The Seven Seals

Happy Wednesday, my dudes!

Let me give a quick update on the game's progress first. Dyluck, kenlan, and Dante_Selvar have all graciously stepped up and agreed to play through the game. While they test it, I don't have much to do except sit here and wait for a bug report to come in. Then, when one does come in, there's a nice explosion of activity that's usually preceded by me reading their PM and saying to myself "that is a stupid error. That is such a stupid error. How did I miss that?"

So, since it's not like I have anything else to do it's a slow day at work, okay? I decided to try and be more interesting. (If you haven't read that article yet, do yourself a favor and spend 5 minutes on it.)

Specifically, I wanted to talk about inspiration. If it's not clear from the gamepage, The Seven Seals is inspired by a lot of different RPGs (and non-RPGs and non-video games) from a variety of different eras. This includes games like Final Fantasy 5 and Dragon Quest 3 and, if you know a thing or two about RPGs, you know that those are old games.

However, I'm not an old guy.

As I mentioned in a prior blog post, I recently graduated college and so my first experience with these 'old-school' games was in a decidedly 'new-school' way. For example, this project takes a lot of inspiration from Dragon Quest 4. I first played DQ4 not on the NES, but on my Nintendo DS back in middle school.

For some reason, playing JRPGs on a DS did not make me especially popular in middle school, but that's a mystery for another time.

My first 'RPG' was Pokemon Yellow on Gameboy Color and that was only because we were taking a family vacation to Mexico and my parents did not want to try and keep me entertained by themselves for a 4-5 hour flight. I was so young that my strategy was 'kill everything with Pikachu' and I distinctly remember being confused why my Electric attacks weren't hurting these Pokemon that looked like giant boulders.

My first JRPG was Golden Sun for GBA, which in turn led me to Final Fantasy 1+2 and 5, and yes, I played the remakes both on GBA and DS and that was my first real exposure to the genre, not the originals, which sometimes makes me feel like I'm lacking in JRPG street cred. (I've played Treasure of the Rudra, so that counts for something, right?) I didn't pick up Dragon Quest 1-3 until middle school/high school and I had to go out and find them used so I could play them on my GBC. And if you want to hear something that will really raise your eyebrows, I didn't play Final Fantasy 6 until two years ago when I stumbled upon a copy for GBA at a thrift shop while shopping with some buddies for Halloween costumes.

I guess what I'm getting at is that sometimes I feel weird in the RM community because you've got people talking about how they played Lufia 2 and Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 2 (by which I mean 4) on the SNES when they were younger and then you've got people like me, who played Chrono Trigger for the first time on an emulator in August 2017.

However, I think this does have some benefits. Playing these games when I'm 'mature' and 'older' has helped me see them without the nostalgia goggles. (Please note the quotes around mature. I took a four year hiatus from gam mak for reasons besides 'I'm in college and this is a time-consuming hobby;' I had a lot of growing up to do.) And I think that has helped me make intelligent design choices when developing The Seven Seals. I'm not just taking ideas from old games willy-nilly like 'Suikoden 2 had a fishing mini-game; I better have a fishing mini-game' or 'Dragon Quest 2 had slow walk speed; I should have slow walk speed' (thank you to my testers for disabusing me of that notion right quick), but I'm instead putting ideas together that work well together and I'm unafraid to say that a mechanic doesn't suit my needs or to understand why a specific design choice was made in DQ3 instead of saying 'resetting your level when you change classes is stupid.'

Ultimately, that's what the remakes I played did. They looked at the games they were rebuilding, thought critically about decisions they made, and kept or changed those decisions in order to create a better experience. I don't know whether I'll be able to do the same with The Seven Seals, but that's my goal. I want to create a game that captures those 'old-school' experiences, but presents them in a way that critically examines whether or not those decisions were actually good and, hopefully, combines them in a way that has all the enjoyment and none of the frustration or tedium. And if this sounds like a certain other game hosted on this website, well, I'd be lying if I said I don't sometimes work on this game with Hero's Realm hanging over my head.

Then the goal is create cool game that evokes nostalgia, but is not frustrating or tedious, while making said game unique and different from other extremely-popular game hosted on this same website that takes inspiration and mechanics from many of the exact same sources.

Easy, right?