Ten Years Gone (& Dragon Island)

On this day ten years ago, I published my first post on this blog - a short introduction to Dragonfaith - followed less than a week later by the first ever demo release (which was basically a way of showing off my excitement after creating my very first town). I had only just started developing in RPG Maker, which I had asked for the previous Christmas, in anticipation of finally putting my plans of constructing my own RPG (based on the Final Fantasy games I had loved in my youth) into action. Truth be told, I had been brainstorming concepts for an RPG going back to the turn of the millennium (if you can believe some of the earliest time stamps I'm looking at), but not all of those ideas have survived the refinement process. A lot of it is lore (especially creation myths) and game mechanics (specifically outlining the magic system), little of which resembles the game in its current form. Suffice to say, it's hard to pin a date on when this game first formulated out of the jumble of thoughts I've been carrying around in my head for the majority (entirety?) of my adult life (although further searching reveals a document titled "dragonfaith.txt" dated 7/16/2005 that lays out much of the conceptual groundwork for the game), but the day I created the project file in RPG Maker marks a significant milestone early in the development (as opposed to conceptual) phase of the process.

It's humbling to acknowledge that ten years have passed since that day, but these things take time, and I'm just one amateur working on a pet project in my free time. And you can rest assured that I am still working on it. I could stand to spend more time in front of the screen during the summer, when other activities (like getting fresh air and sunshine while exercising outdoors) take priority, but I do enjoy coming back to this world every winter when I'm stuck inside at my desk anyway. In fact, after posting my latest Cacowards update just before the New Year, I made a conscious decision to put the series on temporary hiatus (though I look forward to getting back to it at some unspecified point in the future), because I realized that's time I could be spending in RPG Maker. And though it's a mammoth of a project, every little step I take gets me closer to the finish line.

Here's a short update on my progress since the last report. I mentioned working on some of the game mechanics; one problem in particular laid me flat (I still have tabs related to it open in my browser, even though I haven't worked on it for months), involving a superficial modification to the status icon display during battle. It's just another in a long line of issues that demonstrates two things: 1) that although RPG Maker claims to give you the power to, well... make RPGs right out of the box, there are a lot of functional and stylistic limitations that you have to deal with, and 2) the program seems to be more inspired by Dragon Quest than Final Fantasy, causing me to frequently have to bend the engine in pretzels (if I can even figure out how to do that) just to get the game to run smoothly in a way that feels familiar and like the experience that I want to give the player. It's frustrating.

In any case, although I said I was going to set it aside for the time being, I have instead re-dedicated myself to completing the all-important world map. (At the very least, I will someday have a project that you can explore from start to finish, even if there are no combat mechanics). Barring later revisions, everything else in the game is mapped out, so it's do or die. At least as far as mapping goes, I have nothing left to turn to as a distraction from the thing I should be working on. It's an enormous task encompassing an unprecedented level of challenge, but it has to get done. And I'm going to sit with it until it is. I hope. I've tried lots of methods to help me carve out these landmasses and coastlines, and right now I'm working on magnifying a smaller, simplified version of the map in increments, fleshing out the details before advancing to the next scale. It shows some promise. Meanwhile, I have framed prints of the world maps from the first six Final Fantasy games propped up beside me, so I can stare at them all day long in search of inspiration, and motivation.

I really wanted to have it finished in time for the tenth anniversary, but I forgot that was coming up (as I've alluded to before, my side hustle in photography keeps me insanely busy), and I've been dragging my butt. Still, I don't want to leave you empty-handed. So here's something I don't think I've shared yet (although in the past ten years, I could have forgotten). It's a bit of a spoiler, as it relates to the endgame - but it's not the final dungeon. It's actually part of the world map. So, to give you some context, I wanted to send the player through a variety of terrains leading up to the climax of the game (e.g., forest, desert, underground, volcano, mountain peak), as a sort of review or "final tour" of what the rest of the game has thrown at you - not unlike the Interdimensional Rift in Final Fantasy V - and related to the themes and pantheon of bosses in my game, which revolve around the elements. So, before I ever started working in RPG Maker, I pieced together a map of an island (or small continent), using individual tiles copied and pasted from Final Fantasy [1]. The original bitmap is dated back to 2006 (18 years ago!). I've already long since copied it into RPG Maker, but the final version will probably look a little different (it's one of the things I'm working on now). But here's the original:

Dragon Island

It's a proof of concept! Now, you'll have to excuse me. I've still got a lot of work left to do...