Classroom Deathmatch RPG! Jake Richmond Interview part 2.

Panty Explosion is a role-playing game about psychic girls and school drama. Classroom Deathmatch, the next RPG Jake had worked on is based on Battle Royale, to a degree. A game where a class of students must fight to the death.

This part of the interview will deal mostly with Classroom Deathmatch, but also with The Magical Land of Yeld, a fusion of Zelda, the secret worlds of Narnia, and Final Fantasy Tactics’ job-system, a game about children in a magical world of adventure.

The previous part of the interview can be read here, dealing mostly with Panty Explosion, and the work-process Jake and his co-creators engage in.
I will have my comments (in italics and parenthesis), and most links had been added by myself. Hope you’ll enjoy it :)

1. How did you decide on Classroom Deathmatch after Panty Explosion?

Matt and I had been selling Panty Explosion at GenCon (The biggest role-playing convention in the world, AFAIK), and the booth across from us was am import DVD seller called Cine-East. The couple running the booth were really enthusiastic about the game and helped us promote it at the show, and Matt and I ended up buying a whole mess of DVDs from them. Survive Style 5+, Saikano and a whole bunch of other stuff. One of those was Battle Royale 2, and Nick came over to the house and watched it with me a few weeks after the con. We were about half way through the movie and one of us was like “we could totally play this with Panty Explosion”. And then at the same time we both blurted out something about a Battle Royale/Panty Explosion game. We wrote the entire thing that night.

Originally we had planned to release a yaoi-flavored version of Panty Explosion, but it never really happened. Maybe someday.