Sorry for the long delay, everyone, but Act III is finally here. RMN's crashing when I try to upload something, so download it here: http://projectbc.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/act-iii-released/

Act II received over 17,000 downloads in its first week. Let's shoot to break that record!

Being the final chapter of Vacant Sky, this marks the completion of the game after six long years in development.

Six long, long years.

When I first came up with the idea for Vacant Sky, I was a freshman in high school. I never could have foreseen what kinds of things would happen in my life along the long journey I had decided to undertake. I hadn't even thought about graduation or college or the other major changes to my life that would later catch me by surprise.

The past couple years of my life have been very trying, both mentally and emotionally. As odd as it might sound, Vacant Sky has remained one of few constants in my life. Even when I moved hundreds of miles away from home, even when I began to live in a new place without knowing a single other soul, even when my best friends cut their ties with me, I always went back to working on this game at the end of the day.

It's almost kind of a joke among the people who live with me. In fact, this past week, I've had a chorus of "so how's that Act III coming?" and "how's that midnight release going to turn out?" and "You said it was going to be done six months ago." Well, it's done now, so suck it.

There are a lot of people who need to be thanked, but there's one person who deserves special recognition. My apologies, as this is going to be kind of a long story.

I don't think anyone in my family ever really took me seriously when I decided that I wanted to make video games. To them, it surely was a joke I would weeks later be embarrassed when they brought it up, like when I wanted to be a writer, or a physicist. In fact, when I first started, it was just kind of a cool idea. I don't think I expected to ever finish it, but it was an idea I was possessed with and I resolved to teach myself whatever skills I needed to in order to realize it.

As work on what would become Act I became serious, I started to realize that it was something I really enjoyed doing. I loved bringing ideas and stories and worlds to life in ways that people could directly interact with. I loved creating experiences that people would share and discuss with each other. As my high school years flew by, I became more and more set on the idea of pursuing it as a career. Of course, I didn't think that was something you could really study in school, so it remained a distant dream in the back of my mind.

When the time came to start thinking about colleges, my grandmother took me on a fateful trip to the east coast to visit a number of different universities. I toured Harvest and MIT and a number of other prestigious places. At the end of the trip, however, we visited a small school in Worcester, Mass that I had heard a friend talk about before, WPI. I took the tour and sat in on a seminar about their game development program, where I immediately fell in love. I never really said so, since the rest of my family still thought that making video games was a joke of a dream. But memories of what I saw there and the awe it inspired in me remained in the back of my mind for the next couple of years.

When senior year rolled around and I started applying to schools, I made WPI my top priority. That's when I started making it clear that game development was what I wanted to do. As I expected, my family (and most of my friends) thought it was a joke and encouraged me to apply to a real program. But my grandmother reminded me that our family couldn't afford to support me financially in college, so I would have to take out loans to pay for it. Since I would be paying for the entirety of my own education, she told me to pick out whatever school I wanted and to study whatever I wanted. So, I did. I would later be accepted into and attend WPI.

I think my grandmother sympathized with the fact that I had a hard time relating to the other students in my high school, that I never really had any great friends in the area. Over the years, she came to hear stories from me about all these wonderful friends I had met online and from time to time, helped me arrange travel so that I could meet them. Along the often several hour long car rides, we would talk--about my real friends, about what it was like only knowing someone over the internet, about my dreams of the future, and so on. I came to tell her a lot about my dream of making games. She encouraged me to tell her about this game I had been working on for years, even though she knew nothing about computers or video games. Most of the time, she just smiled and nodded, but I could tell from her curiosity and the way she asked questions that she was genuinely trying to understand me.

I often got frustrated with why she would keep asking me about Vacant Sky when she freely admitted that she had no idea what I was talking about. I eventually came to realize that it was the only way she could really relate to me. She knew nothing about computers and we shared no common interests, but she knew that it was something which meant a lot to me, so she wanted to try to understand it better so that she could relate to me and converse with me. I was a lot closer to her than anyone else in my family and she was the only one who showed an interest in what I loved doing. As much as she complained about all the traveling I did, she was always happy and wished me well when I left, because she knew how much those visits mattered to me, how much I reveled in being able to meet with people whom I actually considered close friends.

During my freshman year of college, I completed Act I of Vacant Sky. By some astronomical coincidence, its release date was also my grandmother's birthday.

I was so proud that I finally had proof to show her that all my work and frustrations and passion and tears had paid off. I stood beside her at her desktop, explaining the controls and getting impatient at how she just didn't "get" it. She would stop constantly to ask how to open a door, or what such-and-such word meant, or why I was using such awful language, or what it meant to "save." We got frustrated pretty quickly; clearly, she just didn't grok video games on a fundamental level, so it ended pretty quickly. But I was at least able to give her a CD of the music. As she drove a lot, she was able to listen to it a lot. And music was something she could understand. She would talk at lengths about how pretty the music was or how much she liked such-and-such song or how she couldn't believe that I had had a hand in its creation.

When I was back at school, I would occasionally get calls from her asking about how to play the game (how many times did she ask me how to close a message box?). Eventually, I got fed up with her inability to understand and stopped taking her calls. She must have assumed that I was just busy with school, as she left voicemails asking how I was doing and frequently with questions and frustrated stories about how she tried to play the game but got hung up on such-and-such thing that she couldn't understand. From time to time, I would call back and tell her how school was going and how much I loved being immersed in an environment with people I could relate to. I loved where I was, what I was studying, and whom I was around. For the first time in my life, I loved everything about where I lived. Unfortunately, that was a couple hundred miles from home, so I could only see her a couple times a year.

I'm ashamed to admit it now, but it got to the point where I got so frustrated with her mountain of voicemails that I stopped listening to them and just let them pile up.

In the summer after my freshman year of college, she died in a car accident. I was devastated. I suddenly felt completely isolated when I was at home. No one at home understood my dream, or what I was doing, or how much it all meant to me. No one came close to being able to relate to me like she did. My life changed a lot very quickly and I changed a lot as a person.

During my sophomore year, I opened my voicemail inbox for the first time in months and rediscovered all of her old voicemails which I had never listened to. I listened to them, hearing her concerns about how I was doing, or my studies, or why I never answered her calls, and how she was trying her best to figure out "that stupid game." I broke down and cried. I hated myself. In spite of how she knew she couldn't understand computers or games, she only wanted to experience what it was that I had dedicated my life to, and I just got frustrated and ignored her, never realizing that she was just clinging to the only way she had of relating to me, and the only way she had of connecting with me when I was hundreds of miles away from home.

Thank you, grandma. Thank you for everything. Thank you for believing in my dream and helping me make it a reality. Without your encouragement, I wouldn't be here, with the best friends I've ever had, with the path to achieving everything I've ever wanted laid out in front of me.

And thank you to everyone who contributed to Vacant Sky in some way. God knows that I couldn't have done it without you.

Thank you Isabel for sticking with me through thick and thin, for calling me out on stupid ideas, for telling me when I was being an idiot, and for still sticking with me even when I was. Without your support, your ideas, your perseverance, and your graphical talent, Vacant Sky never would have gotten off the ground.

Thank you Lauren for listening to my late night rants about esoteric scripting and eventing and story problems, for encouraging me when I got frustrated, and for helping out in every way you could.

Thank you Tyler for pointing out every nitpicky flaw in every version of every game and not flipping out when they would go unfixed for the next six months.

Thank you Tarranon for working with us to pump out 77 songs for the soundtrack and for listening to my occasionally flakey whims when it came to designing them. You'll never admit it, but your music is part of what makes the game so great and its scenes so memorable, and everyone else knows it!

Thank you Salice for your beautiful, if ever-belated, character portraits. Your style has become one of the game's major identifying features.

Thank you Charil for pulling through when I really needed it. I needed a voice of Auria with only a week to spare and you not only read all the material, learned the character, and studied the scripts, but you got all of the voiceovers in on time every time. You've done a phenomenal job and just know that there's a reason I didn't cut out voices in the game completely. (Spoiler: It's you!)

Thank you Dave for first mentioning WPI to me. You'll never know how much that impacted my life. If it hadn't been for you, I never would have heard about this place.

And although you'll never read this, thank you Janell for hearing all of my crazy ideas and rants about Vacant Sky from day 1. Even though we both knew back then that the game would never end up being made (ha!), we still spent hours chatting and laughing about it. Your support and encouragement really helped me get started in the early days. I always looked up to you and thought you were so cool. Back then, my dream was to make this game so that I could impress you. Getting your respect was something I dreamed about for so long. I wonder now if I'll ever be able to succeed at that.

I'm sure there's someone else I forgot--if so, sorry!

I think that about covers it. Please enjoy the final part of Auria's journey. I hope it's as much of an adventure for you as it was for me.

-Bishop Myers