Paradise Blue

Paradise Blue has been released for a while and I just thought of making a post for the things that didn't quite make it in, or things that were altered from the original ideas/plans. Sometimes it's surprisingly seeing how much made it in despite some of the cuts I've made. With the expectation that some people have already peeked into the project folder and seen some graphics and things that were never used, I'll explain what they were meant to be used for.

In no order:

> Why does Salomon have a weird wing? Well, he uses the Phoenix Knight class graphic. They were meant to have White magic, Dark skills, Dark Wave, and Triple Cut built in. It was an Ultimate class, meant for if you mastered every other class.

> Similarly, there is an Angel Knight which you see there. Opposite of the more physically focused Phoenix Knight, it has Summon, Time, Black and Blue magic commands, making it a really well rounded caster. Again, it was an ultimate class. They were both cut because I didn't really like the idea of an ultimate class, I felt it'd kill the fun of picking what classes and skills you wanted to have.

> Lancer class was planned for Paradise Blue. This actually warped into the very different Chocolatier later. Mostly because the Jump command didn't seem that different from Monks BuildUp and it was a pain to code anyway.

> Terrain Guard was probably removed or replaced. I just saw that in the list and I realized I didn't have any traps of that kind or lava for example so it was a waste of a slot to include it.

> There was a bigger group for your side. Abigail, Christina, Amelia, Salomon were in the earlier designs, but there were many more like Patrick, Kyle, Lillian, Reuben, Natalie, Mateus, Abraham and Juliana who never made it to the final group, or were renamed. Patrick was the original "Neil", but was young and naive instead of older and laidback. Most of them ended up being random townspeople instead.

> Speaking about these characters, they originally had battle purposes too. However, I didn't really get around to use this so other than a very few points (mainly with Amelia and Neil in the Ancangers), they don't battle. Christina, as a royal guard, was meant to be the most powerful character with the Illumina Spear, Triple Cut, Time, White and Black magic. Triple Cut will not work anymore for her as it's not coded to do so now if you test it.

> While we're on the subject of Ancangers, that name came about by this sentence: "maybe if an can ger NDs stuff to work for my SCSD, ill loook into". I'm still not sure what he was trying to say... And no, they're not called Arcangers. There is an Arc Ancanger however.

> I had actually intended a plot point where Amelia would take this Arc Ancanger and use it to sort of try to take over herself while you'd fight her to stop her. Here's a very work in progress sprite of it!



Had a Whale type design at first. The current ArcAncanger:



> Initially, spirits were the summons in the game. You'd find various spirits around



and have them join you as a summon. This was removed as they were used as enemies in the Spire of the Spirits when I introduced the Magitek-like Ancangers.

> Which means you miss out on this Sun Serpent. The Arc Ancanger replaced it, it had a similar summon use. There is actually an optional boss Sun Serpent in the database of the game but it was not implemented in game.



> Amelias design changed. Initially she was wearing what she has on the left side, but then i was told to keep the design that lazcht made for her. I agreed and went with that instead.



> A quest was cut out, where Amelia set fire to a house without you knowing, and your goal was to find out who was responsible for it. We already had a detective type quest in that town and I wasn't feeling up to it so this got axed.

> The game was originally done with the default NES colors like FF1. Once I started going all color happy, I decided I was just limiting myself for no real reason, then just went ahead and remade the graphics to fit the expanded palette.

> One interesting thing: Part of the soundtrack was made by me before the game existed, and in fact before I even used RPG Maker! The Forests with the big trees over the water is the area that I believe has the most recently composed song.

> There is some content that was a planned expansion. A new island with pirates around it and a side story. However, as I was too busy and the other guy who wanted to do it was away for a while. No DLC for you guys, sorry. I also intended a hireable NPC based on his character to be a reward for completing this part, which would attempt to slay all the enemies when you start the battle. Since this didn't happen, he is unhireable as an NPC even if his code works.

A lot of content did remain in the game though or hasn't changed much since i started making it. Other than working on the battle system for too long a time (I always hate spending too long on that, but it's like a necessary evil), I enjoyed working on this, and definitely hope to improve for the future! Any questions on the game or any other game I've made, feel free to ask me a question on here!


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I also talk about what I'm up to, reblog beautiful artwork, game progress, or any interesting game design articles/quotes I find around. Hope you enjoyed this!