Designing a Video Game in RPG Maker MV

Headline Hustle: The Inspiration

I'm a school librarian. Media literacy is an important aspect of what I teach, and I'm very passionate about it. The future belongs to the content creators and our students need to be proficient creators of media as well as savvy consumers of it.

Social media such as Facebook, X, and YouTube present particular challenges as independent and legacy media as well as individual creators battle for clicks, likes and comments to pull in "eyes" for their advertisers. Many will exaggerate and sensationalize headlines to get engagement. 

I wanted to create a game that would give students experience with recognizing exaggerations as well as false claims. My idea was to make an role playing game where the player would experience exaggeration and misinformation and learn what motivates people to make these false claims. 

Eventually, the scope of the game will include the player discovering a plot to mislead the public about

the dangers dragons pose to the Aetherpunk world of the game. For the purposes of the LIS 678 assignment, I had to pull back to focus on one aspect of misinformation: exaggerated claims.

My husband, Charles plays through Headline Hustle

I decided to use RPG Maker MV for my video game. Of the game engines available to us at a reasonable price, RPG Maker seemed to be the easiest for beginner game developers to use. It is largely menu-driven and a lot of assets came with the program. Nonetheless, there were challenges to learning to use it. I found a YouTube channel, SumRanDev, with lots of good tutorials. However, the time restraints of the assignment limited my ability to learn some of the more intricate and advanced aspects of the game engine. For example, I wasn't able to figure out switches to make events stop repeating. I worked around this by creating two versions of the main maps and switching the player to a version where the events didn't exist. I also had trouble with the levels. I put in a level system, but the only way for the player to know they have leveled up is for them to check their stats. 

I'm not finished with this game. I want to refine the way the skills are distributed and also figure out how to have the game announce when a player has leveled up. There are other little things to tweak. But the big thing is that I want to create a total of 5 parts that focus on different aspects of media literacy.

This is probably the most challenging assignment I've completed as part of the Instructional Design post graduate certificate. Although I know there is much room for improvement, I'm pretty pleased with the product considering that I have no computer programming experience beyond use some basic HTML commands.