All the Preproduction Stuff, Part 2
Last we left off, I talked about how I tried to make my detective visual novel in an engine meant for Ace Attorney fangames. As it turned out, every engine I found was only capable of running the game in a very low resolution, so there was nothing I could do. I turned to my next idea, which would be one of the worst ideas I would have in the entire project so far. Build the game in RPG Maker.
Now, to be fair, you can absolutely make a visual novel in RPG Maker. It has fuctions for dialog boxes, dialog branches, you can put images and stuff so you can actually put character sprites and anything you want. I had some practise with the engine, what could go wrong? Well… there is a difference between something “being capable” of doing something and “being actually suited for it”. I had ridiculous ideas on how to run the game. Because RPG Maker doesn’t have point-and-click, I planned create those sections by taking the third person view player character and turning it into a cursor. I would fill the game with custom scripts without understanding very well what to do with them, go insane thinking how I would make menus… what a nightmare.
I think this is a problem I have, a lot of people have when it comes to making games. I want to make a game but I don’t wanna study to become a programmer. I don’t like games so much I would go to an actual programming school, I don’t even know what sort of courses should I even begin to take if I wanted to learn the bare minimum to make my game work. There’s these handy engines that are easy to use for people, “easier” you could say. I’ve read the tutorials and I can make stuff work, it’s just that I so often run into a dead end and I don’t know what else to do. I think it is unfair that they advertise these engines saying things like “anybody can make a game with this!” and promises of cute anime girls and stuff. But it’s not easy. And having a handy tool helps, but there’s only so much you can do with that.
I’m ranting a lot, but this a very accurate representation of my thought process at this time. Like I said last time, you can have this really cool idea for a game. You can write the story, find some really good graphics somewhere, maybe even strike luck by thinking something very original no one’s done before. But when it comes to programming your game, building a funcional, tangible thing is all that matters in the end.
I stopped working on Masada-sensei at August 2016. I decided to work on something else for a while, trying to build a different game closer to my abilities. It’s here when someone directed me to game jams. Game jams are an interesting way to give yourself an excuse to work in a serious way, meet new people and plan out projects. It’s also a great way to find idiots who say they TOTALLY wanna work on a game and then drop the project 2 or 3 days in because they didn’t know they had to work in order to work. Or they simply didn’t realise they couldn’t combine a hobby project with a 9 hours a day job.
Aaanyways. I didn’t finish any game during this time, but at least I improved a lot on my producer skills. Also realised producing is a thing. Thinking about what feature in a game is essential, what feature in a game isn’t essential, what sort of scope can you aim for, what can you create within that scope that turns out interesting, how to organize information to work with other people, etc. All in all, it was a worthwhile experience. It’s gonna take a while for me to want to work with stragers again, but worthwhile.
Meanwhile, when it comes to Masada-sensei, I spend a long time polishing the sprites, because it was a task I was capable of doing. I spend an incredibly long amount of time, but now I’m very proud of it. I thought for a long time if I could use them on a commercial game, now I know I certainly can’t, but at least as long as I make these games non-commercial, I have at least some very decent quality sprites I didn’t have to pay anyone to do and I completly designed myself.
It was at May 2017 when I began to work on Masada again. I thought making the game in Renpy would be a sensible option, given that it’s an engine meant for visual novels and it also can be heavily modified using python. I heard python is an easy language to learn at My First Game Jam, so I figured out it would be a good idea. I also figured I could formalize all the information about my game in text files and store it in a drive folder in case I wanted to work with someone else (wink, wink). Then, a couple months later I had another idea. My best idea so far. Something that would trump all my previous ideas and be a hundred times more cost/effective…
Have someone else code the game.
Tune in next time to learn how I met my programmers and what new challanges face ahead! See y'all!
