JUDE'S PROFILE

At this point, what happened two centuries ago doesn't matter. Today the UK is our closest ally.

author=WolfCoder
So you have to type 7 escape sequences to report the hero name every time you use it, and you'll have to do something about the hero name in the menu.

I'm not sure what you mean by an escape sequence, but if Miracle is using a custom menu then it shouldn't be an issue. Really, my solution is to just use the default naming system or just remove the ability to rename characters. Does it really matter if he is named Joe or Mack?

The airships in FF6 gave me a boner, until one day somebody pointed out the static horizon which I can't stop staring at anymore.

author=Illustrious
Vampyre's Kiss was legendary at Don's site. Jude would always show things from his game that seemed way advanced for the time. I dare say the community felt it was the biggest thing being made. Yes, I definitely remember this.

I don't know about it being the biggest, but probably one of the biggest. The interesting thing was I didn't hype it that much... There are more Necropolis screenshots on RMN than I ever showed of VK, but each time I posted something for VK it seemed to generate pages and pages of reactions. But yes, the screenshots usually featured things that were relatively new at the time back when people didn't know how to use pictures and variables effectively. Games like Aurora Wing, which actually had released content, were technically more advanced than what VK had to offer, but VK was one of the first, if not the first "super RPGs" that had an absurd number of features that are almost required these days to get any attention.

Suikoden clone
This was a collaborative effort that didn't get very far for reasons I can't remember. It might've been when I joined the military and went to England and was deployed 90% of the time. I've always felt like Suikoden was a series with unrealized potential, so I had a few ideas to address it (some good, some bad in hindsight). The story was something about a wizard corrupting a kingdom with some political intrigue or whatever... It was a good idea and Brickroad came up with it and many of the characters.

The big focus was to get more characters into the fight, since a cast of 40 playable characters is pretty lame if you only use a handful of them, so we beefed up the party size to like a dozen characters. Only six were in the active party, but the six in reserve provided passive bonuses and had an active role in a limit break-like scenario. There was a morale meter of some kind with a few mechanics behind it, and the war system was going to be ore integrated with the feet of the game, instead of being a dopey rock-paper-scissors minigame or whatever.

Stratus Tower
This was a sidescroller, like a Monster World game or similar. It took place in a satellite orbiting the Earth following some kind of armageddon scenario, which was basically a series of ring worlds around a central tower that connects them all. But for whatever reason the tower shut down and the rings became isolated for a millennia or some equally long stretch of time. Anyway, I tried to make this in 2k3 which was a terrible idea. I had functional platforming, but the bugs kept adding up as I implemented enemies so I gave up within a few weeks.

Kim Possible for President (KP4P)
My only attempt at a fan game. It was going to be like a turn-based high school sim with villain-busting quests mixed in. I never made anything for it except a lot of graphics, which I wish I still had. I remember being really mad because around the time I was coming up with ideas for this, Disney actually came out with a proper origin story for Shego which completely ruined some of my central ideas for the plot.

Vsmpyre's Kiss/The Anarch
Ironically, people thought I stole the the title from Castlevania, which wasn't true becausei had in fact stolen it from a terrible movie. Anyway, this was the first thing I ever worked on and tried to salvage on more than a few occasions. Because it was my first idea it also had too much shit going on, since I was trying to include every idea I'd had as a teenager into one package. It only ended up being a vampire game because I think vampires are cool, but it didn't actually make any sense so that was written out.

The central idea was that the world was stuck in a time loop being controlled by one artificial being. Not a literal time loop, since there was no time travel involved, but the Earth was basically a controlled experiment. The idea was that history would repeat itself because the AI would reset the Earth to the same starting conditions and replicate the same stimuli to recreate the same scenario over and over, in order to refine the human race into something better... That new race was vampires for awhile but they ended up not matching with traditional vampire mythos so just turned them into some kind of neo-human instead.

Unfortunately one of the AI's earliest attempts was a little too awesome and also indestructible so he kind of persisted between each cycle, changing things enough each time to royally fuck up the AI's experiment. He was like a super vampire or something.
Anyway, for whatever reason the protagonist, who is the offspring of a human and neohuman (something that didn't happen in previous cycles), starts piecing together that his entire world is some kind of experiment and must find a way to resolve the loop while defeating the super vampire guy.

I initially had a semi-tactical battle system, but I ended up scrapping it because of the way I created it... I basically had to create each encounter as it's own map with many independent events, and this was a huge pain in the ass. I put out some kind of terrible CBS demo for this, when CBSs were rare a decade ago.

So, the game had gone through multiple revisions and I eventually just got annoyed that I was still working on it, so it fizzled out. One of the big problems was that this game is what made me learn how to draw pixels, so every month my new art looked way better than my old art, so I kept redoing it. The most complete iteration still had vampires and the tactical battle system and clocked in around six hours or more of gameplay... hard to say exactly because I wasn't creating the game linearly. I found a bunch of the art assets one day on some old webspace and ended up using one of the portraits as my RMN avatar. Finding old stuff is always fun, and/or embarrassing.