FTRBREED'S PROFILE

author=TheRealQHeretic
I remember your name, yeah! That game sounds familiar too

Q, it's been a very very long time for sure, but I wish you well and give all the thanks to the very early mentorship/friendship. I was Silvereye (and sometimes Lynck) back in those days, the pre-GGZ era with The Heresy going into GGZ as an o.g. "staff" member. I remember just kinda shooting the shit with you on AIM and getting pixel art critique from Illustrious a lot while I worked on my own adaptation of a Dragonlance-influenced RPG that I never released. Now I'm about to join Minecraft as a senior engineer after spending some time working on shipping the new Xbox to the world. I really do credit my time and experience with the GGZ/RM community being the seeds that led me to this point. I'm really glad to see you post on here, honestly made my night to see that. Take care

This has been a wild thread to read and has given me a lot of context and flashbacks to a time I don't give much pause nowadays.

I was known back in the pre-GGZ into GGZ days as "Silvereye", often (back then) referred to as one of the earliest of members of GGZ. Spent a lot of time in AIM chats with Illustrious (sp?), Don, Q, and Wish and a bunch of the other folks from those days.

Back in that day, I was just a late elementary school into early middle school kid in rural America with a shit internet connection and a passion to make games, fueled by LucasArts and Square games. I essentially stumbled into RPG Maker, and I genuinely don't remember how I came across Q, but soon I was a "staff" member on his pre-GGZ site.

I remember looking up to Q a lot. He was a little bit older (in high school at the time), but he experimented all the time with web tech I didn't know like ColdFusion. I remember logging into the early GGZ admin panel through Coldfusion and thinking it was the coolest thing, like I was working at some futuristic company.

Those early days had Illustrious teaching me and critiquing me all the time on pixel art. Those lessons were incredibly valuable to me. I used to do a lot of character art sets and just threw up packages of them onto the site for anyone to use. I also used to religiously search Japanese RPG Maker sites for their chipsets/charsets and lifted them for distribution on GGZ. I know now of the questionable (to say it lightly) ethics of that, but my middle school self had no idea. I was just contributing to a site I loved and felt like I was part of a great community.

My specialty in that day was prototyping new systems. I used to spend a lot of time trying to do, say.... real-time action, side-view turn-based combat (which Q pulled off before me but I always wanted to figure it out for myself), day-night cycles, etc. Whatever prototypes I came up with, I threw on the site as a "tutorial" and let folks improve as they wanted. My pet project was a full adaptation of the Dragonlance Chronicles book series into a set of games, something which I only ever showed brief demos, screenshots, and pics of character sets over time. Sad to say I never finished it and don't have a single backup that I've found yet of the game.

The lead-up to RM2k3 was a ton of trying to translate news sites and forums from Japanese ALL THE TIME. There were tons of late night chat room sessions with Don as we pasted links in yahoo translator or whatever the heck we used.... We were dying to know the new feature set, the # of variables limit, how many chipsets we could import, etc. For every right thing we probably had 20 wrong things from bad translations and us translating forum gossip and assuming it was fact.

Wish was incredibly supportive of me. I remember she always called me "Silver" and was quick to correct anyone who thought I was fake when I'd take years off and come back to chat a little more with the community. When I was in late high school, she checked in if I was going to pursue games and programming for my college studies. I believe that's the last time we interacted, and that was over 10 years ago.

Since then, I went to college and now work as an engineer in the game industry. College pretty much sealed the deal for me moving on. My posts on the forums became a yearly "hey everyone," and wondering why content kept disappearing from the site as time went on. It felt like our old history was being lost. For whatever drama existed at that time, beef between websites, forum mobbing, me getting IMs that I can't talk with ex-staffers anymore, etc etc.... It is my early foundation of how I got into game development. And for that I'm thankful. So thanks for the thread for taking me down memory lane, and I guess filling in a lot of gaps that my young naive self didn't know to recognize or chose to forget :)