britown

Creative-Type Impersonator

🌸请别在工作死🌸


I sometimes like working on never-to-be-finished video game projects


Right now I'm making a game called Chronicles.


Wanna make a game? Here is a list of great C++ libraries to use.


I maintain a Letterboxd in much the way that I assume people maintain bonsai trees.


This is Owen:
Owen
And this is Molly:
Molly
Furthermore, this is Max:
Molly

I've been wanting to write a retrospective for my old project for a decade. This game was never finished and never amounted to much but it meant a lot to me and was hugely influential on a great many things in my life. I have done a few posts already about it, and want to have a nice little record of everything.

I've included a ton of ancient in-development screenshots of the game and tools throughout so let's get going!


The Android App Store (so it was before Google Play) ca. 2010 had a lot of games on it! I remember doodle jumping a lot. When it came to SNES-Final-Fantasy-alikes, I expected there to be a lot but the pickings were slim. There was a lot of emulation of older games if you rooted your phone but one of the big things I hated about games like that on Android at the time (and maybe still??) was they relied on on-screen controllers that you tapped and dragged to move the characters around and navigate the menus. This really sucked and killed playing games on my phone.

To me it seemed if you were going to make Final Fantasy 6 on a phone you could actually lean into touch controls, tapping a destination to move there, tap&drag menuing, swiping between characters on the equipment screen, that sort of thing. So that was the main idea.

In the early days it was just me learning java and @tehpotata making some pixel art. My roommate at the time did a lot of road-trip brainstorming with me for the characters and story. We really wanted to make just a very simple final fantasy knock-off with touch controls.

We learned that a mutual friend was a composition major of similar interests and he put forth a few demo tracks that really swept us off our feet. I think once we could hear the music, the project really started to grow into something much larger than we originally intended.

For about two years, nights and weekend went into BladeQuest. I started a tumblr for dev-logs which I should probably think about archiving soon. Looking at it now, I like the post about my rpg stats design, and the technical details of how I loaded tiles on the old android canvas API. I was very allergic to the perceived difficulty of trying to use OpenGL-ES and spent a ton of dev time making it work without. In those days, needing OpenGL-ES support actually cut our available android devices that could play the game by over half!!

A friend told me to post about it on Reddit, which I had never used before, and I ended up on the front page of /r/gaming with only 180 upvotes (times have changed).

I opened a Facebook page that is still up and absolutely a treasure-trove of development updates and screenshots. I remember I spent 5 bucks on Facebook ads for it just to see and it got a hundred or so people onboard, it was weird!

I finished a demo of just the first area where Aramis escaped the dungeon. There were no battle backgrounds or saving or loading the game, it was very barebones but it's install-base grew very quickly. I think within a week it was sitting in the 10-20 thousand download range. I remember a now-dead mobile reviews website left a positive review for it.

I definitely didn't know back then that I was playing with fire. Getting people excited for an essentially non-existent project is a recipe for disaster. Games are very hard to make.

The .NET map and asset editor I made copying RPG Maker


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