SHMECKIE'S PROFILE

Um... Didn't he say not too long ago he was doing it in RMXP?!

Yo, peeplz! I've been a lurker here for god knows how long, but this topic felt like it would be interesting to post in.

Personally, the hardest part is to stick with it. You see, I spend alot of my time working on starting a career in comics, so I tend to just lose the time to work on my RPG when the time comes to work on my submissions. Plus, I'm also a big M.U.G.E.N. enthusiast, and I make a platform game, as well, so I tend to alternate. The biggest reason being that I hit a creative slump in one, and need to take a break. I tend to be doing that less, though, as pursuing my career has taught me alot about sticking to things.

Also, I've found that making an RPG becomes easier when I let myself do what i want, anot not let my descisions be dictated by one thing or another. I used to hate doing towns, until I used a bit of my artistic sensibilities to their design. Towns got alot more fun to do when I began considering daily life in them, and began just venting my love for designing in them. Doing streets of basic, square houses gets tedious, but making a winding town full of unique houses of various shapes, littered with detail, and it gets way more fun to do. Long strengs of events were the same; because they take a long time to test (god help you if you typo/screw up 2/3 of the way into a long cutscene), but thanks to alot of the dialogue studies I did to get better at comics, I find alot of the times the characters practically write themselves, and it's just a matter of making sure everyone walks, jumps, and turns they way they should.

The hardest thing for me, though, is complicated coding. I'm a simple guy; I just wanna tell a story you can play through. Sometimes, though, I need to do something that just can't be done in basic commands. For instance, part of my game has the player navigating a frozen canyon, where they must reach periodic safehouses, or prolonged exposure to the cold will strike them with Frostbyte, and eventually kill them. In another area, an infiltration mission requires me to find a way for partolling guards to spot the player that doesn't involve a shitload of invisible events.

However, it's all worth it to tell the story I want to tell, the way I want to tell it. I love the cast of characters I've come up with for this game. So much so, I restarted the game from the ground up after my old computer crashed. Kinda glad it did, though; I've been able to make the characters, storyline, and gameplay WAY better than it used to be. Like a blessing in disguise.

Plus, I love setting up battles, picking great music (being a soundtrack enthusiast helps with that, too), watching my story unfold, and my puzzles work, and turn out fun! For someone as obsessed with telling stories as I am, making an RPG is pretty rewarding considering all the work that goes into it!