premise
Him Ham Owes Rent is a narrative adventure game about solidarity and finding your place in a world that doesn’t care about you. We play as Him Ham, whose peaceful goblin life is disrupted when his settlement becomes the collateral damage of a magic battle.
Offered asylum in a local town, Him Ham leaves his ruined settlement to work as a cleaner in the mayor’s manor. However, when the town’s holy statue is vandalized, as the only goblin in town, Him Ham is the prime suspect.
Buckling under public pressure, the mayor kicks Him Ham out of the manor, forcing him to find his own way in Trotter’s End, the only part of town that will take him.
Now it’s on Him Ham to uncover the identity of the vandal and, more pressingly, find enough coin to pay rent.
gameplay
Currently, I’m using RPG Maker MZ to build a simple demo/prototype of the opening act of Him Ham Owes Rent. My goal is for the gameplay systems to be simple and unintrusive, with exploration and character interactions as the game's main focus. A core aspect of the game and character is to invert the “power fantasy” dynamic that is typical in the genre; as such, there is little to no combat planned.
One feature I am working on is “Goblin Mode”. At certain points in the story Him Ham enters Goblin Mode and is able to let loose and destroy all the inanimate objects in his vicinity — people don’t tend to like this…
In this early stage of development, I have written a simple treatment/long synopsis and am using Articy: Draft to scale out and map the story into quests and chapters.
future plans
As it stands, Him Ham Owes Rent is at a very early stage of development. My goal is to release a demo/prototype of the game in 2023.
