Hello everyone! Hyde here, bringing up the very first Blog for Earth Under Attack. While the EUA Blog series isn't something that will be around forever, I do plan on it being somewhat of a mini-series, bringing out a number of entries to tell our story, the story behind EUA, and what our plans for the future are. I myself can not speak for certain aspects of the project as I am only half of the development duo here, the other being the amazingly talented Dekita. While Dekita himself may do a blog or two in time, I will be doing my posts from my own point of view and stories, so don't wonder why some information is not talked about (mainly because I wasn't there). So without boring all of you with random, useless small talk, lets get down to business.






May 29th, an announcement comes out on RPGMakerWeb.com forums. RPG Maker Web and Humble Bundle would be holding a month long indie gaming competition. The rules were that developers had to build a complete, working game in roughly one month's time, from start to finish, no pre-existing projects could be entered. The Grand Prize winner would take home a whopping ten grand, so nothing to joke about. As you can assume, hand began flying as indie developers from all walks of life, all regions of the world, everyone began working on the project that they hoped would bring home the gold. But what did this demand of them? Some knew beforehand what it took to make a full game, yet some had never even finished their own game before and were now taking a journey like none other. One thing that both groups had in common was that neither of them could know just how intense the competition would get. Grueling hours of codes, graphics, and hopes would cause some drop out, some to lose sleep, and some to worry if they had what it took, but from hard work came great rewards! The community banded together in friendly competition over the month, occasionally showing each other their progress and exchanging kinds words before going back to work. And in the end, it paid off. The competition is cause of many wonderfully beautiful games of all kinds!

However, now lets go back to the start. Towards the beginning, I had plenty of ideas, but I had no clue how to go about making them a reality. While I have long been in the world of digital graphics, I have never quite taken to coding/scripting much, so I am often bound to my own abilities, wearing them like a shackle. In situations where I need code, I generally go to one of my three coding friends... Neon Black, Moby Chan, and Dekita. While I had worked with each of them extensively in the past, Dekita and I have worked together the most and are very alike in personality, thought processes, and general likes. Alas, I found that he had already started his own game. Not wanting to bother him by making him help with my own as well, I held off. Neon Black and Moby both have long been inactive in the community, and reaching them hasn't been my strong suit.

After around a week, I find myself watching closely the work that Dekita was doing. A few days pass, he requests a few graphical pieces on the forums, and of course I jumped at the chance to help out. What I didn't know was that this would end up making me want to join on for the whole game. Talking with him, he tells me of his ideas for the game and I was instantly hooked. I loved the concept and I already was getting ideas on how it could look. When I officially joined the development team, Dekita had already gotten placeholders for everything, but otherwise it was a clean slate for me. I right away got to changing everything.



Dekita had already found someone to do graphics for our ships, so I got to work on fixing up the HUD. While making it, something clicked. I, for some reason, wanted to give the game the appearance of a sci-fi comic book! That was the beginning of what you can find in the game now. Black and White outlines, bright colors, crazy environments, the works. I began developing my first level (which in the end turned out to be the final level). The environment for Planet X came quickly and I didn't stop myself from pushing on and finishing up all three levels throughout the day. I was just excited to work on a game like this.

I got the levels to Dekita and he began to implement them in to the code. His coding work was something that I stayed out of cue to the fact that he completely ripped out all default RGSS3 scripts from Ace and built the game practically from scratch, his own engine. As he worked, we talked through messages about what else we wanted to do. The ideas poured out of us and before we knew it, we had already planned out a game FAR too big for one month of development, but we were going to try anyways. As he coded, I worked on menus, logos, promotional materials, plot details, and so on. My enthusiasm was at an all time high and I just kept doing what I could.

After some time, we found ourselves on the final stretch. The weeks flew by and we were now staring at the end, which I imagine was staring at us back with a quirky grin as if to say "You're not going to do it, you are trying to do too much". We kicked our work in to high gear and cranked out some of the fastest work we had done all month. Some teams were putting finishing touches on their games, but we were still chugging along with new features, new ideas, and new systems.

Fast forward to three days left, we still are having ideas and are trying to implement them as quick as possible. Testing is becoming scarce as we keep trying to get things finished enough to play. While hope was never lost or even faltering, we did begin to feel the stress. Day before launch, we discuss our final feature, Survival Mode. The idea we had behind it, absolutely mind boggling. It was by far going to be one of the coolest things in the game, something we wanted to put in that would just make people go "wow". But time was against us. Neither of us were sleeping on a normal schedule and it was starting to wear on us both.



Final day. The Tech feature had to be cut and the Survival scene had to be simplified. We just did NOT have the time to perfect them as we envisioned. There just was not a possible way to get them done in the hours we had left. The final touches on everything were being done with literally a few hours to go, running as close to the deadline as 30 minutes in the end. The lack of testing time would later come back to bite us with a few glitches in the final product, but we weren't worried about that yet. Wiping the sweat from our brow, we finally decided it was time. 20 minutes to deadline, we uploaded and made our wish for the best. We cut it close, but we did it, we made a game in a month! That was a big enough deal to both of us that it overshadowed our anxiety... for a while.

As minutes went by, we began to notice problems in our own system. The anxiety came back, but the game had already shipped, there was no turning back. We both turned to the forums, waiting for feedback from players. A sigh of relief came over me when I read the first positive comment. It was then that I realized it. Our game was in no way perfect. It has bugs, it has issues, but it is our game. One that we worked hard on and that I am very proud of. Whether we win the grand prize or take last place matters not to me, I did what I set out to do and that was make a game I can be proud of. And while I can't speak for Dekita, I am sure he feels close to the same way. He coded an entire engine almost from scratch, implemented nearly every feature we wanted, and made everything look and play terrific! He deserves a major pat on the back for his work.

So in the end, it was an anxiety ridden month, but I would do it again and again. It really was a blast working on this game with Dekita, and I hope to make a common thing of our team-ups. The game, while not perfect, is done and ready to play. I hope you guys enjoy it at least half as much as I enjoyed working on it. We do plan on doing some major updates on the game, making it more stable, more beautiful, and re-implementing the systems that we originally had to cut, so there is still a lot to look forward to from EUA!

Thank you all for reading and for your time and support! You all have yourself a wonderful day and I will see you next time!