Rescue Reidman IV

What do you do when you've worked on something so much and for so long that it's completely lost relevancy? An rpgmaker fangame about a website that was at it's peak over 20 years ago made in an engine that's been made obsolete by more than 3 different iterations? A game so old that even the people it's based around don't know/forgot about it?

WELL, this post isn't meant to be a guilt trip or even a proposal to play it but more of a way to understand this project and it's goals. I'm completely OK with the fact that very few people will ever play this game from this point on because for one it's not done and two it has an extremely small demographic, essentially people who like extremely challenging oldschool jrpgs with lots of "f u" moments.

However, even that small demographic is even more diluted by filtering out people who are fans of that genre but have no idea who reidman is or what website it's even based off of. What do you when your life's project seems to be sorta confined in a narrative that most people are not going to understand or care about? Then for the people that do manage to check it out while having no knowledge of the game's subject (which really isn't needed) they have to get past the janky introductions that were made when I was like 15-20 years old. It's not a super long intro but it's certainly a few minutes until you get to your first battle and that really isn't enough to hold people's attention these days. I'm not saying that in an inherently negative way, but there's just a LOT more content now then there was even 10 years ago. You got myriads of free games you can download in an instant that have DAYS of content!

With all that said it's really not right to expect people to dedicate the small amounts of freetime we get these days towards checking out something that isn't even finished and full of bugs which made me realize how totally amazing it is what some people can do by themselves in terms of coding and art assets and really just everything involved in making a game. Rescue Reid 4 barely has any of it's own assets, it's all borrowed from my favorite games and content which is one of the main reasons this will never be on steam or sold for any amount of money-- but even without having to make my own assets after 20 years all I've got is an unfinished game with a demo that's about 4-5ish hours long (or umm 10ish hours depending on what you do) that is in desperate need of polish.

How do people do it? How do people get these giant finished games they make themselves with custom art assets and giant anime pictures alongside text boxes and they do it within months? How do you make something without having to redo all your mechanics because a dungeon you made 5 years ago no longer fits the intended gameplay balance? I'm not exasperated but just astonished at what people can accomplish now that I've tried my hand at it over a 20 year period and only have this game to show for it.

To make one gameplay system takes like weeks upon weeks in itself to get the mechanics planned out to CODE the ridiculous thing using rpgmaker 2ks by now extremely archaic coding system while using your own picture files and variables to move things around and people just... get that shit done? In a reasonable time? Like seriously how do you do it lol

However, none of this is meant to be negative or anything because I love working on this game and I like what I've done so far. I do feel like I finally have a target I can reach now after all these years p much everything about this game has now been outlined by me and I think I can really finish it soon. Once it's finally finished then I feel I can maybe start working on revamping a few things here and there and giving it that polish I really want to give it but can't justify since there's so much else about the game that is unfinished.

Anyway I just want to reiterate none of this is meant to be guilt trippy or enticing anyone to play my game or do anything that they don't want to do because time is precious. It's more of a vent on how frustratingly long and tedious game design can be. Thanks for reading and take care!