First of two blog posts scheduled for September 25, 2022.

For those of you who remember, I had originally planned to move Sagawind into the most recent Kadokawa release at the time, which was RPG Maker MV. However, after experimenting with it a bit, and then the release of RPG Maker MZ (which I still don't have access to anyway), it didn't feel right for the vision I had in my mind of Sagawind. I'll be honest, there have been some times when I've imagined it more in a style like Tales of Vesperia, with the full 3-D environments and models and the watercolor look, or maybe something more akin to a game like Atelier Ryza, though I think when I had imagined it, I didn't know anything about Ryza.

We then enter 2020, when I had more free time on my hands than I knew what to do with. And what did I do with this free time? I absolutely no-lifed nearly the entire library of Nihon Falcom. If you're unaware of Falcom, they're the studio that created both the Ys series and a much more involved RPG series called The Legend of Heroes, the most recent arc of which is called Trails for short. I played through every single Trails game leading up to the release of Trails of Cold Steel IV in October of that year. And I absolutely adored it. This was what I was looking for for Sagawind -- an immersive and engaging world that evolved over time, with well-written characters you cared about, both playable and non-playable.

With that in mind, I've actually been writing much more dialogue than story beats lately, as I've actually already finished up the basic outline of the entire plot. Now, that's not to say the entire plot is set in stone, because every time I re-read it, I find more holes and more "huh, that's convenient" bits, but the general ideas are in place.

So then comes the task of what to develop the game in. I actually looked pretty hard at GameMaker Studio 2, after the success of Stegosoft/BadLuck and their newest rendition of Ara Fell. And given the "history" between Sagawind and Ara Fell, I thought it behooved me at least to give a look to the tools that Stegosoft used for their enhanced edition. Unfortunately, again, it didn't really fit the vision I had for the game. The SNES-inspired visual style of a top-down overhead view felt like it didn't work for what I had in mind. There's a double-edged sword in gaming research where the more games you play, the more inspiration you have, but at the same time, it creates conflicts in what exactly you feel the vision of your work should be.

I took a long, hard think, talking with other development friends in Discord channels, workshopping and hashing out how things looked in my head, inspirations, and ideas for systems over and over. Wouldn't be surprised if they were tired of my stream of consciousness ramblings about the game. But it then occurred to me: I wasn't looking to re-capture the 16-bit era of RPGs that most remember fondly (and with good reason). I was actually looking to re-capture the 32-bit era that contained so many of my memories -- games like Wild Arms 2, Final Fantasy IX, Tales of Destiny, Grandia, and Xenogears, and even into the PS2-era with Tales of the Abyss and Star Ocean: Til the End of Time and their narratives. Thus enter the Trails series -- a modern rendition of that era of gaming that I so adored. Its style echoed Grandia and Wild Arms 2, the kind of thing I was trying to capture so desperately.

I had attempted to play around with other engines that could give me a style like that PS1/PSP generation, such as Unity and Godot. But the tools proved to be a bit more abstract and requiring of assets that I didn't have the skill at the time nor the mindset to really work with. SMILE Game Builder came extremely close, but the limitations of the engine with regards to battles and stats made it feel like not a good fit. Well, would you look at that, Smileboom is making a new engine called "RPG Developer Bakin." And every single screenshot, video, and blog post I've seen about it seems perfect. A focus on 2-D elements within a 3-D space. Advanced lighting engine. Fully customizable camera. The ability to import plug-ins written in C#. It was like a lightbulb went off in my head.

So! That basically sums up why a) it's taken so long for me to do much of anything with Sagawind, besides the fact that it keeps infecting my brain space and won't leave ever probably, and b) why I'm moving to RPG Developer Bakin. The actual engine doesn't come out until October 3, 2022 in an Early Access state, but given that it's going to have a launch discount and a discount for users of SMILE Game Builder means that I'll be able to hit the ground running, especially if I continue to work like an actual game developer and do proper pre-production. Been reading a lot of articles lately from developers, as well as actually reading game design documents (GDDs) as a frame of reference. It's serious this time.

On that note! I will be going to school full-time this coming week in the pharmaceutical sciences, plus I have a part-time job so I can actually pay bills, so my time will be extremely limited. But I feel more serious than I ever have about trying to get this project finished. Do I have a team? No, but I'm very not opposed to one. Am I okay trying to do all the assets by myself? If I have to. I've gone through old sketchbooks and I wasn't terrible so in my opinion the talent's there, just unpracticed. I've always been into composing and improvising music. And my writing has only gotten better over the years with more knowledge and research.

That being said, if anyone, and I mean anyone, is interested in becoming involved with the project and joining what I'm tentatively calling "Sanctum Games," please let me know either through RMN PM or via my e-mail at trance2.interphase@gmail.com

Here's to more regular updates and actual serious work!