The reason is that this isn’t a feature built into RPG Maker VX Ace, and to my knowledge no script exists to add it as a feature.

Thanks for the kind words! Glad you enjoyed it

I don’t believe I put an explanation for this in the game, but canonically it ran out of juice after Melody cast that really big weather changing spell at the comic’s climax.

It was a joke about how every election with a slot for write-in candidates gets joke votes where people write in Homer Simpson or Kanye West or Batman or something. In 2020 someone in Florida really wrote in “Baby Yoda,” and another person in Kansas voted for Hard Drive’s satirical “gamer president” candidate Ace Watkins.

It was also kind of a joke about tiny towns where things like an animal being elected honorary mayor happen - see Stubbs the cat from Talkeetna, Alaska, for example. These are usually spread as examples of joke write-in campaigns succeeding, but in reality those sorts of things usually happen with tiny, unincorporated communities where there was never a real mayoral election to begin with. But the idea of a campaign like that really succeeding is funny to me.

(SLARPG was in development since 2015, so it’s very possible that specific joke was written before Trump was even elected.)

Thank you for playing!

The thing is, I can’t say I was particularly inspired by other sapphic games when I started making SLARPG

For one, there just weren’t nearly as many sapphic games in the early 2010s as there are today. There was, like, Life is Strange and Gone Home, and some RPGs that had some F/F romance options like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, and a small handful of niche indie games like Mighty Jill Off and Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars by Anna Anthropy, but there wasn’t nearly as much out there as there is today. Just to name a few, you’ve now got indies like Butterfly Soup, Signalis, Get in the Car Loser, certain subplots in Undertale and Deltarune, the continued existence of RPGs with F/F options like Baldur’s Gate 3, and many, many more games than I can list off the top of my head. There’s a lot, especially in the indie space

There are also more AAA games with sapphic characters in them now, but I wouldn’t exactly pitch The Last of Us to someone looking for a queer romance story just because Ellie is gay, nor would I tell you to play Overwatch 2 just because the lore says Tracer is a lesbian. And I know Aloy has a female love interest in Horizon: Forbidden West, but I couldn’t tell you how much focus that’s actually given

But also, SLARPG was based more on my own experiences and feelings, as opposed to being inspired by other works of queer fiction. There was very little out there that I felt I could relate to 100% at the time, so I felt the need to go and make it myself. And, in fact, I kind of avoided playing some other queer games by my peers in the indie scene while working on SLARPG because I didn’t wanna be influenced too heavily by them and accidentally rip them off. I just wanted to tell my own story

To be honest, I’m not able to keep up with all the let’s plays and streams people have been doing because there are so many of them - although this is definitely a good problem to have

Regardless, if you’d like us to see something, tag it with #slarpg here on Tumblr or over on Twitter!

The latter.

It started with the Slime Room. The Neon Labyrinth was the last major obstacle in the way of the big Acts I and II Alpha at the end of 2020, and there was an optional path in the back half of the dungeon that I needed to come up with something for. Burnt out on doing actual level design, I instead quickly made some NPC sprites for the Helper Jelly (an enemy I’d already designed and was fond of) and filled a room with them as a joke.

After that, since I already had the Helper Jelly sprites, I just kept reusing them in different situations. I thought it would be funny if there was one specific Helper Jelly who had something of a character arc running through the game, but you’re only catching these brief glimpses of what she’s up to.

I (Bobby) am from central Florida, so I’m actually a Publix stan. But I have family up in South Carolina, and as such have encountered the chain before. Great name

Everyone always assumes Higgledy Piggledy’s is a reference to that, and I guess it kind of is, but I was likely more inspired by a bit in an early episode of OK KO in which a wizard casts a spell with an incantation of “higgledy piggledy” and shoots beams of pigs out of his hands. (Also it’s just, you know. An existing English phrase.)

No plans at the moment

While I was reached out to around launch (presumably just because SLARPG was a popular new release on Steam that week), GOG is heavily curated with stricter “quality” standards, which is probably why there are basically no RPG Maker games on the site other than To The Moon. No Yume Nikki, no Hylics, no Omori, no Lisa, no OneShot, no Rakuen, nothing. As such I’m unsure if SLARPG would actually make it through their review process. And even if it did, GOG is just not a store that I think has a community that would be particularly receptive to a gay furry RPG Maker game

yup

that sounds very not fun but you do you

I am not capable of porting a game made in a decade-old version of RPG Maker to consoles. Please do not wait around assuming this will happen someday

Yes, that’d be fine! Bee only requests that people not reupload the music by itself to YouTube right now since she’s working on getting the individual tracks up on her own channel. But derivative content like using it as background music in a video (with credit), or commenting on the music in some way - or remixing it, for that matter - are all open season

I created them! Me, Bobby, @ponett, the creator of the game. I designed a majority of enemies, the exceptions being those listed in the credits with other designers

And no, I don’t think there were other Jelly types I had in mind. Pretty sure all my ideas for them made it into the game!