MAX MCGEE'S PROFILE

There is another kind of RPG that is not digital but analogue. Without this ancient form of RPG we would not have RPGs as Square-Enix and kentona make them today. There are a lot of these old "books with games inside". And I mean a lot. Most of you guys could probably name D&D, Pathfinder (which is essentially D&D), maybe Shadowrun (that's the one I worked for), Vampire, maybe some of the Warhammer ones...but there are hundreds. Thousands, probably. And the vast majority of them are dead and unsupported.

I should know. I ran a tabletop RPG publishing company for over five years. 95% of the tabletop games you see on Kickstarter are CRAP just like 95% of everything is crap.



It is also made by amazingly prolific reviewer and tester/human game guinea pig/general betterer of RMN kumada who some of you might know. (I think that might be his voice on the video, not sure, but I'm almost positive he wrote what's being said.)

More importantly, it's been pitched to me as Vampire Hunter D meets The Oregon Trail meets The Way. I have only two words for that premise:

DO WANT!

You should check it out on Kickstarter and learn more.

Now I've gotta say goodbye for a little while.
<3
Max

P.S. The reCaptcha challenge is more of a game than probably 10% of the games on this site lol. I played it three times while making this post.

I love the Souls series. To me, they are some of the best videogames {Kanye} of all time {/Kanye}. I love for their challenge. I love them for their brutal difficulty. I love them for their incredible atmosphere and for their make-the-player-work-for-it approach to storytelling and worldbuilding. I love them for the fist pumping, chest beating rush of triumph I feel when I scream "YEAH, MOTHERFUCKER!" at the top of my lungs (scaring the shit out of my girlfriend and my dog: my cat doesn't give a fuck) upon actually beating one of their absurdly cheap bosses, a euphoric adrenaline rushing in my brain.

I self identify as "masocore". (A word I only learned on RMN five years ago from kumada, FWIW.)

The reason I was able to beat Demon's Souls, in hindsight, is probably because it allowed you to farm arbitrarily large numbers of healing items in some late-middlegame areas. They fixed this problem in the spiritual sequel, Dark Souls with Estus Flasks. (For whatever reason, Bloodborne did nothing for me.)

I never beat Dark Souls. After picking it up and putting it down and picking it up and putting it down and picking it up and putting it down I managed, somehow, somehow, somehow, to FINALLY beat Ornstein and Smough. This still feels like one of the greatest achievements of my life. Note that I did not say one of the greatest GAMING achievements of my life. I own a company that lets me make my living making games. I somehow tricked a girl that is actually attractive into staying with me for ten years. I survived a small-bowel resection surgery under general anesthesia and went on to tell about it. I count defeating Ornstein and Smough among these achievements.

But beyond Ornstein and Smough was the bullshit crystal caverns and the double bullshit boss fight with Seath the Scaleless and you know what, Seath? I'm fucking done. Eat a dick. I'm out.

I never beat Dark Souls II. My momentum was good, my morale was good, most of the bosses were little more than speedbumps. Then I got to what I thought was the end of the game, and upon getting an idea of how much of the game was left after I defeated the Mirror Knight (in less than 10 tries, I think) I just kind of collapsed from exhaustion.

I am stuck on the final, final, really for real final boss of Dark Souls III.

I have been stuck on him since late May. I say I've been stuck since June, that doesn't mean I've actively been trying and failing that entire time. That would be the definition of insanity. No, I think in late May and early June I was still pretty chuffed over having finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, FINALLY beaten Prince Lothric, which only took 109 tries (twice as many tries as Aldrych, which in turn took twice as many tries as Pontiff Sulyvahn) and which I genuinely thought was the final boss of the game...until I found out about the next boss. The true final boss.

The Soul of Cinder.

In early June, I tried to beat the Soul of Cinder and lost as often as I could find free time to lose to him. By late June, I was limiting myself to three tries a day to avoid becoming frustrated. In July, I think I might only have taken five cracks at him total, for the whole month. I haven't played Dark Souls III once during the entire month of August, and I am strongly considering putting disc away in the case, and putting the case away on my shelf, and just accepting that I am a 30 year old man and that I will die without ever having beaten a game in the Dark Souls.

Is that okay? Because for whatever fucking reason, it doesn't FEEL okay.
I would almost rather go to the dentist and say "three root canals please, no sedation" than pick up that controller and throw my brain and eye-hand coordination and my PS4 controller at that unbeatable fucking boss (which hundreds of people have beaten and some of the smug bastards have probably done it on a challenge build or on a speedrun or something) one more fucking time. Yet there is a part of me that feels like if I were to shelve the game and give up on the momentum that has gotten me this far I would never be able to respect myself for the rest of my life, knowing that I had come that far, been that close, to beating Dark Souls IIIwhen the Soul of Cinder had broken my spirit, and I had fled into the night, and obscurity.

There are really three types of responses I'm looking for here:

• Telling me that it is okay to accept I will never beat the last boss of a videogame about imaginary knights and bonfires and make-believe dragons and demons without permanently losing a measure of my self respect.
• Telling me that I'm being a giant pansy and it's time to "GIT GUD" and get back in there and fight the Soul of Cinder until my PS4 breaks or my sanity breaks or I fucking beat him.
• Any actual tangible advice for actually BEATING the motherfucker (I can tell you my build if any of you are crazy enough/determined enough to have made it anywhere near this far in the game, or even worse, if any of you crazy mofos have actually beaten him)

First post in quite a while,
- Max

P.S. I've actually had this happen to me twice before in my life: getting stuck on the VERY LAST BOSS of a videogame and being unable to beat it. It happened to me with Parasite Eve and it happened to me with Final Fantasy IX, neither of which, to the best of my recollection, I ever beat. Even now, a decade and a half later, I still have the savegames, frozen on the precipice of victory, but never to see those end credits. I never got as philosophical about it either them. I was a teenager back then. And now, I am old.

So, lately (for perhaps my last five years of sporadic on and off gam mak) I've had a higher than average amount of trouble sticking to projects long enough to finish them before losing interest in gam mak generally, coming back later, and starting something else that was "new and exciting" at the time. You know how the cycle goes.

And I've found it downright impossible for the last five years to bring anyone on board to help with one of my projects without that person flaking out or vanishing into the internet and turning into a pumpkin at some crucial point where I really needed their contribution to keep me motivated and on task. Often I get super talented and/or semi-famous people who offer to collab or at least pitch in but then they flake out and/or disappear. And honestly, I've been kind of an on-and-off flaky internet pumpkin myself for blueperiod, the creator of the spectacular LINUS, and I feel pretty ashamed about that.

The last...six...serious projects I launched the development of, I told myself something like "it's reasonable to have this be a freeware game to start, and then to consider monetizing it and taking it commercial once I have a substantial amount of progress done, if I'm impressed with the results I have and it seems to "deserve" commercialization. This seemed like a reasonable position at the time.

So I thought to myself today: I make tabletop games as a business, and in that arena my rate of finishing and releasing products is damn near 100%. Because there are financial stakes and it feels real, like work. Getting bored and losing interest doesn't even feel like an option because products have overhead costs and consumers have preorders through KS and so on, i.e. there is MONEY involved.

So my question is...if I monetize a project as commercial from the getgo will that increase the chances that I will stay on board to finish and release something?

More importantly, if I "put my money where my mouth is", will it make internet dev help (i.e. "hiring a team" or "hiring a partner") a reliable, viable option? Or even with paychecks and commissions on the line, do people still flake out and turn into internet pumpkins regularly in the vidya sector?

Even more importantly, if I declare a priori that the design of "Game Project XYZ" will be a business from the outset, will gam mak still be fun?

It occurs to me that these questions seem of interest to devs in general, so please discuss?

This thread is "I think out loud while trying to figure out how to accomplish something simple with RGSS3 and you all laugh at how badly I'm failing/offer suggestions how to fail less". If anyone else finds even the simplest scripting tasks as paralyzingly unapproachable as I do, maybe this will help you with the learnings.

The script in question I am trying to leverage is "Yanfly Engine Ace - Lunatic States Package - Punishment v1.01" and specifically an add-on scriptlet somebody (I'm not sure who) made for it to allow a 'DOOM' or 'Death Sentence' effect a la Final Fantasy.


What I am trying to accomplish is a Gradual Petrify status again a la Final Fantasy. After a few turns, the character will be turned to stone.

The first thing I did was set up a stone state, State 24 in my database. It makes an actor unable to act and it has no removal conditions (so you'd need a 'Stone to Flesh' spell or a Soft-equivalent item to cure it). Its traits set Target Rate, Physical Damage Rate, Magical Damage Rate, and Floor Damage Rate all to 0%, so the effected actor shouldn't be targeted by enemies and if they are, all damage they take will be reduced to 0%. Then I added State Resists for all negative status effects because statues can't bleed, be poisoned, etcetera.

Now basically it looks to me like this Punish Effect No. 9 does exactly what I want, it just inflicts the wrong state. So what I'm going to do is basically copy it, change the name, change the comments, and change the state it inflicts.

What I wound up with including my comments looks like this, and is pasted right below the existing Doom effect:


Now all I need to do should be to create an "About To Get Stoned" state which I will call "Flesh To Stone" (State 25). It doesn't do anything on its own and it goes away at the end of battle and in three turns. It has a " <leave effect: petrify> " note tag in its Notes box.

There. That...should...work? I know it doesn't do a couple things I want it to do. Multiple applications of State 25 won't cause State 24 to trigger immediately, but I can live without that. Additionally, every actor being Petrified won't trigger a game over effect like it probably should which is a slightly bigger problem.

To all of you makers out there, I think all of us have experienced this: just as motivation drain is really grinding you down on a project you're trying to haul towards completion, a bolt of inspiration strikes you for a new game, maybe in the form of some new graphics that became available, a new mechanic you want to try out, or just a yen to work on a game with a different setting/theme.

Suddenly, the prospect of starting the new game makes you feel like a kid on Christmas morning, and the prospect of continuing your current project seems like doing homework in your least favorite subject.

How often do you have this happen and how do you handle it?