Visions & Voices

Before I begin, this is not being made in response to Craze's topic - though it is undoubtedly influenced by it.

Back in late May or early June of this year, Craze and I had an idea to make a game together. We had tried before but never actually succeeded. We talked it over for a few days and conceptualized the basics, and decided to give it the go ahead.

There was one major issue - it had to be released before Craze left to work for the summer. Last paragraph I mentioned that we had started games together before. Well, more then one of them had died over his two month-long excursions. We knew that if we did not finish it before he left it would be doomed to die. And so production began - and quickly.

I have never written so much in so little time. Craze was overworked too. We had to cut corners here and there to even have a prayer of finishing the damn thing, and it sure as hell showed in the final result. Though 'complete', the game was buggy and the battles extremely tedious. It also had issues with direction and terribly useless descriptions for pretty much everything in the game. Our deadline came and Craze had to leave, so that is how it would stay. To paraphrase all three of V&V's old reviews, the game "lacked direction, had horribly conceived battles and useless descriptions, but the writing was neat and the feats system was cool".

Craze came back during August. He didn't seem interested in working on V&V again at first, but a comment in IRC sparked him to at least fix up the most broken aspects of the game. So we spent another three weeks working on it. Craze did most of the work, entirely reworked the way the battles play, and the game actually became relatively enjoyable to play through - at least to some people. At least the beta testers, anyway.

So we released again, at both places we previously had and new ones. We actively advertised our game out of the community before to get more exposure, so we did again. Results were fairly typical. Some places seemed to like it, some didn't. Oh well. It put us well over 2,000 downloads, which is pretty okay for a game that's only existed for a few months.

And that's the basic history of the project.



As for the fiasco that occurred afterwards, well...Craze probably had good intentions, but in his haste, ego and pride he had one too many snap judgments and posted a generally terrible topic on pretty much every RM* forum out there. Like pretty much everyone, we wanted to make a game that was fun that people could talk about. But it's not like you can create this situation artificially, either, and I think Craze lost sight of that at his most frustrated. We will try harder and hopefully be more successful next time.



Karsu, over and out ~