Warning: this blog has no screenshots, because I don't have too much to show at the moment. If you want a TL;DR, scroll to the bottom.

Let me preface what I'm about to say with the fact that this project started in March of 2010. Add it up! That's nearly nine whole years ago. Lots of things in my life have changed since then, and the overall vision of this project has evolved and morphed into something a lot different than what I anticipated at the start.

Of course, with the project being old as it is, there were a LOT of questionable design decisions made way back when. Decisions that were mostly made on a whim, without a ton of thought behind them: Battle mechanics, menu design, overall narrative, etc. Furthermore, the event code that makes all these things run were, dare I say, completely unmaintainable. Way back when I started this thing, I maybe had the know-how to make things tick the right way, but I didn't have a clue about how to make things generic enough to be re-usable and/or extendable whatsoever. Small changes would be scoped to days worth of effort due to the nature of how things were cobbled together. Lots of copy and paste, everywhere. Lots of insider-knowledge stuff, things that were impossible to parse when trying to understand why things were made the way they were. As you can probably imagine, this made things extremely difficult when trying to make any meaningful headway in terms of development on this project.

It goes without saying: This project is old, and it's got a lot of cobwebs to clean out. But, it has so many neat ideas that I want to show everyone! I don't know if I could begin to quantify how many hours have been spent working on this thing. It hasn't been continuous over the last nine years (hell, not even the last one year) but it must be thousands of hours at this point. I was doing a lot of significant work on this game in 2017, but got sidetracked when some real-life stuff got in the way (including needing to find a new job... TWICE! frig), and so I let TLS fall to the wayside while I focused on getting my life in a good place. This has happened at least a few times over the last near-decade. But the thing is, when I'm not actively working in the editor, or drawing stupid little pixels, or making music, or whatever else, I'm just simply ruminating on The Looming Spire. I've scrawled out hundreds of tiny ideas in tons of little notebooks (many of which have been lost to the annals of time), storyboarded so many little story events, and constantly thought and re-thought so many details that are, at the moment, nothing but fragments of the ether in my crazy head. I have also, of course, given up on this project many many times. I just keep coming back to it. At this point, it's almost unhealthy. I can't keep it internal anymore.

So, that brings me to the purpose of this blog post. The Looming Spire will be finished this year.

There, I said it. It's going to be finished, come hell or high water. I can't keep dreaming of what this project could be, and I can't let all the work poured into this thing go to waste. Even if no one plays the damn thing, I want to see it completed. I'm doing this for me, to finally say I've finished something with pride. With that, my motto for this year is

2019: FINISH. THE. GAME.


Ok. So there's my announcement. But what about all that other stuff I was talking about? How the game is completely unmaintainable, impossible to work with, etc? Well, sometime in 2017 or so, well after RPG Maker 2003 was given an official english translation, Cherry made some incredibly significant updates to the engine that made development of this project SIGNIFICANTLY EASIER. (The primary change being that when referring to "This Event" in Common Events it refers to the last map event in the call stack, which, man, I cannot overstate how useful that is for what I'm doing specifically).

As a result, I spent a huge amount of time re-writing the battle engine for this game. Of course, while deep in the guts of this game's mechanics, I decided to re-think some initial design decisions made, and have since decided to re-tool almost the entire thing. The Rune system works well outside of combat for puzzle solving and stuff, but the way the mechanics were implemented within a combat setting were clunky and without a real purpose or intent in mind. Status effects were confusing and unintuitive. Battles overall were pretty brain-dead and didn't really try to do anything interesting. So I figure, if I'm going to make this thing work, I might as well make it the best it can be and really go for it.

At this point, I've got all the initial design documentation in place. I've already refactored the entire battle engine to be much much much easier to work with, with all the enemy and battle mechanics in one place instead of scattered amongst hundreds of maps. I've also added in some new features and mechanics that I will introduce in a later blog post. Lastly, I'm currently working on re-designing the menus so they are more intuitive and much more informative (which, again, thanks to Cherry's updates, this is a hell of a lot easier to accomplish).

TL;DR: It's been nine years, but the game will be finished this year even if it kills me. Much of the core gameplay event programming in this game had to be re-worked, but it is now a lot easier to work with. Lots of big changes coming. Expect updates by the end of February.

Thanks for reading. Cheers.