On finishing Blackmoon Prophecy... It's unbelievable. I can actually see the completion of Blackmoon Prophecy being very attainable, and if I can keep myself motivated then it should be reached in February or March! It's just hard for me to believe that I may finally be able to push this game aside once and for all in the new year. I mean, I've been working on this thing since 2004! Regardless of how good (or not good?) the finished product is, I will just be extremely satisfied to know that it's finally out of the way.

I've had a lot of ups and downs with this game. I can't even count how many times I just said "screw this" and tossed the game aside for months upon months without working on it at all. I've lost motivation so many times that I just can't count. This game, despite how it looks and plays, has been a colossal undertaking for just me alone. My ultimate goal has always been to make something that's pretty full length and comparable to commercial RPGs. So many RPG Maker games are pretty short and even just half a dozen hours is usually ideal for us at RMN and other RPG Maker websites. I never wanted that with Blackmoon Prophecy, and it's probably why the damn game is taking so long! I'm just one guy trying to make a game that's longer than a good majority RPG Maker titles. I haven't completed a test play of the game recently, but my last one clocked in at somewhere over a dozen hours and I'm the creator of this thing, so I know what to do, where to go, where to find the little secrets and such... so how long is it going to take the average person?!

I'm over 800 maps now I believe, but I expect the final product to hover close to 1000. I still have another world map to make as well (Blackmoon Prophecy will have three) and it's going to prove to be a very challenging one that will require an ungodly amount of planning.

Anyway, here's what to expect when all is said and done around February.

1. Hopefully around 20 hours of play, give or take a few.
2. Three world maps (two are 500x500, the other is around 300x300).
3. Approximately thirty towns.
4. A dragoon, black mage, blue mage, white mage, red mage, dark knight, swordsman, ninja, caller, treasure hunter, and engineer as playable characters.
5. A freakish amount of equippable items, many which are hidden, secret, or upgraded versions of older items.
6. Huge amount of optional content. At least ten dungeons that don't even need to be visited, ever.
7. Arena, auction house, Aurabolt (basically Blackjack), chocobo race track, rabbit catching, and treasure hunting (think FF9 chocographs) as minigames. I haven't ruled out adding more, but they're not a priority right now.
8. Lots upon lots of items to enhance the power of your characters by teaching them magic, summons, and special abilities.
9. Sidequests. Ideally, I want at least one sidequest in every single town. Some of them are very obvious while others are a little obscure or vague.
10. The finished game will probably be around 60 or 70 megabytes archived I'm guessing, though it could be as low as 50.


On further revisions... A little idea I am going to tinker with is adding beaches to the world map. It wasn't done in the classic FF games, so it might look pretty cool and sort of bridge the gap between retro (FF 1-6) and modern (7+) in terms of world design.

Another thing I'm going to start on is upping the graphical quality of the FF4 chipsets that I use. I've already done this with a few locations such as Branch Castle (which is NOTHING like it used to be in the old demos) and most caves, but I'm not going to stop there. My goal is to have almost every tile in every chipset looking at least a little different. The FF5 tiles will hardly be changed since they look fine, but we all know that FF4's graphics are certainly a little dated in comparison. I have two reasons for doing this.

1. To bring a bit of originality to the game.
2. To bring the graphical quality of the FF4 chipsets up to the same level as the FF5 chipsets.

I may also attempt to give Vahn's sprite (a pretty blatant Kain) a few changes as well to make him look more unique. We'll see how it all goes!