It's been a short while since the game was released. I won't be touching it anymore, so I think that it's time to throw up a little reflection.

Initially, I had no plans of entering IGMC at all. I saw it, and immediately thought it would have been too much work. I already have enough trouble wrestling with real life, how the hell was I supposed to make a game in a month on top of that? But in the end, due to the passionate arguments of some friends, it was decided to at least give it a shot.

And so came the plan to conjure up a game without wrestling with resources too much. I already knew I had no desire to touch the RTP sprites, faces, and tile sets. I never have any desire to work with those. So that was out. And I knew mapping would be a royal pain in the ass, so that was out too. Naturally, we came to the conclusion that we should use what we have; which in this case would be all the resources available on Sacred Earth: Memory.

But there was no way to just take a snippet of SEM's story and toss it into Ace and have it all make sense, so a friend of mine volunteered to pen a short story with the characters, largely unrelated to the main game, but with character motivations and personalities intact. The intention was to craft a short story with entertaining, snappy writing, and a fun battle system to showcase the design philosophies that SE is based on.

And with the plan set, we began to work. I set about the arduous task to reformatting all of SEM's art assets into usable form again for VX Ace. That mean character faces, cut ins, and sprites, I think I was doing this right up until about the last week even. Our writer spent about two weeks writing the script, and even more impressively, he found the time to playtest the game over and over and over while overseas for a thesis proposal.

Following the preparation of SEM resources, was the design of the menu layouts and the battle system. Designing the interfaces too no time at all really. I got it done in about two, three days tops. What really took the most time out of everything definitely had to be getting the battle system up to working order. From the beginning, all the way up until about the end, I was jumping through flaming hoops to try and find a battle system that worked with the combination of mechanics I had thought up.

It's kind of amazing that in all of VX Ace's lifespan, there still doesn't exist a simple individual turns structure that's not ATB or something overly convoluted as CTB(Though I do love my CTBs!). 8V

After cycling through about a million battle systems, some working more than others, it ultimately came to the point where in order to ensure the highest caliber of compatibility, the safest, and best choice was...the Default Battle System. With YEA layered over it, but the DTB all the same. I abhor the DTB turn structure, so I made it my personal mission to make the battle mechanics as fun as engaging as I could think of, while still staying true to the roots of SEM.

SEM, while still my baby, is undeniably what one of my friends likes to call 'The Guilty Gear of JRPGs'. Mechanics on top of mechanics, and several layers of advanced tactics that the layman probably will never use. 6 different resources to keep an eye on and manage, all while trying to keep your characters alive and figure out the best way to win.

I love it. I am not ashamed of this. I love fighting games, and I love guilty gear, blazblue, king of fighters, I love all of it. So likening my battle system to a fighting game is a compliment to me.

But this isn't true for the average player. Likely more than half of the people who played SEM couldn't make heads or tails of the battle system I had set up. I still think it's possible to get people to understand with a little hands on and some comprehensive tutorials to reference. I have a handful of players who clicked with the game and went on to say good things about it. Hell, the SEM battle system won a boss design contest, so I know the potential is there.

But I digress. For the purposes of this contest, the SEM design philosophy was streamlined. Simplified. Made easier. Easier than I honestly would care to ever make it. But the point wasn't to crush the player with epic difficulty. The point was to let them play through and experience the story and mechanics, so the difficulty was adjusted to account for that. It's one of those things that can't be helped! But I think it worked out in the end. It may be on the easier side, but it is better to err on the side of easy, than on the side of hard.

As for the writing, I personally think the script is hilarious. And I can say that, because I had no hand in writing it at all. But more than being hilarious, the script also has it's serious moments, and I think that it really does a good job of highlighting certain aspects of the characters. The city conversation system was kept in the game purely for the sole purpose of throwing in as many of these amusing little side conversations as possible.

At every opportunity we could think of, there was a new event devised for it. And we determined that while the chances of people checking events twice were small, we would add second replies to all of these events for incentive. So there really is a lot of side content to read through and chuckle at. The points in which they change should be obvious, so I won't say exactly when.

Of course once everything was said and done, the game was released and I laid back, deeming my job finished. ...Of course it wasn't. There's this thing called PR and advertisement. I'm terrible at these things naturally. So it's no surprise to me, the relative underground-ness that the game has. I'm personally just happy to have finished a game and made a successful second foray into the VX Ace Engine.

But where do I go from here?

It's been suggested by multiple parties to move SEM to VX Ace and continue on with the momentum, but.......I don't know. SEM in 2k3, has an entire unique battle system that can't easily be replicated in Ace. Sure, the streamlined version of it for SEP works nicely, but it ultimately is not the same. While I do think moving to Ace would certainly help my visibility, I really do fear losing the mechanical integrity that I've worked so hard to achieve in 2k3 so far.

What does one do about this?

The other solution was to begin work on another project using the same engine from SEP to tell another story. This is a more attractive idea to me personally, but it would mean SEM getting sidelined. And that bothers me greatly.

In the end, there doesn't seem to be an easy solution, so for now I will take a break and await the results of the contest.