There is a blocking bug in the Fly-Off Peak area. Just uploaded a new version to the Main Download to fix it. How are you?

Well there it is. Chapter 3 is done. There will be at least one more edition to put up later since I still have to add Rogan's battle backgrounds as soon as I get them. And also there will probably be explosions and problems too, because water is wet. But I can't whip myself into a good mood about it. This ordeal has left me numb to all feelings.

During my very-definitely-final playtest of the final boss battle for the chapter, a certain enemy is supposed to be forced to make a couple specific moves at a certain time, and I kept observing that it wasn't. Everything else about the final battle was fine, everything else about the chapter was fine. This was literally the last little bug to address before the 16-month odyssey of making this chapter was to be completed.

Furthermore, it was Saturday afternoon and I was out of project time for the day since I was about to go out, and I wouldn't be getting back home again until Monday evening. But it was okay. I wasn't impatient. I'd just spent 16 months on this. I could wait 2 days to put on the last bit of polish. Even when I came down with a fever over the weekend and wound up not getting home until Tuesday instead. What's one extra day.

So I finally got a little more time to look at it again, and I found the source of the problem. I had added the concept of "occasions" to the Event Pages in battles, so that instead of running them all at the very beginning of the battle turn, some could be postponed to only run at the end instead. Alas, after a page is finished running the engine checks again for if any other pages are now valid, and at this point the detail about which occasion it is was being lost. So, by piggy-backing off of another Event Page that just finished, Event Pages were capable of running at the wrong time.

I fixed the bug and then every existing event page broke.

In every other existing battle in the entire game.

The one last small tiny little bug that made me patiently put off finishing this chapter for 3 more days resulted in ripping off a blister that abruptly expelled all the content all the way back to the beginning of chapter 1. Moments before I had been on the verge of tying off this chapter and finally getting my life back together. Suddenly, every single battle that uses events heavily -- basically every boss battle -- would now have to be re-tested and probably tediously fixed, one by one.

God's potency is truly awe-inspiring. Only He could have come up with such a sublime fecal efflusion to capstone the horrible experience that working on this chapter had become. Only a divine power could have arranged for such a perfectly demoralizing and soul-crushing button joke, such a massive final cow patty to splatter in my face just when I thought my torture and misery would be over.

First, I slammed my fist on the desk and some things fell off.

Then, I undid the bugfix. Turns out the battle event system had been hobbling along basically on luck and coincidence, and I guess that's how it's going to stay for now. The one specific issue that started this all -- trying to make the boss do a few specific moves at certain times -- isn't all that important.

Then, I uttered a vitriolic fuck you to the universe.

And then I packed up the project and uploaded it. I couldn't think of a single sincere thing to say at the time, so I just said nothing. I couldn't even bring myself to type up any release notes.

Part of the blame can legitimately be placed on the heads of the original programmers of RMXP. The coding is so slapdash and amateurish wish such shitty style and so many bad coding practices that I'm astounded it works at all. Anyone who wants to try to extend it might as well shove burning bamboo under their fingernails instead. Especially the absolute impenetrable shitshow of the Scene_Battle class. It's like the programmers wanted everyone to see their projects get bogged down with bugs and problems until they abandoned them, because they thought that if users discovered that coding was actually enjoyable, they might decide to make games from scratch and stop buying RPG Maker products entirely. That's why they made working with the base code as Sisyphean as possible.

At some point, after a long break, maybe I'll consider getting back to this and dealing with this problem.

Or maybe I won't.

Maybe this is one of those "breaks" that doesn't end.

Maybe this is where I put the project on "Hiatus" and never take it off again.

I think everything is about to fall apart.

A half-finished game is not worth 50% of a game, it's worth 0% of a game. Because no one wants to play an unfinished game, except on the confidence that it's still going to be finished, at all, ever. We all know this is true. When I look for random games from this site, obviously the first thing I do is filter for "Completed" games only. Even if I dishonestly set the status of this project to "Completed" anyway, reasoning that it's "as complete as it's ever going to be", as soon as people get wind of the truth they're going to click away. A half-finished product is worth nothing. If I quit this project I will have invested 4 entire years' worth of free time and creative energy into nothing. I put all that effort into simply advancing myself 4 years closer to death. I might as well have spent the time grinding for new gear in Destiny, which is worse than death.

Anyway I'll address any bug reports but aside from that I'm taking at least two months away from this project.

Thank you for reading this and for downloading maybe.

I've been keeping track of the amount of time I'm spending on this game, and for the current chapter I just broke 500 hours! https://rpgmaker.net/games/8323/progress/

I'm not proud. It's horrible.

Why must the RPG Maker gods demand so much and give so little.

Thanks to kumada for reporting that the final scene of chapter 1 has been broken. This means that after beating the final boss you would sit through a very long serious of cutscenes before the game freezes and you lose that progress and quit playing this game forever. I hope not very many people have quit this game forever. Please take the newest version available and move over your save files.

I've also added a save point just before the feast scene to break up that long series of cutscenes a bit. If anyone lost progress and is mad, I'd be willing to nerf the chapter 1 final battle so that you can continue without much trouble. Please PM me about this.

I noticed that some people accidentally downloaded the original Chapter 1 version of this game. This is because it's at the top of the list of downloads I guess. I don't want to delete it because I want to save the download count, but please be sure to take the newest version, it's the one you get if you click on the big Download button. Or else it can be found father down on the Download page.

Sometimes when it's 11:23 pm on Friday and the Internet is being really slow you just want to hurl your computer across the room.

Chapter: 2
Status: All major scenes are built. I just have go back and fill out missing content from the middle.
Development Time:10 months so far

And I don't mean that I did lots of procrastinating and it could have been finished a lot quicker if only I'd had more discipline.

i mean. it. took. ten. months.

do you know that I specifically started a pointless little Elder Scrolls fan-game because I was tired of enormous projects that burn you out? It was supposed to be a break from massive life-consuming projects. it was supposed to be a fluffy dumb little thing that could be all done in maybe a couple years. that's why i was fine with it being a fan game full of stolen material which can't possibly be made commercial or anything.

It's only after I was knee-deep into the commitment that the Project Gods whipped away the curtain and said, "Oh, your little Elder Scrolls game? It's actually a 10-months-to-make-one-chapter game. Oops! Surprise! Hahaha! GOT U"

https://rpgmaker.net/media/content/users/546/locker/testimonial.mp3

But I keep coming up with rationalizations to feel better. I.E. future chapters are going to reuse a lot of older areas/graphics/content. Even-numbered chapters are in a completely separate "world" from odd-number chapters, so it makes sense that ch2 would also take a long time because every character and major area has to be designed. Yeah, that's it. So after this the chapters will just start piling out

So at this point you can "walk through" the entire chapter, and I just have to go back and flesh out things like skill trees and cannon fodder dungeon monsters which I neglected the first time through. And then balancing. And sorry to be a font of misery in the journal. But I have to let out the misery or I will die. Thank you for listening to the misery.

STICK IT TO THE PROJECT GODS.