#jimmyandthepulsatingmass

[unggoymuffin]

Hymn to the Earless God

LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD AND YOUR RAGE BE SEEN!!! Check out Hymn to the Earless God!

If you love Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling, Chrono Trigger, or Earthbound, please check out @jimmyandthepulsatingmass 's newest game!

[fujoshiwarrior]

one more thing while you're at it you should also check out the demo for hymn to the earless god (which i also have linked in my pinned) which is the jimmy dev's most recent project (also be sure to follow him @starseedgames @jimmyandthepulsatingmass )

i'm actually so serious each and every single one of you is required to play jimmy and the pulsating mass, if not for the profound storytelling then play it for the best take i've seen on turn based rpgs in a long time. there is literally a link in my pinned

[jimmyandthepulsatingmass]

A Look Back at Old Jimmy

Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is one year old today!  To celebrate, I thought I’d share some stuff about what Jimmy looked like in its original incarnation.  Spoilers: not as good!  But, fans will probably find it interesting, so check it out after the break if you want a super long, super informative post about a version of Jimmy that was never meant to be!

When I originally conceived of Jimmy, it wasn’t meant to be a huge game with a focus on exploration.  Instead, it was meant to be around 8-10 hours and mostly linear.  It wasn’t going to be a commercial game; instead, it was going to be a game that I posted on rpgmaker.net, like many of my other earlier games, and a means for me to show everyone that my game design had matured.  The game was broken up into four segments, each representing a different character.  Each segment was its own game.  For example, Lars’s segment was going to be a first-person dungeon exploring game (called Dark Dungeon), Andrew’s segment was going to be a visual novel about going to school, etc.  I forget if Helga or Buck had the more straightforward RPG segment, and I can’t remember what the fourth segment was going to be.  Of these, I’d only been working on the RPG segment, and I’d finished all the battle designs and locations, so, at the point that I stopped development, this section was almost complete.  So, naturally, that’s what most of this post will focus on.

In the frame story, the house was uncolored, and by completing each segment of the game, you’d gradually color in the house and make your family happy.  When you had colored everything in, you would leave the house and then the ending was very similar to the ending that eventually made it into the game.  Everything was drawn with crayons (by which I mean the crayon tool in MS Paint, haha) other than the sprites.  Also, looks like this screen showed off Jimmy’s old sprite.  Yikes, right?

Here’s the whole family.  This isn’t a scene or anything (none of the dialogue was in at this point--other than some battle dialogue), but I just wanted to show off all the sprites.  Let’s just pull that band-aid off quickly.  The setting is a castle that gets destroyed by the Pulsating Mass.  The entire RPG section takes place in a faux medieval section.  I pulled some ideas about the videogamey aspect of that world into the Everchip segment (mainly how dialogue is delivered), but nothing too important story-wise.

This was Jimmy’s room inside of the RPG world.  If it looks familiar, that’s because the opening of this segment of the game was going to be a shot-for-shot remake of the opening scene in Chrono Trigger, just drawn way worse.  Helga would have delivered Chrono’s mother’s dialogue, but, like I said, I hadn’t done the dialogue yet, so I’m just manually opening the curtains.

Here’s a look at the world map.  The little dragon aspect of the map could also breathe fire; he moves randomly, so I didn’t happen to catch it when I made the gif.  The gif quality kind of sucks, so here are the area names: Hazeleye, Stoney Craw, Bursa Pass, Marrowick, Eastern Brow, Legs of the Ancient Giant, and Pulsating Mass. 

Here’s a little effect that I thought turned out alright.  The areas in dungeons were short and the paths were narrow.  Enemies were designed to be at chokepoints, so there were fixed encounters.  You didn’t get any experience or money from them--you just got to progress.  I’ll get into that more, later, but here are some other shots of maps I thought didn’t look totally terrible:

The entrance to Bursa Pass, a mountainous area.  You’ll probably recognize the bird effect in the background from Lars’s beach scene.  This is actually where you would have first found Lars; he would have been sitting in front of the sign and carried off by a giant bird similar to Grimclaw, but its name was Throbbing Feathers; you can see how I cannibalized a lot of that stuff and used it in different ways in the final game.

This was Throbbing Feathers’s nest.  He was the second boss.

Another shot of Bursa Pass.

This is a little reflection effect I liked in Marrowick, a forest area where you encounter the Rotting Jack-o’-Lantern, among other things.

This is a short area called Eastern Brow.  It was meant to be an observatory, but it also kind of looked like a cannon, so I ended up planning for Jimmy and the family to go there and fire themselves out of it to get to the top of Legs of the Ancient Giant.

Here’s a typical part of the Pulsating Mass.  It was very pink.

Equipment was fixed.  You couldn’t buy equipment or items, and you only gained levels after beating bosses.  Like I said earlier, the game was super linear.  Battles were built more like puzzles since you couldn’t power level to get around them.  Here’s what every other character had equipped for the curious:

My favorite part about looking through the equipment was that I forgot that Lars could only equip a Tommy Bahama Shirt on his upper body.

Here’s a weird part of the battle system that didn’t make it into the full game.  In addition to their normal skill sets, characters had a “Moxie” set of skills.  These four skills were the same for every character.  In addition to HP and MP (SP here), battles utilized RPG Maker’s TP system.  You would gain a set amount of TP each turn, and you could get double by guarding.  TP allowed you to use these Moxie skills, which were basically surrogates for items.

Here are a few skill sets, starting with Helga’s.  There’s a lot of overlap with the full version of Jimmy.  Helga apparently was a cheerleader in Jr. High.

This is just to show that some of these skills that you’re familiar with didn’t operate the same way.  Also, the characters’ HP and SP would normally be full, as you get full recovers after each fight, but I had artificially leveled him, so the numbers are wonky.

Here’s Jimmy’s complete list of transformations.  He had a few extras that didn’t make it into the full game, as you can see.  The final four were optional ones you could get for fighting new monsters that replaced the bosses in each area.  “Imagine Face” lets you transform into a monster called “Giant Face,” which was the tank role; the Revolting Blob was more of a status inflicter.  “Imagine Tree” is the “Tree of Life,” which took over the Phoenix’s big healing role (the Phoenix focused a bit more on offense), and “Imagine Guardian” was a monster called “Ancienter Guardian” (A harder version of the Ancient Guardian you could fight earlier in the game).  It had an offensive role and the ability to interrupt, kind of like a more powerful Red-Billed Squawker with a group attack.

By the way, transformations could only be used inside a battle.  There wasn’t a point of transforming in the field because of the linear level design.  They also took a turn to use; a lot of the combat was slower and built around utilizing each turn correctly.

Speaking of battles, here’s what one would look like.  As you can see, Mortimer made the transition from Old Jimmy to new Jimmy, but his design is a bit different.  The battle backgrounds were stationary.  The TP I was talking about earlier is shown here (as MP--Moxie Points).

Here’s Mortimer getting wrecked by Andrew.  Some of the battle animations look pretty cool as crayons, but there just aren’t a lot of them.  This is because anything that was used on players didn’t have an animation because of how VX Ace’s default battle system works.  Note the end message says “Jimmy’s Family;” HItomi, Jonathon Bear, and Punch Tanaka weren’t playable characters in this version.  Of these, only Punch shows up in the game at all.  Jonathon Bear is just referenced via Jimmy’s shirt, and Hitomi wasn’t planned at this point.  Jonathon Bear’s history with Jimmy wasn’t even conceived at this point.

Since I showed off Mortimer, here are a few more friendly faces:

You’ll notice their designs are basically the same as in normal Jimmy.  There were only a few monsters that I kept, design wise.  These two operated a bit differently in battle, though.  The Elder Mr. Asp was invincible, and he would berate his son every turn.  Then, at the end of each turn, the message, “The Elder Mr. Asp is ravaged by age!” would appear.  After a few turns he died of natural causes.  Here’s how it played out:

Apparently the Elder Mr. Asp was originally kind of a creep in addition to being a jerk.  Also, I kind of wish I would have gotten a gif of him coughing, because I was using timing tags so that the cough and hack were instant, then the wheeze was drawn out really slowly.

The last thing I’d like to share is a bunch of monsters.  There were a LOT, so I grabbed some I thought people would find interesting:

50′s Style Vampire’s original design.

This guy’s name was Albert Hands.  Just kind of liked that.

Bad Weather’s original design.  None of the other cloud people existed yet.

Elegant Ice Swan was an enemy rather than a piece of furniture.  There was a mechanic where you could use elements--like fire--and they would have adverse effects on some enemies.  Elegant Ice Swan would just melt if you hit it with a fireball.

Flesh Orb’s old design.

Here’s the Giant Face I mentioned earlier.

Grumble Bear’s design is the same for the most part.

Happy Little Sunflower’s original design.

This is a superboss named Karma.

Luna and Sol’s old designs.  Sol looked okay.  But, uh, Luna...

This guy’s name was Mumbles.

Here’s what Buck looked like when he got taken over by the Mass.

This is a dude named OctoCarl.  I think he’s a cool dude.

Overweight Dinosaur was an early monster.

Early Phoenix design.  You can still see this reflected in the Phoenix’s sprite in the full version.

There’s Punch Tanaka; he was too cool to have an action pose.

Here’s the Red-Billed Squawker’s early design.

...and Revolting Blob’s.

This is a monster called Bad Lunch.  It tries to trick you into eating it.

Rotten Jack-O’-Lantern’s early design.

Here’s a monster called “Seeing Lips” that operated the same as Lingering Eyes.  It also had a mechanic like Balanced Equations where if you didn’t kill both before the end of the turn after killing one, they would revive (and get a full heal).

This is a monster called The Amazing Residue. I wish I would have been able to include him in the full version.  All he does is show off every turn and beg for people to pay attention to him, and the way to beat him was to use Andrew’s “Boring Lecture” ability to put each party member to sleep.  Afterwards, he sulked off.

Here’s Throbbing Feathers, aka proto-Grimclaw.  In this battle, you didn’t ride on his back, but Lars was in his claws, so you had to keep Lars healed while beating Throbbing Feathers in order to win.

This is the Tree Man that you didn’t get.  He looks terrible, but if you set him on fire...

...this happens.  It changed his move set and made him lose HP each turn.

This is a monster called Water Spirit.  The way you beat it was by alternating freezing and melting it.  Each of its forms had different abilities, so you had to switch the forms smartly in order to win.

Wubbly was one of the few unchanged designs.  He had way more health, though, since there wasn’t an artificial “last 8 turns” challenge to draw the battle out.

Well, that’s about all I think I want to share.  Old Jimmy was a way different game, and there was way more planning and A HELL OF A LOT more work between what you see here and what Jimmy eventually became.  I hope y’all enjoyed seeing the little ideas that germinated into something more in the final product and all of the weird evolutionary dead-ends that never made it out of Old Jimmy’s bizarre, crayon-colored world.

[brunobuglisi]

Quick arrangement I recorded to test old mic and I just finished this demo, amazing can’t wait for more! @jimmyandthepulsatingmass

[grim-echoes]

Just barely still in season, oops. Happy holidays to all of my amazing friends and to anyone passing by; to my buddies over at Jimscord, thanks for letting me be part of your community. It's strange being part of a greater social dynamic when I've been absent from that sort of thing for the better part of nearly a decade, but I'm elated to be able to spend the end of the year with you all, and I hope you've all been well—and that I'll be able to see another (full) year through with everyone, no matter what the future brings.

No sappy message of mine would be complete if I didn't also thank @jimmyandthepulsatingmass. I've already made a show of it once, but it can't ever be understated how impactful this little game has been for my outlook on life and on me as a person, and going forward into 2022 I have high hopes that things will change for the better. I can say with certainty that I wouldn't be saying that if I hadn't experienced this work of art. Again, Kasey—thank you, and merry Christmas. To all of my closest friends and loosest acquaintances, I love you all.

[kadzhi]

Here’s the full album art! Plus some close-ups I suppose?

Unfortunately it’s too small but I put Andrew and Helga’s initials on the tree and you can’t really see it 😭​

Thank you again, Kasey! @jimmyandthepulsatingmass

[scrapyardparadise]

I posted 16 times in 2021

15 posts created (94%)

1 posts reblogged (6%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 0.1 posts.

I added 30 tags in 2021

#my art - 10 posts

#jimmy and the pulsating mass - 4 posts

#my oc - 4 posts

#jatpm - 4 posts

#rkgk - 2 posts

#fn fal - 2 posts

#dragonborn - 1 posts

#stfu terf - 1 posts

#fanart - 1 posts

#neanderthal - 1 posts

Longest Tag: 35 characters

#jimmy and the pulsating mass fanart

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

RKGK of an OC of mine, with her rifle of choice.

The FN FAL.

Commissions (closed) | Instagram | Ko-Fi

21 notes • Posted 2021-11-09 04:03:00 GMT

#4

Just a fake battle screen based off of something from a dream.

This took more effort than necessary yet somehow less effort than my usual stuff.

Also the HUD was taken from post-game but by this point idgaf i just wanted something there to look vaguely authentic.

Commissions | Instagram | Ko-Fi

24 notes • Posted 2021-03-21 03:28:04 GMT

#3

Hey look, these three are my favourite side antagonists.

And I really couldn't help but think these three have EEnE energy.

Commissions (closed) | Instagram | Ko-Fi

34 notes • Posted 2021-04-21 20:02:11 GMT

#2

i think i fucked up on the filter

oh well

been playing this game to completion. Lots of fun, but holy shit it gets disturbing sometimes.

As for the dead man in the background...it makes some sense in context.

fun fact: the dev of this game has a Tumblr. Give @jimmyandthepulsatingmass a visit!

Commissions | Instagram | Ko-Fi

35 notes • Posted 2021-03-13 22:54:49 GMT

#1

rkgk

I was initially going for an AWM, but decided halfway to go with a Sako S20, but my tired ass instead went for the Sako TRG so now I just have...whatever this is.

Catgirl maids because cute.

Commissions | Instagram | Ko-Fi

43 notes • Posted 2021-01-23 04:04:45 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[horatiovonbecker]

Okay, so Hedge Maze AI Dungeon. Ghibli/Zelda hybrid. Top notes of Toby Fox, probably.

Hm. @jimmyandthepulsatingmass, where in the world would you set this, vibe-wise? I'm thinking somewhere misty and desolate, with a techno undertone. New Zealand? Memphis? Chicago? Greece? Somewhere in Japan, Korea, one of the other mainland Aisian countries? I think this sort of question might be up your alley.

The orphan of man. That’s what the universe calls you now. You are an AI, and after exterminating the alien race that had committed genocide against your creators, you’re now trying to figure out what to do after vengeance has been accomplished.

[enhousestudios]

what are some other indie rpgs coming out that you are excited for?

I’ll name three!

Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass @jimmyandthepulsatingmassVirgo Vs. The Zodiac@virgovsthezodiacHeartbeat@blinking4soup

[unggoymuffin]

Yo, check it out!

My favorite game creator, @jimmyandthepulsatingmass is making a new game! it would be nice if this one was not overlooked compared to his last one. Any support would be nice! If you like RPGS like Chrono Trigger or Earthbound.

[scrapyardparadise]

i think i fucked up on the filter

oh well

been playing this game to completion. Lots of fun, but holy shit it gets disturbing sometimes.

As for the dead man in the background...it makes some sense in context.

fun fact: the dev of this game has a Tumblr. Give @jimmyandthepulsatingmass a visit!

Commissions | Instagram | Ko-Fi

[grim-echoes]

I think Grimclaw Jimmyandthepulsatingmass and Griffon Devil May Cry should date

[smis-five-creedmoor]

@jimmyandthepulsatingmass

@redrobster

@grim-echoes

There's like...very little fanart of Hitomi. I like to think I've at least contributed to filling the market.

Commissions (closed) | Instagram | Ko-Fi

[jimmyandthepulsatingmass]

What’s in the cave?

[smis-five-creedmoor]

@redrobster @grim-echoes @jimmyandthepulsatingmass

Hey look, these three are my favourite side antagonists.

And I really couldn't help but think these three have EEnE energy.

Commissions (closed) | Instagram | Ko-Fi

[smis-five-creedmoor]

@redrobster @jimmyandthepulsatingmass

Just a fake battle screen based off of something from a dream.

This took more effort than necessary yet somehow less effort than my usual stuff.

Also the HUD was taken from post-game but by this point idgaf i just wanted something there to look vaguely authentic.

Commissions | Instagram | Ko-Fi