The Book of True Will

Inspiration is a weird phenomenon. It often strikes from where you least expect it, is hard to track down afterwards and can leave you perplexed by your own trains of thought. The idea behind The Book of True Will is the result of a whole set of events which weren't even all connected, and of which some were extremely unlikely to even happen.

Funnily enough, this game came into existence as a sort-of spinoff of another game project which still only exists inside my head. When a very random joke gave me the idea for two NPCs who soon grew to be interesting enough to have their own story, the order reversed: The "spinoff" was getting made before the original game project that sparked it.

But in a way, the game's history goes way further back. Many years ago, me and my brother invented the fictional fantasy world of Terrein, in which my very first RPG Maker project was supposed to play. It was essentially the most uninteresting and cliché setting you could imagine, complete with ultimate magical swords and burnt down hometowns. Needless to say the game was never finished.
As the years went by, I began to recognize how utterly silly my old ideas were and, full of shame, abandoned them forever - or so I thought.

Bu then, the experience of some really great RPG Maker games rekindled my interest in game making and also made me recognize aspects of it I had never thought about before. The Book of True Will is my ninth(!) game project, and one of the few which I still think is promising enough to actually finish and release.
But those games also made me rethink certain things I had taken for granted before. I started to research subjects I had hardly had any interest in until then, and began communicating with people I had never imagined I would ever have contact with in my life.

These new perspectives and what I learned from them, as well as a seminar at university which I had visited not long before, ultimately inspired the basic plot idea. Among other things, this game is the expression of an important personal development I underwent myself.

As I started planning my other project and The Book of True Will, I found many of my ideas could work well in a more original medieval fantasy setting - in fact, those ideas were a possible key to making a fantasy setting more original. So I decided to unearth the world of Terrein again, cut out all the pointless nonsense and rework it into a hopefully more developed and mature setting, using my old ideas only as a background instead of as main plot points.

I can't promise everyone will like this game, especially if you are not fond of text-heavy RPGs. I will probably never call any of my own games "perfect", but I am quite pleased with what I've accomplished so far. And hopefully, as soon as it is completed, this will be true for the finished product as well.
But no matter what, I do know that making this game and the events that lead to its creation were important and influential experiences for me, and I hope it shows.