Timmy's Very Bad School Day by Miyolophone

One strange day, Timmy showed up for school at Coolville High just to find everybody inexplicably irritated and ready to unleash their emotionally unstable rage at the world. And that... got Timmy angry. Help him roast the whole school in this insult-laden "JRPG" made from scratch in 72 hours!
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Hey everyone! We're Team sLEP (I guess? someday we should really standardize) and all of us have participated in many past LDs before this one, so we thought that we'd switch things up this time and do a TEAM ROLESWAP!! For example, Miyolophone, who usually does music, did the art; fawnblue, who usually does art, did programming; etc etc.
Basically, we came into this jam with very low expectations and the intention of having fun trying new roles, and we ended up also making a (hopefully) decently fun game while we were at it! Hope you enjoy, and if you did, please leave a comment! (if you didn't, we'll send principal pike after you)
Controls!
Move: Arrow keys / WASD
Select: Z
Get ANGRY: X
Our Team!
LunacyEcho - Music Czar, additional story
arch - Story Czar, additional coding
johnfn - Overworld Czar, additional coding
fawnblue - Battle Czar, additional art
Miyolophone - Art Czar, additional parents
(and special thanks to Jack Rogers for his amazing guitar work!)
Changelog
Fixed various ending bugs that crashed the game
Fixes for invisible menus, some enemies and interactables not respawning as intended, etc
Fixed a couple crashes and soft lock states you could get into


| Link | https://github.com/johnfn/ld49 |
| HTML5 | https://johnfn.itch.io/timmys-very-bad-school-day |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/literally-just-undertale |
Ratings
| Overall | 41th | 4.263⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 25th | 4.288⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 99th | 4.025⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 797th | 3.488⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 349th | 4.038⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 39th | 4.269⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 15th | 4.475⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 81th | 4.188⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 46🗳️ | 56🗨️ |
omg that's the undertale person
The character designs are gorgeous, (you know, before it turns into staplers and missing textures, which might I add are also incredibly well drawn). The quips, oh my lord the quips! How did you make every line of dialogue great? God dang **Gteve**! I'm crying. Oh my god you have seriously raised the bar so high.
Thank you for making this game, and godspeed. Saying you did a great job all around is an understatement.
@100th-coin oooh i believe gteve is johnfn's baby. he put it in as a placeholder npc and we kept it in because we loved it (either that or none of us remembered to change it. i can't remember exactly.) thanks for the kind words!
The only improvement i see straight away would be more content, but this is a jam so good job!
I really loved the main word dodging/identifying mechanic! It was a... fast-paced reading mechanic?? Which I had never seen and which was fun! Reading is fun it turns out! As things got faster though, I definitley preferred the scenarios where EVERY word in the insult was capitalized, that way I didn't have to parse out which words to actually hunt for. The parsing aspect was fun with the slower challenges though!
Boss theme was nice :) Always love some surprise vocals.
Great work! Role swapping turned out nice, hope it was fun!
I cant believe you made this in three days.
I felt the "no one will play you in three weeks", really tremendous job.
I think I'm kinda understating how much stuff you all got done, this is like 20 minutes of gameplay, that's way impressive for a gamejam!
Since the game is so short and tight, beyond asking for things like collision hitboxes to be neater in rooms, and fixing a bug when you click an action at 0 hp (messes up the ui a bit until next battle)... not really much I can offer in terms of constructive criticism. Great job!
@zvyaga glad you noticed the guitar hero similarities! the rock band series was by far my favorite game series growing up, and i've been wanting to do a rhythm game for a while. this game isn't really that (we tried seeing if we could line up the words to the beat but that was a bit too hard to do in the time frame), but i'm glad that hints of it are visible.
@vitor-milioni thanks so much for your enthusiasm! i believe the notebook scroller was pushed by arch, giving him the broadest skillset represented by any of us, i think. i also definitely agree with you on 'cry'—we ran out of time to balance it as an actual feature, so now it's just some nihilistic statement about the futility of coping mechanisms or something idk
@wedgiebee "reading is fun" wow i can't believe we made an educational game !! but nah we appreciate that you found it a novel mechanic. arch was the guy who balanced and unique-ified the various fights, so i'm glad the differences made an impact for you!
@squigglez LMAO ok as a small point of clarification. our original placeholder submission from back before we had decided on an idea was called "literally just undertale" because that had been our guiding philosophy for past lds. but we only realized *after* ld was over that, while you can change a game's title, you can't change its url. i'm glad elements of it showed through though!
@gryhyphen thanks for pointing that bug out to us! we're working on seeing how to fix that up.
@dannyk1994 whoaa that sounds like a serious bug. feel free to post it in the comments! or, if you'd rather it stay secret, here's a google form you can note it down in too: https://forms.gle/N2HGQ2itMLM8cRjH6. thanks for playing!
@bluishgreenpro many thanks! [ʔtʰiːv] is official, accept no substitutes
But gameplay became a little bit boring after the second fight IMHO
The fact that like EDM chillstep (?) is playing in the background is soooo funny to me - I mean, it's good EDM, don't get me wrong, I've just never seen a JRPG with EDM before. And the battle music - it's super good, period. And the final song with the school bell and the guitar is sooooo lit.
the insult minigame is genuinely so fun, and at the perfect difficulty level. it's kind of like a mix of.... guitar hero and danganronpa class trials? Actually, I have no idea how to describe it - it felt pretty original, which I love!
i feel like y'all must've built off some engine or existing code because there's a lot of JRPG features (tool tips, dialogue system, battle system, health system, good player and camera movement) in addition to a ton of content, so much so that i can't imagine y'all could've coded all that in 3 days - it's really awesome! it legit feels like an RPG vs a jam game because f that.
the writing is SO FUNNY. the low effort grammar makes things x1000 funnier. "Image Not Found" has been found - I don't even know what to say 💀 the fact that you can regain health by eating from the trash 💀 i can't imagine what the dev process for the story must've been - y'all must've been laughing your asses off making it.
some critique:
it'd be nice to be able to select buttons like Insult / Cry via keyboard since every other control is through keyboard too
it'd also be cool to have a tutorial for how the battle mechanics like insulting work - i failed the first time when insulting the teacher because I didn't know what to do - definitely out of scope for a game jam, but maybe for the future!
the dialogue boops when students talk feels like it's scraping my ears which makes for an unpleasant experience
at one point a possible insult is "you're more out of place than gteve" - I got confused what that meant because I hadn't talked to Gteve yet - maybe that should only be shown if you've talked to Gteve.
anyways this is SUCH a great entry. This is just such a trollish game and I love it. If you continue it I'm sure it'll get more plays than zero three weeks from now 💀 I'd def it again!
I would have loved a fast bpm music for the two last fights but the sound design was really good, Nice little game !
@angela-he WOW thanks for the incredible feedback!! tbh the edm chillstep bgm was ~~entirely inspired by deltarune~~ a result of miyo, our regular composer, giving me very specific and helpful directions on how to evoke the vibe of a high school jrpg, then me ignoring them completely because i had a catchy melody i wanted to plonk down.
also, we (and by we i mean just fawnblue, johnfn, and arch) were using godot to build this, and i'm decently sure that a lot of the architecture was custom-made for the game? they're all SO talented!! like, we came up with the battle system on like midday sunday and by 5 pm fawn and arch were like "cool so battles are working now, what next". it's v possible i'm wrong on this hehe but wtv imma hype them up bc they deserve it!!
ALSO also thanks for appreciating the dialogue! a fun game imo is to try and figure out which lines of text are placeholder lines that made it into the final cut because ~~we ran out of time~~ we carefully and meticulously pondered their worth and thought they would be funny. there's at least 5!
@nomus ooo the two last fights *should* have had the boss music playing (i.e. the same music that plays when you fight principal pike)! i wonder if that's still working or if there's a bug—thanks for bringing that to our attention.
@rookrules FINALLY someone reads the url and is able to judge our game as it was always meant to be judged!!!!
The dialogues are so funny! Really REALLY loved that ending and those final bosses!
The only _really little negative point_ was the texts were really hard to read in the fast fights, it gave me a bit of a headache!
But it's really nothing compared to the overall quality of the game!
You got a full 5/5 from me guys, would love to see your next game next LDs!