LEARSON - Chapter One

Hot damn can't believe it's been six years since I started this project.

After Chapter 4 I started work on Chapter 5 (was gonna go all George Lucas and call it Chapter 7 but decided against it...) which was a prequel following the Black Knight, remember it was heavily influenced by Phantom Pain since I'd played that around then and think I actually made quite a bit of it, even had a fair bit of gameplay compared to the other Chapters, I remember some dodging fireballs, basic stealth mechanics (really pushing whole Phantom Pain thing) and even a sort of whack a mole boss fight. Kinda got burned out and took a break to work on something else, that soemthing else never materialised into anything and when I finally felt like going back to the Learson project had soured in my mind. Didn't like the story, gone off the whole supernatural angle.

So basically I did nothing for 4 years, well that's not entirely true, got a new job, got in shape, lost my hair but real life stuff doesn't matter.

Anyway finally wanted to get back to it to work on my new project, a project which I cared deeply for, so much that I wanted it to be all by me, custom graphics, music all that. Problem is I'd never done that before, so I couldn't start work on my dream project without practicing on something first, hence the idea to finally finish the Learson series. Not just finish it, remake it. I figured I would condense the story, cut out all the crap, make it short and sweet and simple and smash it out in a year or so. This sounds bad but since I didn't really care about it anymore I figured it would be easier finishing it off and saying 'yep, that'll do', but as I'm sure most of you know feature creep took ahold of me, small tiny maps ended up becoming multiple maps, a lot of what I cut out of the story creeped back in, (saying that most of the crap from Chapter 4 has been cut, not sure what the hell I was thinking back then. Also most of Chapter 1 and 3 if I really think about it.) So yeah I became attached to it and now it's taking longer than I expected. Still I feel like I've restrained myself somewhat this time, I'm actually able to cut scenes and other stuff that don't really add anything. Feel like the story is a lot more cohesive this time around but I guess we'll see.

Main difference now is there's going to be 5 different endings, largely because I couldn't decide on which one I liked and partly because I needed a reason for all the dialogue options in the game.

Anyway, think this new version will be a lot better, more of a visual novel than an RPG, no battles, no puzzles, those always were kind jammed in as an afterthought in previous games. Replaying them for the first time in a while it really was quite glaring. Why the hell were they fighting rats in the desert?