that throw unique gameplay and story elements together as the characters try to uncover a murderer that lurks among them. It’s very difficult to describe so I’ll just leave it at that for now.

A screenshot of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, courtesy of ricedigital.co.uk because I was too lazy to play the game up till that point (I’ll maybe get my own screenshot later)

Like any popular videogame, Danganronpa has a pretty passionate fanbase, despite the game being pretty niche. And these fans produce lots of fan made content: Variations on character sprites, sound track remixes, and most intriguingly, original fan games and stories.

There’s tons of fan projects based on or inspired by Danganronpa. I’ve tried cataloging them all and I gave up. These include video series, RPGMaker games, and cool web games. However, while most of these projects are Danganronpa-like, very few are actually ambitious enough to be considered a full danganronpa game with all of the gameplay mechanics, bells and whistles from the original series. There is one solo project that stands out among all the others, as it appears to be a fully polished, 3D game on par with a fully professional game. It even has its own playable demo that released about a month ago, and it looks bloody fantastic. But games like those are the exception, and there are tons of fans that would love to make their own games but don’t really have the game development knowledge needed to undertake such a project.

So I decided to make an editor that gives anyone the power to make games similar to this genre. And I also want to make the first chapter of my own game with that editor when I’m done with it. And I want it all to be done before the 10th anniversary of Danganronpa, by November 25th, 2020. Oh boy.

The Project: Danganronpa Engine

A brief DISCLAIMER: I take credit for NONE of the Art or Music that I’m about to show. All of the assets here are temporary placeholders to demonstrate the engine’s capabilities so far. Every piece of character art is from the Danganronpa series by Kazutaka Kodaka and is property of Spike Chunsoft (besides the programmer art and sound effects, but that’s not really important)

There are two parts of this project: The Engine, and the Editor.

The Engine is basically the gameplay of the game: Stuff like character dialogue, observing objects, and class trials with their minigames and debates. I’d say 70% of that is complete right now, and most of the work from hereon out will be tying everything together so it’s not a mess.

The Editor is what other people can use to make content that the Engine can run. Until recently, this consisted of separate tools and debug screens in the game, but now I’m moving this all to a single program.

I won’t bore you with everything that makes the engine or editor tick, so I’ll give you a brief overview, with some videos.

Visual Novel Scripting

Inspired by RenPy, I made a simple visual novel scripting system. You can write character dialogue line by line and do some simple language features like creating labels, basic functions that you can call and return from, and conditionals.

You’ll notice two things in the following video (besides the fact that it’s a low resolution crop from Unity): The room open transition, which is an awesome Danganronpa staple that I can’t leave out, and the dialogue which will proceed sequentially from the script below.

This is saved to a file. You can tell the engine to open up this file to run the dialogue.

Resolution here is much lower but you’ll get the idea.

This scripting system is reused in two other places. One variant of the scripting language controls the flow of the story (telling the game what scenes to show at what time and what conditions to wait for so the story can progress linearly). The other is used in the class trial.

Class Trial

Trials involve dialogue and minigames as characters argue about who they think the killer among them is. The most prominent minigame is the debate, which involves words flying across the screen and you having to “shoot down” contradictions with appropriate evidence. Here’s what the early stages of the debate editor look like:

I wrote this editor while I was drunk from sleep deprivation so it’s a janky piece of doodoo. I’m definitely going to redo it from the ground up.

Below is a partial recreation of the first class trial from the first Danganronpa game. I wanted to see what it would look like in my engine.

Be aware, the following video contains Spoilers for the first chapter in the game, but it definitely won’t ruin the game if you do watch, the mystery still remains intact but the first murder victim is spoiled.

WARNING: SPOILERS! See previous paragraph.

For comparison, here’s what the first trial looks like in the original game. Keep in mind this game was made almost 10 years ago, so graphical improvements are necessary.

The Project: Danganronpa Editor

So I’ve got a system that does dialogue, holds content and can create other things in the game. Now I have to put it all together.

Early look at the editor with VN File editing features

So far the editor is basically a file editor. It opens up files in different tabs and edits them differently depending on the type. You’ll open up a VN file and be greeted with a VN text editor. You’ll open a Debate file and will be greeted with a debate editor, yadayadayada.

You may think I’m a fool for trying to reinvent the wheel when I could just use solutions that already exist, and to that I say yes. But I’m having too much fun so I’ll keep chugging until this bad boy can produce a fully functional game.