The Campaign

If you are one of the few people who have followed this project for a while, you may have noticed the distinct lack of any sort of update for about a year and a half. The reason for this is unfortunately rather simple: I have done very little work on The Campaign over the course of the past year. And the more time passed, the more I became aware that when I did work on it, I did not get any enjoyment out of it. It's time to face the truth: The Campaign is going nowhere as a project at this point. Therefore, I am cancelling it permanantly.


The Campaign was originally created for the Fundamental RPGology contest, in which it even won the third prize, despite the fact that the contest version was very much flawed in numerous ways. For a long time, I felt obliged to finish a full and improved version that would add all the content I had originally planned, and address the problems the game currently had. And to be fair, I did put a lot of time and effort into trying to make that happen. I rebalanced or completely replaced skills, overhauled stats, added numerous features and visual clues to make the gameplay more transparent, and cleaned up a lot of my incredibly convoluted eventing. And all of that made it even more frustrating for me when it finally began to dawn on me that I would very likely not finish this project.

Why is that? Well, I can definitely say I learned a lot from creating this project: For example, I have become aware that I really dislike having to balance combat. I also was painfully made aware that a huge disadvantage of making a game with very complex mechanics is that after taking a break from it, getting back into it and re-learning one's own "coding" is very exhausting and demotivating.

But the most important lessons I learned are of a different kind. The aim behind creating The Campaign was to build my own battle system in RPG Maker based on events. And I successfully accomplished that mission! Working on this game taught me so much about efficiency in building mechanics, the economic use of variables, long-term planning in resource management, complex eventing in ways that I had never tried before, and taking constructive criticism. Many of the mistakes I made when developing The Campaign I will likely never make again. That is in itself a huge success.

However, I also realised something different, which is ultimately the other main reason I decided to cancel this project: Sometimes, one's ideals and plans do not work out in practice. I still like the basic concept I structured The Campaign around. But I have not only come to see that personally, I simply like turn-based combat less than more action-based systems. It just became clear to me that despite my best efforts, the combat in The Campaign is just not a lot of fun to play. No matter how proud I was of my own work, no matter how pleased with what I perceived to be the originality of the concept: Playing my own game did not feel engaging to me. Taking the perspective of the player, I perceived it as slow, one-dimensional, and simply boring.

Sometimes, an idea only sounds good on paper. Sometimes, a developer lacks the skill or insight to make a potentially good idea work well in practice. Regardless of which is true in this case: A feeling of obligation as the sole motivation for finishing a game that I neither enjoy working on nor think is enjoyable to play is just pointless, and not beneficial to anybody. This game has been a mental burden for me for too long now, and I want to be free of it.

Sometimes, you just have to admit defeat, return to camp to regroup, fill up your HP again, and keep the lessons of this moment in mind on your future campaigns. And that is what I intend to do. I hope you understand.

See you in future projects, everyone!