Chase for Divinity! It's Here!

Hello everyone! To get Chase for Divinity out in time for the Revive the Dead deadline, I stayed up way too late last night but was able to release the game! That's right! The game is complete and ready to go!

First things first, though, if you haven't played any RPG Maker 2000 or 2003 games before this, you'll need to install the fonts or the game will look wonky. If you have this problem, go to the Chase for Divinity folder, and inside find a folder called rm2k_fonts. Install the fonts onto your computer and it should fix the font issue.

Secondly, I find that the game (on my computer, at least) has a tendency to lag in the default full-screen mode, however windowed mode seems to work a lot better. To go to windowed mode, press ALT ENTER at any time.

With that said, please enjoy this game I started over a decade ago. The rest of this blog will be dedicated to describing my feelings on the game-reviving process itself, so if you want to go ahead and play now, please do so by all means and feel free to come back to the rest of this later, if you want ^_^

PS: Try examining random objects. You never know what you might find or what your party might say in response!

Reviving the Game

I was tempted to just call this game PROJECT: OLD SHAME, given how old it is and how many little things are in it that I wish were better. However, the whole point of the Revive the Dead contest was to take something that never saw the light of day and get it completed, so that's what I've done. With that said, I'd like to speak of some of the less-than-perfect details you might want to be on the lookout for when playing this game:

Errors to Look For

These are things that you may find in the game that I'd very much like to hear about so I can fix. Given the one-month deadline and the myriad mistakes in the game, it's inevitable that I've missed some of these mistakes (and in fact I'm getting feedback on some of them already XD)

• Character Name Errors: When I came back to this project, I wasn't happy with most of the characters names. They were based on silly things like personal in-jokes or names that I just didn't think suited the characters, so I changed most of them. This was a lot more work than I expected as I had to go back and put their new names over their old dialog events, one by one. If you see a name that doesn't match the character, please let me know so I can fix it!

• Music Errors: I think most aspiring RPG Makers tend to go a bit overboard in the music department when they first start, and I was no different. I had to massively cut back the amount of songs in the game for this release. Which means, if the engine is told to look for a song that got cut, it will just play silence instead. The biggest occurrence of this is the battle music. If you find a spot where the battle music cuts out and goes silent, please let me know about it. Generally, I put a lot of events that will fix this, so you probably won't have silence as your battle theme for long, but it's still something I want to nip in the bud.

• Spelling, Grammar, and Punctuation Errors: Okay, I'm not really asking for you to contact me every time you find one of these, as that's pretty much asking everyone to be an uber-dedicated tester/editor, but I wanted you to be aware of this at least. I found at least a hundred errors like this, which means there very well may be a hundred more (I was super-terrible about it back then, especially in regards to spelling).

• Resource Crediting: Until recently, I've been very poor about crediting resources where deserved. This game has a good deal of rips in it when it comes to graphics, and I didn't keep track of where I got resources back in the day. The part that concerns me most is resources that I took from other RPG Maker developers, so if you see something that you know is someone else's work, please let me know and I'll add it to the credits file.

The Mistakes of One's Youth

This section is about mistakes that are either intrinsic to the game itself or I just don't have time to fix. It's more an acknowledgement of the fact that most of this game was made when I was a teenager who was still learning the fundamentals of GAM MAK.

• Mapping and Connecting Maps: While most of the maps are playable enough and somewhat decent, many don't pass on the standards I hold myself to today. That's probably pretty obvious, I mean I've come a long way in twelve years. But what I find maddening is the way I used to do doors. I'd have a door on the top of the map, and when you enter it, you're taken to the top of the next map! Which means, if you aren't paying attention and keep pressing up, you could cycle indefinitely between the two maps. I initially wanted to fix every instance of this, but it happened so often that I abandoned that notion in order to make the deadline.

• Random Encounters: Okay, I'm going to state up-front that I don't think random encounters are inherently bad. However, they've become a real turn-off to a lot of people so I wanted to mention them here. Yes, this game has random encounters. If that's not your thing, I apologize. Luckily, however, thanks to a really awesome series of eventing by Corfaisus, I was able to fine-tune the encounter rate a whole lot, which made it 100 times better than it was originally.

• The Battle System: I could spend weeks and weeks refining the battle system and still not be completely satisfied. Hero's skills, monster skills, hero stats, monster stats... it's all very rough around the edges. I fixed up a few things over the month, but the rest are kinda just there, for better or worse.

• The Monster Graphics: The monster graphics may have gone through the most revision as I tried to pick this project back up over the years. They started as RTP and SNES rips, then were all redrawn by me, and then the poorer ones were re-redrawn again years later. There were even a couple that were bad enough that I replaced them with monster sprites from an upcoming XP game (this only happened a few times though). This all makes them lack a visual cohesion, and the majority of the sprites are the early-drawn ones that have colored pixels past their outlines and look generally poor. Again, while I tried to touch them all up with highlights and shadows, there was no way I could have redrawn them all in time.

• The Facesets: The heroes faces also went through a lot of redrawing over the years. I redrew most of the face art once again for this release. The problem is that originally, almost every NPC character had an RTP face, and it clashes horribly with my style. So you'll come across several NPCs whose faceset's now just state who they are rather than actually having a picture. And now you'll know why XD

• The Way Items are Listed is a Mess: This goes to show that you should always sort out what sort of restorative items you want in your game beforehand rather than making them up as you go along. It's not as big of a deal in VX Ace, but in 2000, you'll notice that you'll have to scroll all the way down your inventory to use some items, as 2002-unity didn't plan ahead. Luckily, these items are usually the rarer ones, but it's still unprofessional and not cool.

• The Character's Examination-Commentary Is Static If You Backtrack: You have probably noticed that you can examine most things to get your characters to chime in with their opinions or observations. But if you go back to older dungeons, you will find characters saying the same thing they did when you fist visited those dungeons. I just didn't have time to go through every event and update it if the situation surrounding the comment had changed.

• The Character's Examination-Commentary Abruptly Ends At the Final Dungeon: The title pretty much says it all. I had never gotten around to putting the commentary on each and every event in the final dungeon. Given that you split all the characters in two groups, I'd basically have to write a different comment for every character for every event, and that just wasn't feasible.

• The Ending Is Rushed: Again, exactly what it says on the tag. I almost didn't have the game done in time and the ending was pieced together from old notes and memories. I also specifically had created a park map where you were supposed to be able to talk to all of your party members and ask them questions. That didn't get put in due to time constraints. I may add it in sometime in a future release.

But I'm Happy that the Game Lives!

Okay, enough of me harping on my own game. It's just real easy to do when you're remaking it and all the flaws seem highlighted in neon. After all I've said, I'm still proud of the game, and I think it's a fun journey with interesting characters. I hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading my long-winded rambling as I looked back at a game I started so long ago!