The Design of Millennium Maximus, and Its Core Fantasy

1. Table Of Contents

2. Introduction

"In Millennium Maximus, you are the creator of a childrens' card game! Design and release cards to keep your fans excited while thwarting spiky-haired protagonists!"

Mechanically, Millennium Maximus is a hybrid management-narrative-card game, with a strong emphasis on theming and humor. That's a lot going on, so I wanted to talk about the design and ideas that went into it. You don't need to have played MM to understand; I give a lot of context for everything and all the systems. But, I still recommend you do because I think it's pretty cool. You also don't need to have a solid understanding of code or jargon either! I wanted this to be accessible.

I wanted to write about this for a few reasons. There’s a lot going on, and I wanted to talk about how it works. It is pretty big scope for a solo game jam, and I wanted to talk about how I got it done in time. And I wasn’t sure if I wanted to work on this more, and thought talking about it would help me decide.

This also turned out to be a pretty long write-up! I'm not used to writing things like this, but I wanted to organize sections so people would read what they're most interested in. I hope I did well.

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3. Game Jam Timeline

I think this is worth going into here because MM is an ambitious project for a game jam - it has three hugely different game states plus a dialogue system with an in-depth story. That's a whole lot going on to make in the 72 hours of mini jam, and I'm proud that I managed it. I attribute this to two factors, primarily:

First, the game was already largely thought-out before-hand. I've been sitting on this idea for a while, and I had a pretty clear vision for the structure and birds-eye design of the game. This meant I could speed along into implementation from the start, and keep up a good pace for most of the whole time - I just had to create things, instead of coming up with ideas and then creating them.

Second, PICO-8 is an incredible tool for rapid development. I don't think I'd have a chance to finish this if I had used Unity. There are so many reasons for this, big and small: Everything is integrated into one environment - no need to create sprite assets, then import them to unity, then add them to game objects. No need to switch between a code editor to the unity window to the hierarchy. Everything is also code - once you have the assets, you can easily draw them with spr(). And you don't have to wait for it to recompile every single time you make any small change. And I could go on....

With all that out of the way, a quick rundown of the development of different systems and some thoughts on them. These numbers are mostly approximate - some of them I know are pretty exactly right, like day job and card design, but I tried to account for all 72 hours of the jam.