YE OLDE ANCIENT SCREENSHOTS TOPIQUE

this is just my OLD (not-recent) folder of VX games, on this laptop. My old laptop has even more, including Rastaban above.

I don't have any 2/k3 games on this laptop, or the srpg95 game I released a while back (with custom graphics) but took down because it's just a little too gay, in that the characters were obnoxiously gay in the butt-sex way, not the derogatory way.



A few more random screens, from Dracocide and Amazing Grace. The former was mostly just coding for the party/character creation system.

LockeZ
Craze. I am... well, impressed isn't the right word. But I am in awe.

I mean I'm sure a couple of those folders are probably not games, and a few are finished, but seriously HOLY JESUS. That's just for VX?

Just for VX within the past year or two. Some (like Geondun and old V&V (not the "Visions & Voices" folder, which is the remake)) are my own older games I've downloaded off of here, just 'cuz. Other games I've lost completely, like Rastaban.

Curse you! One of my few RM projects that didn't get eaten in a Windows+hard drive shit storm * is a RM95 game but I can't open it on Windows 7 at all to take screens!

* A fun experience reinstalling Windows XP. One of my hard drives was pretty big (relatively) and XP pre-SP1 or 2 would have troubles reading/writing to it. Except I didn't know and Windows never told me, it kept trucking along with there wasn't a problem randomly corrupting data all over. After a bit I start noticing a lot of shit was getting corrupted and I did some research when I realized the problem. Unfortunately by then I had lost huge swaths of data all over and a bunch of old RM games pretty much got mortally wounded. I managed to scavenge some bits out of them and shoved them into the bonus area of Demon's Gate.

I started quite a few projects, most never really got anywhere. Two that did which didn't get shoved into Demon's Gate and still had some traces to work with were Age(s) of Darkness II ** and Leaves of the Shadow Tree.

** AoD1 was never finished and it was never consistent if it was Age or Ages. Dumb shit really.



Age(s) of Darkness 2 was my response to the problem I had with the plot of AoD1: Some kid and his dragon go out on quest because there is literally nothing else for them to do. Yeah that's a plot point. The whole thing was made up as I went along. AoD2 was marginally better in I thought up of some vague plot points that would happen in some kind of sequential order and I'd work out the details later. Plus it had politics and military stuff and everybody loves that and it would make my game an instant success, right? Ignore that the main character didn't have a defined personality and did a complete 180 about 10 minutes into the game.


Game starts, General and Lieutenant are going to take a city! However this isn't Suikoden so it comes down to a two man commando team infiltrating the city to do it. So of course the two most important people in the army go to do it because that's what generals do, right?


(big image)

Around here is where I discovered the dumb shit way of doing two layered maps. There was one cool thing is that you could do this early dungeon one of two ways: Infiltrate the castle and take the King or open the gate and let your troops in and it would have repercussions throughout the game. There were some extra little events like walk here and guard show up just to make fights even more frequent as I also left in random encounters here. There were also NoProgress guards you couldn't defeat but could run from. You could pick a fight with any guard but the NoProgress guards looked distinctly different on the map at least. My mapping sucked pretty hard too, what a completely bland place. You could probably find a place where it was nothing but you and orange tiles surrounding you.



The army wasn't no pansy uniformed army! The army was everybody that I could cram in from the 1.3 RTP including a Dragon Ball Z character! After the invasion you take control of the lieutenant who compared to the general was pretty shitty both in combat and in character. Based on what you did in the invasion means you get a different antagonist who poisons you and in order to get cured you have to go to the Science Academy because Science can do anything! At least because you're a lieutenant you get an escort which doesn't consist of the general this time. I decided to put a name to about half the army with their unique sprite, give them two moves, and have the game randomly put two in your party along with a mandatory third. He even shows up in cutscenes. The most acknowledgement the other two get is that they won't show up in town to give NPC talk. Guess who disappears into oblivion ten minutes later in the game!



Around this point the wider community was discovering that custom menus on top of the default one and alternative ways of learning skills beyond levelling up might help create cool gameplay mechanics and separate your game from the storm of others! I hopped into that band wagon too! Unfortunately my CMS was lost to time (thankfully) but I still had part of a skill learning menu (oh fuck me! While Science is occurring the lieutenant can choose one of eight elements to start learning skills in. Win a fight, get points, accumulate points and learn a skill! Learning a skill unlocks others. Nothing too fancy and I needed to make a menu for it but shit like showing current points and number of points seemed too much to me so I made a contender for ugliest menu ever. There's supposed to be a finger graphic that got eaten but I don't think that'll help a whole lot. The other two main characters also had a different way of learning skills but fuck if I remember what they were. Same with what was on the top menu besides the first option being a way to open the real menu and a second to open the above horror.



Dungeons sucked too. I think this was the second or third, a crystal cave. Featuring some paths, my favorite puzzle the teleporter maze, and this thing that's about as much of a puzzle as asking the player to guess what card I have in my hand. When you step on the suspended bridge a tension meter starts filling up in the corner. When it fills up you get sent back to the start. If you make it to the other side and flip a switch you can progress! Riveting, isn't it?


I don't remember too much more of the game. Most of the content got replaced by empty maps that trying to play result in Stream Errors. Half the graphics got nuked too. Those SimRPG faces on the character list were replacements for what basically disappeared. The top menu common event still exists but not the graphics. And then there's this fantastic message:



I don't know what it means. If I keep the map open that causes this error it will keep coming back to the point you need task manager to kill it. I don't even know what on earth that Lucifer shit is. It's just very fucking dead. Good riddance.



Leaves of the Shadow Tree
Then there's this: The only remaining evidence of an XP game I started. It didn't get that far, it spent most time in design hell where I couldn't make a decision of where to take it at all. I did spend some time looking at RGSS and realizing that the default shit fucking sucked and I should start my own. I don't remember how far I got exactly. I know the item menu was kinda functional. The objective window at the top was a marquee window too that went through a few iterations until I found out how to make it not suck and it got ported to my VX projects at least. I still like some of the stuff I did with it and I've been meaning to integrate it into future projects but then I forget about it or get lazy or something. I think I did all of that with bitmaps too. No separate sprites or anything like that and it basically ran like ass compared to what you'd expect out of a menu system.

And yes I know it should be 'Riddler'. It's the fucking Fed Ex arrow to me for that video.

Are those "ye olde" projects, Craze? XD

Watch out for the wall, supervillain!