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Announcement

Final Blog

So, calunio submitted a review and it seems to cover everything pretty well. I can only hope that there are those who liked the ending a bit more, but I do agree with all the flaws that were pointed out.

The game currently has 10 subs, and 68 downloads. Again, it's pretty much what I expected. This wasn't ever a serious attempt to gain attention or create a masterpiece for all to love and praise, just a little writing exercise for myself where I got to experiment with a cool theme.

I was also able to submit this for the NaGaDeMo event, and got an achievement out of it. It's rather funny, I only have two achievements for this site, and they were achieved by submitting Esoterica and Surreality respectively. I feel like that alone means they weren't complete failures, for me personally. They were also fun to make.

It will be a good while before I get to making the third entry in this surreal themed series, and I probably jumped the gun a little when I started on this one. Nevertheless, it will be made eventually, and I hope for it to be a culmination of all the best parts of Esoterica and Surreality.

Announcement

Released Today

Alright, the time to release is upon us. I just sent the download to the site, so it should be available at some point today.

I've got my hands tied with 3 other projects now, so I'm really hoping there are no problems left in the game. If there are though, please don't hesitate to contact me on the game's main page.

A final note that Surreality and it's spiritual predecessor, Esoterica, are both available exclusively on RMN.

Progress Report

Slacked, but back into beta mode!

I took a few days more than I though I would doing the beta testing. It was a lot of tileset settings to mess with and a major pain, so I slacked off. Anyways, I'm right at the end of the game and should be finished my edits in the next 5-10 minutes and then I'm sending it off to amerk for the final test. Whenever he gets back to me with it, I'll release it. Could be today, tomorrow, the weekend... he's usually pretty quick, and it's a short game.

Playing through this got me thinking about something... RPGs suck in one very big way. Most of them have NPCs with a few lines of dialogue, and then if you talk to them again, they say the same thing over again. Because of this, we as players never bother to talk to an NPC more than once. This isn't logical. There's needs to be something leading towards a finality to the conversation, and depending on your character's previous relationship with the NPC, more lines of dialogue should be available.

What I'm getting at it, in Surreality, you can talk to NPCs 2 or 3 times and learn more about those relationships. It isn't something you have to do, but you can if you want to. The problem is, unless you're reading this blog, you'll probably assume otherwise. Why? Because most RPGs suck in that very specific way, and it totally ruins experiences like this game.

Anyways, I wish there was some way to really get the word out about it, but based on the downloads for Esoterica, I doubt this game will be getting many players anyway. Which is okay, this game is more for me than anyone else. But hopefully there will be a couple others who get something out of it.

Next blog, release! I promise!

Progress Report

Beta Testing Begins...

Finally finished! Music is in place and everything.

I'll probably need the weekend to do my own beta testing, since I'm pretty much set on NOT doing any more for this today. It was a frustrating morning with it, I'll tell ya. After I finish my quick playthrough though, it's off to amerk for final testing and then the release.

Not sure if this'll count towards that nagademo thing or whatever, but oh well. Finished is finished, and I've held on to this one for a couple months longer than I'd hoped anyway.

Anyways, instead of launching right back into the third game, I have a secret project that I recently started. It was merely a concept when I blogged about it here a couple weeks back, but it is now well into production. It will most likely be the first game I release on RMN that won't have a game page well in advance of its release, so here's hoping that will gain some attention. It very well could go the other way though, and avoid the notice of virtually everyone. Meh.

Anyways, expect the release of Surreality very soon! It may be a couple days later than I'd expected, but soon nonetheless!

Progress Report

Day 4 complete!

This one turned out a lot shorter than I had previously expected... but it just made more sense. Players will have a pretty good idea what's happening anyway, and I don't want to bore them before the climax.

Anyhow, the end is in sight (already). It's probably true that the shorter the experience of the game, the greater the impact. I won't know just how short it is until I play it, but I'm thinking that most people will breeze through it in about 20 minutes or less. It depends on how many NPCs they chose to talk to.

Anyways, I'll post about 2 more updates before the release. One will be to report that it has been finished, and the other will deal with the beta testing period. I also need to find some music for this pretty quickly, as I believe it will be pretty reliant on it for setting the moods of each major event.

In the meantime, I am off to sleep.

Progress Report

Day 2 and Day 3 complete!

Admittedly, these were much shorter than the first day was. Day 2 was pretty much finished off yesterday and I did a really quick couple of cutscenes for day 3 right now (which is all day 3 has).

Still going pretty well, I think. Day 4 will probably be a bit longer than day 2, and so will day 5 (the last day). It'll most likely be finished over the next few days.

I have also confirmed with amerk that he will be beta testing for it, so that's good news. My best estimate for release is sometime this week, hopefully before my bday on Friday.

If there's one thing that I've come to realize during the making of this game, it is that I'm not so into oldschool adventure games. There have been a couple that I liked well enough, but not many. While I do like the story of Surreality, even I must admit that a lot of the dialogue may seem boring and tedious for the first day. Is what it is, I suppose. No real getting around it, but at least it creates a relatively believable world right from the beginning.

Anyways, this is going to be the first and only oldschool adventure game I ever make. It's not a passion project of mine, but a story that I have wanted to tell for quite some time now. Whenever I get to the next spiritually connected game for this series (Transcendentalico), I'll have to come up with some real game mechanics again.

Progress Report

Day 1 complete!

4 more days left to go. Most of the environments have been laid out, so it's mostly just story events that need to be placed. Day one is completely finished, and I'm pretty happy with the planned progression of the days.

Day 1 is a little slow, and basically comes down to meeting a lot of people in the neighborhood while searching for your girlfriend, but it leads up to a really strange twist that really lights things off (imo).

Day 2 is completely mapped out as well, so all I have to do is put in the events. It took me about two days of work to finish the first day, so it'll probably take a little less for this one (it's a shorter day with less characters walking around).

At this point, I can now guess that the game will be extremely short to play through (especially if you don't want to talk to everyone and explore everything thoroughly). It is a little pointless to meet some people, I'll admit, but it lays out the foundation for the character's backstory, which can help players become immersed in the little world I've made here.

Anyways, so far so good. Hopefully the progression will go just as smoothly for the next 4 days of the game as well. Slowly but surely, I'm getting there!

Announcement

Not Forgotten... I promise!

The title kinda says it all... kinda.

I haven't been making a whole lot of progress on this lately since Amerk and I are back into Eden Legacy 4, and Fragile Hearts 2 is still making (more than) steady progress. I am still working on it though, little by little.

The main reason it is taking so long is because, graphically, it has been a little bit harder to build. Having different styles usually makes things easier, but having re-occurring styles throughout is much harder (especially because I'm trying for ones that are drastically different from one another). Consistency is at the heart of the project, and I don't want to release anything that is thrown together for the hell of it. I've had this story in my head for a long time and I want it to be done properly.

"SORT OF UNRELATED NEWS"
As stated before, I had in mind 3 separate games with similar themes that form a spiritual trilogy of sorts. Well, not to name names, but a sort of recent project on this site has a VERY similar plot to the one I had planned for the third game... so much so, in fact, that I may have to scrap it. I'm gonna play said game and decide after if it's worth pursuing.

In the meantime, I have a small project in mind to do alongside my next slew of games (see Fragile Hearts 3, Eden Legacy 5), which is entirely unrelated to this game. It will be a visual novel (a REAL one this time), and will play similar to the Sakura Taisen games (except each chapter will feature a new minigame instead of a tactical styled battle). I'm having fun with the mutliple routes thing in FH2 and want to try it out in a different type of game.

I may be recruiting for a partner on that project in the future, someone with experience making VNs.

Progress Report

Not quite how you remember it...!

I made the town today. 3 times. With more to come.

Mapping for this game is extremely difficult, because I have to be able to find other chipsets that are similar but different in style, and then "re-imagine" each map a total of 4 times. Maybe 5... we'll see how it all pans out. Probably 5.

Anyways, the toughest part is out of the way now, so I'm quite satisfied with my progress so far. I'll post a couple more screens soonish, and you can bet they'll be a lot like the previous ones (showing different day styles).

The real beauty of this game will come out in the characters of the story. You'll be meeting the same cast day after day, but just like the environments, it will be difficult for Corbin to tell who is who or what is what. An example: you meet someone, let's call her Maria. You know her well enough, but the next day she'll look completely different than you remember her, so you'll be talking to these characters and trying to figure out who is who each and every day. On top of that task, you'll have to find differences in the environments day to day and figure out the sequencing of each one to piece together the story in a coherent way.

I know, kinda fucked up.

In the end, it will fall upon the player to make sense of what has happened. Being able to figure out the sequencing of the days is ultimately how you will actually come to understand what has happened. I don't think it'll be quite as complicated as it sounds... but I guess we'll see. Like I stated previously, I haven't even begun the eventing portion yet. I do have a pretty clear idea of how it will go though.
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