Warning: the following post is not a development update. But I had wanted to share how I got into gamedev stuff for a very long time (and when I say that I actually mean since I started this blog!), and today is that day. Read on if you're curious or close the tab if this kinda stuff just bores you, 'cause this one's gonna be wordy!
This journey started long before RPG Maker was a thing. Or at least before I knew it was a thing, whatever. Like most indie devs a game of my own has been a wet dream since my teenage days. Whenever I had the time I would write down random gameplay ideas and scribble character designs into a little notebook, sometimes even on school stuff. There was hardly a day where I didn't think of my little dream project. Obviously it was gonna be a Nintendo 64 game because that was the hottest console around at the time... or not! At the same time, though, there was also this good ol' lingering "average joes like you don't get to work jobs in the game industry" thought, but that didn't stop me from dreaming. One thing that has always been part of the story was a young man down on his luck trying to make enough money to prevent himself from ending up on the street. No matter which iteration of my story, this part has always been there in some fashion. Sometimes this guy was a secondary character, but always present, and always broke.
Not long after I got myself a Dreamcast and binge-played Phantasy Star I learnt about RPG Maker on this wonderfully mysterious place called the internet. And like everyone else I immediately downloaded the illegally distributed English version and had the time of my life. What followed were a ton of unfinished, barely playable "games" with horribly mismatched graphics, misplaced midi music and dumb storylines that were written on the go.
The years went by and new versions of RPG Maker were released. Suddenly a whole slew of possibilities came up! Now you could use scripts to easily put new features into your games that took hours of eventing and were buggy as hell before. Say what you want about its reputation nowadays, RPG Maker XP was THE shit when it came out. So obviously, my dream project was moved to XP, and even after VX came out I deemed it too plain and simple to move things over again. Sometime in 2009 I discovered a little website known as rpgmaker.net, or RMN for short. I posted my game there and managed to get a fairly bad reputation on the forums because of some dumb posts I made and which I'm really embarassed about, to say the least. The project stayed alive for most of that year, but decided to finally move it to VX the following one, which was also around the time I started this blog. Unfortunately this was also a time where some true megalomania set in, as I started way too many projects and worked way too little on any of them. This trend continued into 2011 and the first half of '12.
I'm saying first half because 2012 was the year where I truly hit rock bottom. I was working a crappy job with long days, minimum wage and had to move in back with my dad because I couldn't afford a place to stay. To top it off, my (already way too old at the time) PC finally died, without me managing to save any backups, which sealed the lid on the coffin for good. I still WANTED to make that game, but my state of mind and the lack of resources made it impossible at the time, and towards the tail end of the year I had attempted to do the very worst one can do to themselves - and almost succeeded if my father hadn't intervened. 2013 was only slightly better, since my depression continued to negatively affect me and my view on gamedesign during the time. It wasn't until 2014 that I could finally manage to pull myself out of the slump, and also bought a new machine, and a friend gifted me a copy of RPG Maker VX Ace, including quite a bit of DLC as well.
Looking back, '14 and '15 were sort of "experimental" years, as I mostly played around with different ideas and DLC packs, but I never quite managed to capture that dream game feel again. If you follow me on Twitter then you probably noticed that I was gone for almost all of 2016. It was another crappy year, but this time I surrounded myself exclusively with my friends to prevent the worst from happening again. Fast forward to November and I finally managed to assemble all the stuff I needed and started taking the whole thing seriously again. Having accumulated over ten years of experience and with the support of my friends I felt like the time to finally, finally realise my dream has come.
So by all intents and purposes I can say that Project Parfait is my dream project, and that it has technically been in development for as long as I have been working with RPG Maker. And like I have said previously, the game will be finished, no matter how long it may take, no matter how many bugs there are to squash and no matter how much life can get in the way - it's a dream I've been longing to fullfill and it's finally time.
TL;DR version: life sucks and my dream is to make a game in baby's first gamedev software.
Not long after I got myself a Dreamcast and binge-played Phantasy Star I learnt about RPG Maker on this wonderfully mysterious place called the internet. And like everyone else I immediately downloaded the illegally distributed English version and had the time of my life. What followed were a ton of unfinished, barely playable "games" with horribly mismatched graphics, misplaced midi music and dumb storylines that were written on the go.
The years went by and new versions of RPG Maker were released. Suddenly a whole slew of possibilities came up! Now you could use scripts to easily put new features into your games that took hours of eventing and were buggy as hell before. Say what you want about its reputation nowadays, RPG Maker XP was THE shit when it came out. So obviously, my dream project was moved to XP, and even after VX came out I deemed it too plain and simple to move things over again. Sometime in 2009 I discovered a little website known as rpgmaker.net, or RMN for short. I posted my game there and managed to get a fairly bad reputation on the forums because of some dumb posts I made and which I'm really embarassed about, to say the least. The project stayed alive for most of that year, but decided to finally move it to VX the following one, which was also around the time I started this blog. Unfortunately this was also a time where some true megalomania set in, as I started way too many projects and worked way too little on any of them. This trend continued into 2011 and the first half of '12.
I'm saying first half because 2012 was the year where I truly hit rock bottom. I was working a crappy job with long days, minimum wage and had to move in back with my dad because I couldn't afford a place to stay. To top it off, my (already way too old at the time) PC finally died, without me managing to save any backups, which sealed the lid on the coffin for good. I still WANTED to make that game, but my state of mind and the lack of resources made it impossible at the time, and towards the tail end of the year I had attempted to do the very worst one can do to themselves - and almost succeeded if my father hadn't intervened. 2013 was only slightly better, since my depression continued to negatively affect me and my view on gamedesign during the time. It wasn't until 2014 that I could finally manage to pull myself out of the slump, and also bought a new machine, and a friend gifted me a copy of RPG Maker VX Ace, including quite a bit of DLC as well.
Looking back, '14 and '15 were sort of "experimental" years, as I mostly played around with different ideas and DLC packs, but I never quite managed to capture that dream game feel again. If you follow me on Twitter then you probably noticed that I was gone for almost all of 2016. It was another crappy year, but this time I surrounded myself exclusively with my friends to prevent the worst from happening again. Fast forward to November and I finally managed to assemble all the stuff I needed and started taking the whole thing seriously again. Having accumulated over ten years of experience and with the support of my friends I felt like the time to finally, finally realise my dream has come.
So by all intents and purposes I can say that Project Parfait is my dream project, and that it has technically been in development for as long as I have been working with RPG Maker. And like I have said previously, the game will be finished, no matter how long it may take, no matter how many bugs there are to squash and no matter how much life can get in the way - it's a dream I've been longing to fullfill and it's finally time.
TL;DR version: life sucks and my dream is to make a game in baby's first gamedev software.
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