STRANGELUV'S PROFILE

author=Kaempfer

author=TFT
That was Strangeluv btw. Going through this topic today just shows 90% of what's been posted isn't even remotely accurate.

You thinking that it matters more the accuracy of specific memory and less the accuracy of accumulated feeling is evidence to suggest that you have a dramatic misunderstanding of what the problems people had with GW were.

I apologize for incorrectly ascribing blame. I guess you were frenetically high-fiving him too much for me to distinguish from the blur of troll which one you two it was.

What? I never did this. I don't even know who you are.

Haha alright, no sweat ^^

Here you go buddy: http://rpgmaker.net/games/2324/

I live in Trinidad and Tobago. This is a small island nation in the Caribbean just off the coast of Venezuela. There aren't much outlets here with respect to hobbies. In primary school, the teachers always wanted you to write about what you wanted to be when you grew up. I always wrote that I wanted to be a videogame designer. When I was eight years old, back in 1994, I was introduced to a company known as Squaresoft, now known as Square-Enix, best known for their Final Fantasy series.



On a sidenote, I can say that Squaresoft also helped my vocabulary quite a bit as a child. When I had to fight baddies with names like Osprey, Mandrake, Behemoth, Inferno and Sirens with weapons known as Tempest, Mallet, Scimitar and Epee while equipping Amulets and Relics, I couldn’t help but look those things up in the dictionary. I later used some of those words in my Common Entrance practice essays.



This is me when I knew the word "Behemoth". I'm the one without the mustache.

These games made me love storytelling, and I wanted to tell a visual story like those guys at Squaresoft.

Fast forward past two awful break-ups, family dysfunction, a close shave away from parental divorce, a whole lot of cutting and general teenage angst to the weeks leading up to my Cambridge A’ Level exams in 2005. This was around the time Flash games were really starting to get popular. I didn’t know shit for my Organic Chemistry but I went Googling “how to make a game” and came across a program known as RPG Maker 2003. This was perfect, almost too good to be true. Squaresoft mainly produced RPG’s and here was this piece of compiled code, sent to me like manna from heaven, and if I was in a cartoon at that moment, my monitor would have been glowing gold punctuated by a chorus of cherubs.



Just imagine this with a heavenly golden tint.

I downloaded it and I opened it up. The graphical user interface seemed simple enough, so I spent a few days tinkering with it, putting sense to the program’s jargon – switches, variables, events, panoramas, mapping, chipsets. RPG Maker was so simple to use that you didn’t even have to produce your own graphics. You could simply rip characters from other games and use those if you couldn’t pay an artist to do it for you. So if you wanted to make a game about Mario, no problem!



I had forgotten that I had A’ Levels right around the corner. I joined a forum known as Gaming World, which attracted amateur game developers based around that program and my avatar was Jack Nicholson from The Shining in the infamous “HEEEEERE’S JOHNNY!” scene. My alias was, and has always been Strangeluv (by now you could probably tell I love Stanley Kubrick). There were innumerable projects posted on the website, though most of them were unfinished. This made me want to produce one of my own. I began work on it and I named it Wyesse.



Wyesse was about an errand boy who woke up (who also happened to be a skilled swordsman… go figure), was bored with his life and was visited by a sexy sorceress in his dreams. They eventually meet and decide to go into a forest named Nimerel to meet an elf named Meeko to defeat an evil wizard named Rashomon (I am cringing, just typing this). But members became interested in Wyesse because of a single screenshot that began circulating the website.


The main attraction.

This brought flocks of people to my game. Who was this new genius designer coming in from the snows to join their campfire? I knew Wyesse wasn’t going to match up to the other games on the site. It just didn’t have enough technical prowess, enough muscle, enough attitude. It was mediocre, if that. But the worst thing was that it was objectively mediocre. You can actually open up the code and say, “Hmm, this designer really didn’t put in that much work into this.” It just wasn’t good. And it got the treatment it deserved. People hated it. My childhood dream, to be a videogame designer, was turning into a nightmare. Comment after comment was just my designer peers thrashing it. They flushed it right down the crapper and Strangeluv became known as a ‘hype artist’ – one who can successfully sell a product that sputters and crumbles as soon as you touch it.

I quit the forum. I couldn’t take it.

Two years passed and I was now in my second year of University (don’t ask me about the Organic Chemistry). Around Christmas time, I fell from an elevated walkway and landed on my patella. Inflammation developed in my leg and I became quite ill for two weeks. On Christmas Day, I couldn’t leave the house, but I was recovering. Bored, I scrolled over old programs and over RPG Maker 2003. I don’t know what made me do it or think I could do it, but I wanted to leap right back into the fray.

But I had to regain my respect with the forum and dispel the “hype artist” title for anyone to take me seriously. So I frequented the Literature sub-forum there and set up a thread where I would critique any piece that anyone posted. I critiqued probably well over 100 stories by the time they made me a Moderator at the forum. With this new status, I was able to give my project some traction. I named it “A Home Far Away” and it was based on a story I was writing at the time, about a young boy and his sister who end up on a pirate ship and get taken to another continent. Then they must find their way back home.



Cap'n Grizzlybeard, the man who kidnapped the siblings.

I befriended a composer, a few artists and spriters and they helped me with the project. I read tutorials on how to code specific systems, such as a day/night cycle and weapon charging and I applied this new knowledge to this game. I even made a trailer for it in Windows Movie Maker with Bond violin music. When the game was released, it was divisive. It was too difficult and frustrating at parts, and the latter half of the game seemed too repetitive. Now, how did Wyesse go wrong? Why did people hate it? And why were people a little more receptive to A Home Far Away?

Sword and sorcery has never been my strong suit, and will never be. Anything purely dramatic of serious never has been either. But I think the main reason was that I tried to make something huge. I had planned the game to be about thirty hours long and to be a great fantasy epic. There's two problems with this. One: a first-timer should not try to do an epic. Even George Lucas had his THX-1138 before Star Wars: A New Hope. Even Stephen King had his magazine short stories before Carrie, and before The Dark Tower.

A Home Far Away was only a few hours long. I learned how to manage it that way. I didn't embark on a journey that was clearly longer than my feet could bare. I would get blisters and wouldn't even reach my destination. A year after I finished A Home Far Away, I made another videogame named Leo & Leah: A Love Story.

People loved it, it garnered 3000+ downloads alone on the site I frequented and it was featured on numerous website frontpages. A few people even posted fan artwork of it.



But I'm done with videogame design for the moment. Shit, I've completed two games. I'm more than pleased. Even though I'm only accomplished within certain niches, I still feel like I've risen above that mediocrity to produce something that people were inspired by and genuinely loved. But most importantly, I love my projects. It is literally a dream come true.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I owe you dudes at this site. You helped me get my project off the ground and gave it a home. It really means a lot to me. I've been brash in the past but I just feel so good to have a game to call my own.

I just wanna give some dvice. There's always going to be people who are better (whatever that means to your ego) at the things you love than you. Fortunately, there isn't really any one story, song, artwork, game that is unanimously the best. Or even unanimously good. If you know you want to do something, do it. It's hard to tell what's good and bad poetry nowadays, even. Shit, I read Derek Walcott the other day and didn't know what the fuck his poems were about. And he has a goddamn Nobel Prize.

Do what you want to do. If you like it what you do, you'll do it better. If you love what you do, you'll cry for producing something mediocre. And if you love it even more, you'll wipe them tears, mix them with ink, charcoal and binary code, and try again.

Thanks, bros.