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So what's the deal with this game?

  • Volrath
  • 03/07/2021 05:56 PM
  • 543 views
I've been trying to make this game in one way or another for the last ten years. Although my best known stuff is pretty typical Eastern RPG storytelling, some of my best childhood gaming memories are the Might and Magic series. These games had the bare minimum when it comes to story and were really about wandering around an open world as your characters got more skilled. This is an old series and the first two games are so primitive that they are basically unplayable now. However, Might and Magic III to Might and Magic VII are still a ton of fun and I inevitably end up replaying one of them every couple of years. After VII, things started to go awry for the series.

I wanted to make a game that captured some of the fun of that series but I knew I didn't really have the skill or the means to create a true open-world game in RPG Maker. So I decided to attempt a mixture of free-roaming gameplay with a fairly detailed story of the lead character's school life. In Might and Magic, your characters can wander the woods for literally weeks with no negative consequences except potentially running out of food. It wouldn't really make sense for my teenage character to disappear into the wilderness and live as a hermit, so I had to work on balancing the story and the open-endedness. Combined with the control I wanted to give players over how Bradley's skill development, I knew this would be a challenging project. But challenging ourselves is good, right?

Originally, I was going to make this on RPG Maker VX. Then I heard VX Ace was on the way so I did some general planning while I waited for that to come out. Once it did, I tried to get some of the immediate needs out of the way quickly - I got some art help from Ronove and Lunarea and Fomar helped turn some of my ideas into scripts that are now the backbone of this game. Things went well for a while and eventually, I put Legacy on hiatus to do X-Noir with Stoic (perhaps better known as ArtBane).

After X-Noir came our foray into commercial gaming with Labyrinthine Dreams, which took quite a while to finish despite its short length. I want to choose my next words carefully. Given the crowded indie game market, I feel like LD did reasonably well given its small size and the small price that inevitably comes with that. I'm glad we did it and I'm grateful for the experience. But I would be lying if I said there wasn't something a little disillusioning about it too. It was clear that making games would never be a career that could actually support me. It's a bit like a joke I remember from Will O'Neill (who has also made a few commercial games in RPG Maker): "Maybe someday I'll make a true indie hit...and then I'll be able to turn down two whole freelance jobs."

There are a lot of things you have to worry about with commercial games that are pretty far removed from the fun parts of it, i.e. creating. Some of the satisfaction I remembered from doing MotW and other projects was lost and I missed it. I didn't really use RPG Maker for a long time afterwards. What I needed was to return to it as a hobby without the extra pressures. More recently, I came back to Legacy with fresh eyes and murdered a few darlings in order to make completing it seem more feasible. And what do you know, I've actually gotten close to wrangling this thing into a functional demo that I can share with you guys.

A lot of time has passed and I'm not sure how many people are left who remember MotW and really care what I'm doing now. But perhaps folks will stumble on this page and be intrigued. I'll be giving a lot more details on the game itself during the next few weeks while I try and get the demo ready for a release. Peace bros!

Posts

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Think a lot of people remember and would love to return to Master of the wind universe. Shame it's using the Ace tileset though, compared to XP it's just a bit blegh.
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