TE: Absolution - A 2025 Retrospective

[Manibrandr System]

Introduction

The world of TerraEarth had been something that had captured our imagination ever since we've started telling stories about each other going on adventures and having a great time overall. It started with Adventures, and spun off into side stories written by various members. One thing lead to another, and eventually the RPG Maker games became a thing. With the release of TE: Absolution, Ashlynn was given something to anchor to during the time when xey were an exile from our system. And so despite it being primitive in construction, it gave us a lot of meaning.

---
What We Have (Re)played

So far, we have played through the first main arc as the Soul Cross team, going from the beginning, all the way up to after the fight with Malizzo. That includes all of the side quests. We also played up to the First Gig of the Brewmaster's Guild, North Cape Shipments of the Secret Service, the first part of the Book Club, and the Frostspire Battle Royale.

---
What We Liked so Far

• The fact that it is basically a world that took elements from the Soul Blazer games, and that "remixed" the world in a new interesting way.
  
• The amount of side quests that opened up fairly quickly early on.
  
• The TP system that allowed for agency in building up a set of skills.
  
• The writing. A lot of the NPCs are given their own quirks and personalities that makes them feel pretty relatable.
  
• Lore. The idea that the world is a virtual one, that can interact with beings from other planets and worlds is a compelling one, one that raises questions about what makes one particular subjectivity more real than another.

---
Our Involvement

For those who may not know, we had a lot of involvement in the creative process, what with having a self-insert presence in some form in the world, the games and the stories. We also were responsible for a good portion of the original music being made for the games. We were also responsible for pushing so hard for the TP system and the ATB system being a part of the game.

Looking back, I would say that I regret pushing to hard for the ATB system to be included, as given how it was implemented, I realized how much of a mess it could be when straight up converting a standard Turn-Based System to an ATB system, as there are often situations where turn-lapping happens in either direction. This made the AGI stat the single most important stat in the game.

In our defense, at the time, we have been getting into Playstation 1 emulation and, as far as standard RPG systems go, we were really obsessed with how FF6 crafts a weaving narrative with a wide cast, and how FF9's AP system allowed for character customization and player expression, and both games use the ATB system. Looking back from what we have since learned about game design, we realized that FF9 and FF6 managed to balance the ATB system by keeping the numbers low and clustered close to each other.

---
What Could Have Been Better

• Mapping. It is clear that Jason's strengths are very much focused on writing and not map design. The construction of the locations and the buildings are very much square and orthogonal in nature, and with a lot of empty spaces. To be fair to him. Environmental design is a very involved and difficult process and not everyone can make the kind of beautiful maps that some in the RPG Maker community could achieve.
  
• Dungeon design. Yeah, this one is inexcusable. Making use of the random dungeon generator and leaving it mostly as is is just low-effort. Not only that, a lot of the puzzles don't really make sense in the respective conceit of the respective dungeons. And really, the community deserved better.
  
• Tilesets. Now don't get me wrong, the RTP is a fine set of assets. However, given how it's been used in almost every RPG Maker projects, and how they're designed to fit as many situations as possible, the RTP lends itself to looking somewhat generic, and doesn't really bring out the character of a world such as TerraEarth.
  
• Sound design. It seemed that Jason could not decide how the soundtrack would be handled, and so he decided to throw everything and the kitchen sink at it. This includes, his own music, music from this community, Soul Blazer music, and popular RPG music. The issue with this is that by refusing to commit to a soundtrack style, he's limited his own ability to express himself onto the project via music.
  
• Gameplay styles. Same issue as Sound design. UX is an integral part of playing a game, and by refusing to commit, he's denying himself the opportunity to really make a chosen gameplay style shine, instead being forced to spend resources to balance the numbers across each gameplay style.
  
• Methods of learning skills. Making AP the only way to learn new skills creates a new issue where the learnset of any given class is tied almost exclusively to weapon type access. This flattens the possibility space of class expression.
  
• Quest structure. we feel that some of the quests are overly simplistic, and that they did not really gel well together to form a unified narrative terroir. Moreover, we feel that the quests that we took on did not have a lasting or consequential impact on the world and how it operates.
  
• Cut features. The original character system was one that we greatly enjoyed during the development of the game. The idea of "creating an account" and choosing to build a party of your own creation, or recruiting residents or veterans, and going through an original story line, is quite compelling. I am quite disappointed to learn that that feature was cut for the final version.
  
• Tolkienesque fantasy tropes. Overplayed, boring, generic. 'Nuff said.
  
• Navigation. It is too easy to get marooned in a part of the world that is too high-level for you when you go off the beaten track to do quests that were in the Tower of Babel.
  
• The game engine. Let's be frank here. Even back when the game was being produced, RPG Maker VX is primitive, with an inferior new tileset and tile-mapping system that is several steps backward from XP and 2k3, with the Ruby scripting engine that is barely an iterative upgrade from XP. It gets worse when VXAce got released soon after, as a straight up upgrade to VX. This made sure that RPG Maker VX as an engine would be largely forgotten, and abandoned by the community before it had a chance to mature.
  

---
How We Would Revisit It?

So, given that this game, despite its flaws have buried itself in our mind and imbued us with an obsession of iterating on the premise, we have a few ideas as to how we would handle this when we get to doing this for keeps.

• We will be using Clockwork Raven's tilesets and icons. With its 16x16 aesthetic, it will be sure to give that retro aesthetic that keeps it looking fresh and colourful. While we could come up with our own original tilesets, we feel that having a library of assets ready would work as a good starting point. And as needed, we could easily extend the tileset with our own original work.
  
• We will be using these assets to great effect in making memorable environments that players would feel good traversing, exploring and revisiting. We'd also be leveraging Aerosys' Random Map Generation system to add some replayability.
  
• We will spend time to make sure that each quest will be as impactful and consequential as could be.
  
• We will be making use of our compositional skill to write original music for it, making use of the Roland SC-8850 for sound generation.
  
• We will be adding a twist of the original character creation back, by bringing in the possibility of starting the game with Loki (Formerly Enigma) and Cierra in the party, older and wiser, and defaulting to residential recruits.
  
• We will be making all encounters on-map encounters that only respawn when the player exits the dungeon.
  
• We will be implementing multiple ways of learning skills, be it through equipment, class proficiency, story conditions or in-battle conditions. We will also make sure each character/class will have something different to add to the gameplay.
  
• We will implement different travel styles that are unique to each party. Raini and Psychokind's party will be able to make use of portals outside of The Tower of Babel, Deathpit's party will travel via Red Riotz, and Jason's party will travel by train. These methods will always be available to the party.
  
• We will be building an original fantasy world lore around non-humanity, the realness of various subjectivities, and paracausalities.
  
• We will be making use of RPG Maker MV, making use of plugins by Yanfly, Irina and Olivia, as well as Moghunter.
  

[Jason Tandro]

Oh my word, what a read this was on my lunch break! Really dragging me back to the good old days... lemme give some feedback.

Manibrandr System wrote:

It started with Adventures,

Ah yes, my first foray into TE: Fanfiction. The entire story was written in chunks (I was writing this thing DIRECTLY into the web browser and often during school so I had to be judicious with my time.)

It all began with a goal to hit the word count limit on TE, and this was back in the early early days (circa 2005), so it was like... 75,000 words? I don't even remember but I do know that I gave up before hitting the cap about a third of the way to it because I felt the story had reached a satisfying conclusion... or more likely because I grew tired of writing it....

Foreshadowing is a literary device...

Quote:

and spun off into side stories written by various members.

I myself wrote a few other mediocre to bad pieces including TE: Mysteries, TE: Soap Opera, TE: Haunted House, TE: Christmas Carol, and the obnoxiously bad and aggressively poorly edited "Kingdom Smarts". A two-part story, and I never finished the second part.

Others, however, were writing wonderful pieces. Our girl inferiare wrote a direct sequel to TE: Adventures, and of course SoulBlazerFan had their wonderful (and tbh, much better constructed) Crisis of Infinite TerraEarths. It was a glorious time to be a young creative who's friends were mostly online and represented by avatars.

Quote:

One thing lead to another, and eventually the RPG Maker games became a thing.

A PSOne RPG Maker nothing-burger, an RPG Maker XP game simply called TerraEarth which was ambitious, bad and ambitiously bad, two separate attempts at a sequel, and finally TE: Absolute, the ground-zero of this post. Also there were three additional games, only one of which was completed: TerraEarth: Awakening (a prequel set in Rainichan's home country of Kineti). The other two was TE: Dark Gaia Crisis, meant to be another prequel and focusing more on the story of TE: Adventures, and the infamously unfinished (hell, barely started) TerraEarth: Beyond.

Quote:

With the release of TE: Absolution, Ashlynn was given something to anchor to during the time when xey were an exile from our system. And so despite it being primitive in construction, it gave us a lot of meaning.

I'm glad it helped with a difficult time. I poured a lot of love for this place into that buggy half-finished mess, lol.

Quote:

--- What We Have (Re)played So far, we have played through the first main arc as the Soul Cross team, going from the beginning, all the way up to after the fight with Malizzo. That includes all of the side quests. We also played up to the First Gig of the Brewmaster's Guild, North Cape Shipments of the Secret Service, the first part of the Book Club, and the Frostspire Battle Royale.

Malizzo and the elemental fiends are stolen straight from Final Fantasy, and were also carried over from the very first TerraEarth Game. Why did the Fire Elemental live on a previously non-existant island north of the OC Town "North Cape" and in a haunted manor? No reason. Though... I think that manor is the one from TE: Haunted House? I need to go back through all this old stuff....

Quote:

--- What We Liked so Far The fact that it is basically a world that took elements from the Soul Blazer games, and that "remixed" the world in a new interesting way.

Map taken directly from IoG with a few oddities of my own, and some stolen from Soul Blazer and Terranigma. I remember Glecliff being one of my favorite Terranigma Dungeons, and the concept of an underworld - another wholly cut map, by the way. Soul Blazer I didn't play enough of so honestly I just slapped some names on some places and hoped for the best. Southerta Island as a gold-saucer-esque minigame hub? Jeez, lol.

Quote:

The amount of side quests that opened up fairly quickly early on.

I wanted the world to be as open as I could reasonably make it, but I lacked the skill to fulfill this particular vision. So I'll take the plus points, but tbh, the game probably could have used with some reining in here lol.

Quote:

The TP system that allowed for agency in building up a set of skills.

One of several scripts I managed to stitch into the game. I only wish I had done it justice! (Same as the ATB and other noteworthy additions to the core VX system).

Quote:

The writing. A lot of the NPCs are given their own quirks and personalities that makes them feel pretty relatable.

You're too kind. Character interactions were my favorite bits for sure, and I did love a good dialogue scene, even if it was primarily static sprites face-blabbing at each other. I do like a lot of my original NPCs though, particularly from the guilds. I wanted them to be just serious enough to feel like people but primarily comedic elements. Even though the story as a whole can probably be chucked in a bin, there are a few little bits that shine here from my late teens / early 20s style of writing.

Quote:

Lore. The idea that the world is a virtual one, that can interact with beings from other planets and worlds is a compelling one, one that raises questions about what makes one particular subjectivity more real than another.

And if you think I fully understood the implications of that when I was writing it, I have a bridge to sell you in Euro.

The general idea was I wanted it to be a place that actually existed that people from our world (Earth) visited like a game, but also that most of the people within it lived in. So the closest comparison is - and tbh, another concept probably stolen - Star Ocean: Til the End of Time and it's Fourth Dimension nonsense. And this from a main story premise that openly aped the .hack games... I was a simple boy.

Quote:

--- Our Involvement For those who may not know, we had a lot of involvement in the creative process, what with having a self-insert presence in some form in the world, the games and the stories. We also were responsible for a good portion of the original music being made for the games. We were also responsible for pushing so hard for the TP system and the ATB system being a part of the game.

Your contributions were essential, it's true. Truthfully, the story was a team effort from everybody who brought a bit of themselves to the table, because without their personal wishes I had very little to go on. That's how we got Psychokind and EverPhoenix heading an "evil" adventure, and how chicken wound up joining the traditional trio of Jason, Val (frm. Joan) and Axe from TE:Adventures.

Your music is absolutely breathtaking, and I still listen to it regularly to this day. It cheers me up and reminds me of better times. The battle theme "Clash of Wills" is what I consider the true "Theme of TerraEarth" considering my own meager contributions such as "Where All Is Revealed" are really just loop-happy messes stitched together in MAGIX. I am not the renaissance man I thought myself in my youth lol.

All of your music was and continues to be a wonderful expression of some genuine spirit and life and I only wish my game had been worthy of the tracks. "Grecliff" and "Final Destination" are also favorites, as well as the somber "Suffering Dryad". But picking out a favorite is an impossibility. Each does what they do so wonderfully and fit their scenes beautifully.

Quote:

Looking back, I would say that I regret pushing to hard for the ATB system to be included, as given how it was implemented, I realized how much of a mess it could be when straight up converting a standard Turn-Based System to an ATB system, as there are often situations where turn-lapping happens in either direction. This made the AGI stat the single most important stat in the game.

This is the part where I tell you that I... basically edited monsters on the fly during play testing to make them suitable for MY party at THAT moment, and was generally just winging it. The game is broken in so many ways that a competent designer would have spotted immediately lol.

Quote:

In our defense, at the time, we have been getting into Playstation 1 emulation and, as far as standard RPG systems go, we were really obsessed with how FF6 crafts a weaving narrative with a wide cast, and how FF9's AP system allowed for character customization and player expression, and both games use the ATB system. Looking back from what we have since learned about game design, we realized that FF9 and FF6 managed to balance the ATB system by keeping the numbers low and clustered close to each other.

Don't hit yourself up too hard, it would have been my preference too had you not suggested it. Your pushing just made me look into scripting, which also got us the TP option, which I think could have been great if we used it better. The FF9 AP system is also one of my favorite skill learning systems as well. Some of my favorite skills were linked to the Boomerang weapon type (did I mention I was also playing Lunar 2 around this time?)

Quote:

--- What Could Have Been Better

The whole game.

Quote:

Mapping. It is clear that Jason's strengths are very much focused on writing and not map design. The construction of the locations and the buildings are very much square and orthogonal in nature, and with a lot of empty spaces. To be fair to him. Environmental design is a very involved and difficult process and not everyone can make the kind of beautiful maps that some in the RPG Maker community could achieve.

A common criticism. My map making was... function over form? I guess that's the best way to put it. I knew that I needed X thing in Y Place and ways to get from X to Y. In many of the maps I was just copying an existing map from IoG, but in others I was just truly phoning it in. This was my design sensibility right up until... uh... pretty recently when I learned much better map designing skills from my buddy Jacob, whom lists level design as his core strength. I wish I could show you in this forum, but believe me when I say the man is a master craftsman. There is clutter and beautiful chaos but never in an unbelievable way. Each aspect is carefully considered and adds such a life to the region he is working on that I consider my attempts to ape his style in my latest (and to date, final) RPG Maker project - an FF Fan Game, I started as I meant to go on apparently lol - the highest compliment I can pay myself.

As far as areas that I generally like the design of...? It's been so long since I played, but I remember enjoying the design of Tower of Babel as a world hub. Patted myself heartily on the back for that silly elevator.

Quote:

Dungeon design. Yeah, this one is inexcusable. Making use of the random dungeon generator and leaving it mostly as is is just low-effort. Not only that, a lot of the puzzles don't really make sense in the respective conceit of the respective dungeons. And really, the community deserved better.

No lies detected.

Quote:

Tilesets. Now don't get me wrong, the RTP is a fine set of assets. However, given how it's been used in almost every RPG Maker projects, and how they're designed to fit as many situations as possible, the RTP lends itself to looking somewhat generic, and doesn't really bring out the character of a world such as TerraEarth.

I remember having trouble importing in VX. RPG Maker XP tilesets were far more prevalent when I was working on this game. Still, the resources were totally there.

Quote:

Sound design. It seemed that Jason could not decide how the soundtrack would be handled, and so he decided to throw everything and the kitchen sink at it. This includes, his own music, music from this community, Soul Blazer music, and popular RPG music. The issue with this is that by refusing to commit to a soundtrack style, he's limited his own ability to express himself onto the project via music.

Hah, yeah this one came down to coding laziness, not gonna lie. The way I had to - for every map - have a parallel process to determine music and then to do the same for every scene, eventually got to be too much for me to keep track of and I never went back and gave the thing the proper scrubbing it deserved. As such, iPod Nano Shuffle of a Soundtrack, another disservice to your music tbh.

Quote:

Gameplay styles. Same issue as Sound design. UX is an integral part of playing a game, and by refusing to commit, he's denying himself the opportunity to really make a chosen gameplay style shine, instead being forced to spend resources to balance the numbers across each gameplay style. Methods of learning skills. Making AP the only way to learn new skills creates a new issue where the learnset of any given class is tied almost exclusively to weapon type access. This flattens the possibility space of class expression. Quest structure. we feel that some of the quests are overly simplistic, and that they did not really gel well together to form a unified narrative terroir. Moreover, we feel that the quests that we took on did not have a lasting or consequential impact on the world and how it operates.

Today's lesson, kids, is hubris. I wanted an open world, I overpromised and I under-delivered. Which is a segue right to...

Quote:

Cut features. The original character system was one that we greatly enjoyed during the development of the game. The idea of "creating an account" and choosing to build a party of your own creation, or recruiting residents or veterans, and going through an original story line, is quite compelling. I am quite disappointed to learn that that feature was cut for the final version.

Yeah I put like... dozens of hours into an entire original character creator and story arc and even recruitable characters (something that would later come back in TE: Awakening) and I just... gave up? Scrapped it? It got too hard to balance with everything else going on and considering how poorly balanced it ended up being anyways, that's a real shame. Now for this one, I feel like there were also a bunch of bugs that frustrated me, but it seems a poor excuse to chop 1/5th of my game.

Quote:

Tolkienesque fantasy tropes. Overplayed, boring, generic. 'Nuff said.

Aye.

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Navigation. It is too easy to get marooned in a part of the world that is too high-level for you when you go off the beaten track to do quests that were in the Tower of Babel.

Each town has a teleporter back to the central hub, but I know there were a lot of places you could wind up and just be SOL. Several navigational glitches include my favorite "missing transport tile". I invented the Company's "Sky Hook" item mostly as a debugging tool, lol.

Quote:

The game engine. Let's be frank here. Even back when the game was being produced, RPG Maker VX is primitive, with an inferior new tileset and tile-mapping system that is several steps backward from XP and 2k3, with the Ruby scripting engine that is barely an iterative upgrade from XP. It gets worse when VXAce got released soon after, as a straight up upgrade to VX. This made sure that RPG Maker VX as an engine would be largely forgotten, and abandoned by the community before it had a chance to mature.

Oh it gets worse. VX Ace I'm pretty sure it came out during my production (2008 to 2010) so I probably had to option to move it over and just... didn't? I mean would have been a lot of work tbf.

Quote:

--- How We Would Revisit It? So, given that this game, despite its flaws have buried itself in our mind and imbued us with an obsession of iterating on the premise, we have a few ideas as to how we would handle this when we get to doing this for keeps. We will be using Clockwork Raven's tilesets and icons. With its 16x16 aesthetic, it will be sure to give that retro aesthetic that keeps it looking fresh and colourful. While we could come up with our own original tilesets, we feel that having a library of assets ready would work as a good starting point. And as needed, we could easily extend the tileset with our own original work. We will be using these assets to great effect in making memorable environments that players would feel good traversing, exploring and revisiting. We'd also be leveraging Aerosys' Random Map Generation system to add some replayability. We will spend time to make sure that each quest will be as impactful and consequential as could be. We will be making use of our compositional skill to write original music for it, making use of the Roland SC-8850 for sound generation. We will be adding a twist of the original character creation back, by bringing in the possibility of starting the game with Loki (Formerly Enigma) and Cierra in the party, older and wiser, and defaulting to residential recruits. We will be making all encounters on-map encounters that only respawn when the player exits the dungeon. We will be implementing multiple ways of learning skills, be it through equipment, class proficiency, story conditions or in-battle conditions. We will also make sure each character/class will have something different to add to the gameplay. We will implement different travel styles that are unique to each party. Raini and Psychokind's party will be able to make use of portals outside of The Tower of Babel, Deathpit's party will travel via Red Riotz, and Jason's party will travel by train. These methods will always be available to the party. We will be building an original fantasy world lore around non-humanity, the realness of various subjectivities, and paracausalities. We will be making use of RPG Maker MV, making use of plugins by Yanfly, Irina and Olivia, as well as Moghunter.

Nothing to say here except all of this sounds magnificent. You have inspired me to revisit and post lengthy comments on my old projects if for nothing else than to explain myself XD.

Basically, I made this game - the coding side of it at least - single-handedly between the age of 19 and 21 and it really shows in the final product. I enjoy what parts of this game serve as a time capsule for the era it was created in and the community it - albeit poorly - reflects. I have a theatre in Euro where standups that I enjoyed can be heard. I have a Foamy the Squirrel fanclub which has aged poorly. I have a slew of references, in-jokes and entire side content all based around stuff that only members of this community could find remotely entertaining.

It was a fun project. It still makes me smile. And it definitely didn't work. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with the basic premise, and am confident you can turn out something of substantially higher quality that that which I released in April 2010.

[Manibrandr System]

Jason Tandro wrote:

Oh my word, what a read this was on my lunch break! Really dragging me back to the good old days... lemme give some feedback. Ah yes, my first foray into TE: Fanfiction. The entire story was written in chunks (I was writing this thing DIRECTLY into the web browser and often during school so I had to be judicious with my time.) It all began with a goal to hit the word count limit on TE, and this was back in the early early days (circa 2005), so it was like... 75,000 words? I don't even remember but I do know that I gave up before hitting the cap about a third of the way to it because I felt the story had reached a satisfying conclusion... or more likely because I grew tired of writing it....

For what it's worth, it was one of the more fun story experiences we have read through. It got us thinking about what sort of stories we would want to tell if we were a part of it. We, at one point would like to take what you have written and expand on it with a more fleshed out style of prose.

Quote:

Foreshadowing is a literary device... I myself wrote a few other mediocre to bad pieces including TE: Mysteries, TE: Soap Opera, TE: Haunted House, TE: Christmas Carol, and the obnoxiously bad and aggressively poorly edited "Kingdom Smarts". A two-part story, and I never finished the second part. Others, however, were writing wonderful pieces. Our girl inferiare wrote a direct sequel to TE: Adventures, and of course SoulBlazerFan had their wonderful (and tbh, much better constructed) Crisis of Infinite TerraEarths. It was a glorious time to be a young creative who's friends were mostly online and represented by avatars.

Those were fond memories. These stories really captured our imagination, and made the dark years of our late teens and early twenties a lot more bearable.

Quote:

A PSOne RPG Maker nothing-burger, an RPG Maker XP game simply called TerraEarth which was ambitious, bad and ambitiously bad, two separate attempts at a sequel, and finally TE: Absolute, the ground-zero of this post. Also there were three additional games, only one of which was completed: TerraEarth: Awakening (a prequel set in Rainichan's home country of Kineti). The other two was TE: Dark Gaia Crisis, meant to be another prequel and focusing more on the story of TE: Adventures, and the infamously unfinished (hell, barely started) TerraEarth: Beyond.

Funny story about the Dark Gaia crisis. We have been ideating on what possible sort of game would suit the story conceits of a story like that with shifting viewpoints and perspectives, and the answer would turn out to be a strategy RPG. Recently, SRPG Studio got released on Steam, and that tool seems to be perfect for it, as it is well-suited to recreating the gameplay of old Fire Emblem games. Maybe one day if we ever do return to this, I would love to collab on such a project.

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I'm glad it helped with a difficult time. I poured a lot of love for this place into that buggy half-finished mess, lol.

It's like what I have told a dear friend of mine, it may have been primitive and not very well put-together, but it was one that gave us great joy. The experiences and feelings that were woven into this, especially how it stitched our collective WYRD together was a magic that we will never forget the feeling of. It basically served as an anchor for us to that part of our life, and the connections we've made then and there.

Quote:

Malizzo and the elemental fiends are stolen straight from Final Fantasy, and were also carried over from the very first TerraEarth Game. Why did the Fire Elemental live on a previously non-existant island north of the OC Town "North Cape" and in a haunted manor? No reason. Though... I think that manor is the one from TE: Haunted House? I need to go back through all this old stuff.... Map taken directly from IoG with a few oddities of my own, and some stolen from Soul Blazer and Terranigma. I remember Glecliff being one of my favorite Terranigma Dungeons, and the concept of an underworld - another wholly cut map, by the way. Soul Blazer I didn't play enough of so honestly I just slapped some names on some places and hoped for the best. Southerta Island as a gold-saucer-esque minigame hub? Jeez, lol.

It seemed to fit back then, given the online culture at the time, being all about taking elements of other medias, and mashing them up in a sort of a fanfic like narrative. Of course, fanfiction used to be all the rage back then, and in that time of our lives, we just couldn't have enough of it. We would read entire epics based on a children's cartoon show that aimed to appeal to a growing audience with more mature themes, perhaps another entire alternate universe branching off of the original media, or maybe we would read about how characters from the author's various favourite games would come together to beat each other up, because why the fuck not? It was the highlight of an earlier part of our lives when everything else seemed hopeless. So, thank you for that.

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I wanted the world to be as open as I could reasonably make it, but I lacked the skill to fulfill this particular vision. So I'll take the plus points, but tbh, the game probably could have used with some reining in here lol.

The thing about writing for RPGs is that it is hard, and that is because one not only has to start thinking about how the main plot unfolds, there's also considerations for any and all possible player interactions to be made, under any and all possible conditions and game states. I will talk about it later on when I am able to gather my thoughts after playing more of the game.

Quote:

One of several scripts I managed to stitch into the game. I only wish I had done it justice! (Same as the ATB and other noteworthy additions to the core VX system).

While these plugins can greatly enhance the experience for players, it does take a lot of work to really bring out the best of those systems.

Quote:

You're too kind. Character interactions were my favorite bits for sure, and I did love a good dialogue scene, even if it was primarily static sprites face-blabbing at each other. I do like a lot of my original NPCs though, particularly from the guilds. I wanted them to be just serious enough to feel like people but primarily comedic elements. Even though the story as a whole can probably be chucked in a bin, there are a few little bits that shine here from my late teens / early 20s style of writing.

I do love the idea of being there to hire mercenaries of all types to do work that, while not as important to the existence of the world, or the continent, or even the town/city, but is still important for someone's fortunes, happiness, or even satisfaction.

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And if you think I fully understood the implications of that when I was writing it, I have a bridge to sell you in Euro. The general idea was I wanted it to be a place that actually existed that people from our world (Earth) visited like a game, but also that most of the people within it lived in. So the closest comparison is - and tbh, another concept probably stolen - Star Ocean: Til the End of Time and it's Fourth Dimension nonsense. And this from a main story premise that openly aped the .hack games... I was a simple boy.

You know, that concept really stuck by me, especially since the idea of Boxxleman going mad over his creation not "being real" raised questions about subjectivites and the "realness" of them. While we have written the short prose on the Dawn of Svandir, and how the world came to be, we've been developing the concept and ideas for some time now on our own terms.

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Your contributions were essential, it's true. Truthfully, the story was a team effort from everybody who brought a bit of themselves to the table, because without their personal wishes I had very little to go on. That's how we got Psychokind and EverPhoenix heading an "evil" adventure, and how chicken wound up joining the traditional trio of Jason, Val (frm. Joan) and Axe from TE:Adventures. Your music is absolutely breathtaking, and I still listen to it regularly to this day. It cheers me up and reminds me of better times. The battle theme "Clash of Wills" is what I consider the true "Theme of TerraEarth" considering my own meager contributions such as "Where All Is Revealed" are really just loop-happy messes stitched together in MAGIX. I am not the renaissance man I thought myself in my youth lol. All of your music was and continues to be a wonderful expression of some genuine spirit and life and I only wish my game had been worthy of the tracks. "Grecliff" and "Final Destination" are also favorites, as well as the somber "Suffering Dryad". But picking out a favorite is an impossibility. Each does what they do so wonderfully and fit their scenes beautifully.

There is a funny story about how we conceived of Clash of Wills, as this battle theme was inspired by an off chance video I watched of someone sharing their custom battle system for RPG Maker on YouTube, and the song that they used for the BGM was Trails in the Sky - Fate of the Fairies. Truth be told, back then, we had no idea what kind of a mood or creative direction this game was going to go in, so we just picked things that seemed to sound cool to us at the time as reference. The insistence of using greek song titles was due to us getting into listening to Greek Rock] and [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhCGvVECcUg]Ballads[/url back then.

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This is the part where I tell you that I... basically edited monsters on the fly during play testing to make them suitable for MY party at THAT moment, and was generally just winging it. The game is broken in so many ways that a competent designer would have spotted immediately lol.

Yeah, I have noticed that almost all of the monsters you've set up had the AGI set so low that they almost never can get a turn off before getting blitzed by our party. And those that do not are still too slow to keep up with the party. Moreover, most of them, even bosses, have ATK stats so low that they can't even damage the party.

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Don't hit yourself up too hard, it would have been my preference too had you not suggested it. Your pushing just made me look into scripting, which also got us the TP option, which I think could have been great if we used it better. The FF9 AP system is also one of my favorite skill learning systems as well. Some of my favorite skills were linked to the Boomerang weapon type (did I mention I was also playing Lunar 2 around this time?)

If I did my research correctly on the VX/VXA era of RPG Maker scripting, those scripts are made by one Fomar0153, who was pretty prolific back then and is still creating scripts and plugins for MV and MZ.

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A common criticism. My map making was... function over form? I guess that's the best way to put it. I knew that I needed X thing in Y Place and ways to get from X to Y. In many of the maps I was just copying an existing map from IoG, but in others I was just truly phoning it in. This was my design sensibility right up until... uh... pretty recently when I learned much better map designing skills from my buddy Jacob, whom lists level design as his core strength. I wish I could show you in this forum, but believe me when I say the man is a master craftsman. There is clutter and beautiful chaos but never in an unbelievable way. Each aspect is carefully considered and adds such a life to the region he is working on that I consider my attempts to ape his style in my latest (and to date, final) RPG Maker project - an FF Fan Game, I started as I meant to go on apparently lol - the highest compliment I can pay myself. As far as areas that I generally like the design of...? It's been so long since I played, but I remember enjoying the design of Tower of Babel as a world hub. Patted myself heartily on the back for that silly elevator.

I would love to see his work for myself. Your friend seems like an experienced gamedev whose works would be interesting to check out.

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I remember having trouble importing in VX. RPG Maker XP tilesets were far more prevalent when I was working on this game. Still, the resources were totally there.

From what I had learned from researching RPG Maker engines from that era, it seems like the assets needed to be imported in engine instead of simply having the assets copied into the project's folder. I am pretty sure XP tilesets were able to be imported to the VX format with a bit of work, though nowadays, it would be pointless as there are plenty of VX/VXA tilesets available, plus plenty of 16x16 tilesets that would work in any RPG Maker engine with a bit of adjustment.

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Hah, yeah this one came down to coding laziness, not gonna lie. The way I had to - for every map - have a parallel process to determine music and then to do the same for every scene, eventually got to be too much for me to keep track of and I never went back and gave the thing the proper scrubbing it deserved. As such, iPod Nano Shuffle of a Soundtrack, another disservice to your music tbh.

I feel like it's more of a disservice to the zeitgeist of the project. Since, I do feel that having a solid direction in the sound design would have helped it a lot.

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Today's lesson, kids, is hubris. I wanted an open world, I overpromised and I under-delivered. Which is a segue right to... Yeah I put like... dozens of hours into an entire original character creator and story arc and even recruitable characters (something that would later come back in TE: Awakening) and I just... gave up? Scrapped it? It got too hard to balance with everything else going on and considering how poorly balanced it ended up being anyways, that's a real shame. Now for this one, I feel like there were also a bunch of bugs that frustrated me, but it seems a poor excuse to chop 1/5th of my game.

Even open worlds have some limits placed in for the sake of having a focused experience. A lot of creative decisions were made to make the feel of it coherent too. In a lot of ways, this focus is very important, as it reduces the amount of work needed to put everything together.

However, I did consider the original party builder to be a core aspect of the project, so seeing it gone made it feel like something big was missing. I guess it also doesn't help that, looking at the database, all of the recruitable heroes only have access to generic classes.

As I mentioned, if I were to add this gameplay element back, the recruitable heroes are going to have their own set classes, with the play starting with Loki and Cierra.

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Each town has a teleporter back to the central hub, but I know there were a lot of places you could wind up and just be SOL. Several navigational glitches include my favorite "missing transport tile". I invented the Company's "Sky Hook" item mostly as a debugging tool, lol.

And I think that kind of has things backwards, as I don't think any of the main story beats required passing through the tower. The tower itself seems to primarily be focused on side content, so maybe priority should have been given to setting up a system for tower teleporters to give players options for where they want the teleportation circles to take them.

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Oh it gets worse. VX Ace I'm pretty sure it came out during my production (2008 to 2010) so I probably had to option to move it over and just... didn't? I mean would have been a lot of work tbf.

I would argue that scripts have existed for a while that could make the conversion process easier, but I am guessing that they weren't as mature back then. Still though, I'd have argued that it would have been worth it, as there had been a lot more plugin development done for VXA. Though to be fair, this is hindsight speaking.

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Nothing to say here except all of this sounds magnificent. You have inspired me to revisit and post lengthy comments on my old projects if for nothing else than to explain myself XD. Basically, I made this game - the coding side of it at least - single-handedly between the age of 19 and 21 and it really shows in the final product. I enjoy what parts of this game serve as a time capsule for the era it was created in and the community it - albeit poorly - reflects. I have a theatre in Euro where standups that I enjoyed can be heard. I have a Foamy the Squirrel fanclub which has aged poorly. I have a slew of references, in-jokes and entire side content all based around stuff that only members of this community could find remotely entertaining. It was a fun project. It still makes me smile. And it definitely didn't work. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with the basic premise, and am confident you can turn out something of substantially higher quality that that which I released in April 2010.

In a lot of ways, I respect the sincerity in which you'd presented these things in the game. That kind of thing gives the project a kind of charm that can't be understated.

I have played through Chapter 2 (The Eastern Continent) and focused my efforts into finishing the side content. I have written 10 physical pages of notes, and I will be parsing them in a follow up post later on. Thank you for this, this gave me a warm feeling inside to read! nwn

[Manibrandr System]

Playing through the next bit of the game, it seemed so much shorter compared to Chapter 1, with only 4 major checkpoints and 1 side area, compared to Chapter 1’s 5 major checkpoints and, 9 side areas.

I feel that there is a big missed opportunity to add in a story beat that occurs in Freejia. After all, there was a short cut scene that played where Axe commented about the presence of the Mishima Clan and the lack of Kazama clan presence. It could be a thing to have a whole story arc about Axe confronting his past, driving out the Mishima clan and restoring the Kazama clan presence in the city. Similarly, pulling a Ryuu Ga Gotoku, and dipping into the criminal underworld once again as someone who once earned his freedom from the Kazuma clan mafia is another option.

The Nazca Desert section is even more bare, it is a mostly blank featureless sand plain, with no real defining features other than a couple of landmarks sparsely scattered around. There were no encounters, and no geological features that give the location its own personality. All there was to do there for the main story is to get to a cut scene, which then transports your party to the Sky Gardens. If there ever was a masterclass on how to make a desert biome interesting, one should look no further than the continent of Oblivia from Xenogears Chronicles X, which featured a wide variety of environments and interesting geological features for a desert biome. The Duma Desert from Legend of Mana is also a good reference for how a desert biome could be done properly.

The Sky Gardens dungeon itself is...functional. There are puzzle relating to the story of the Sky Lord, which is extremely basic, but I guess it is something. Given that we’ve already done some side content, we are way over-leveled for the Tiamat fight, and are able to tackle her with little resistance. This fight with her is nothing to write home about. This dungeon would have been an excuse to map out a world wonder like The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, where there would be shifting aqueduct puzzles to challenge players in a way that matches the theme.

Getting to Evegrow, if there was one thing that struck me about this place, it’s that it was forgettable and generic-looking. It was my second visit to that place, (The first time being an early Special Ops mission.) and I can barely remember anything about the town. It has all of the typical buildings, but nothing to really distinguish it from other towns. In fact, the layout really resembles the ruined town of Minimaly. This really kneecaps the gravity of Remus setting the town on fire just to gain the party’s attention. It’s like “Oh no! A town I never had the time or opportunity to get to know and grow attached to is being set on fire! Anyways...”

Feeling disappointed, I decided to start dipping into the side content.

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Mining Town

The Mining Town doesn’t feel like a mine at all. It feels more like stone-age village, and less like a cavern that promises a plethora of rare gemstones. When I think of a mining town, I think of either a temporary camp with tents for domicile, trading, medicinal, etc purposes, with a nearby entrance to a dark underground labyrinthine cave, or an underground village carved out of stone, and inhabited by cave-dwellers, with a nearby tunnel leading to deeper underground areas. As for the mining areas themselves, I think a good set of inspirations to draw from are the cave areas from the Mana series. From Trials of Mana, we have locations like the Dwarf Tunnels and Gemstone Valley, and from Legend of Mana, we have the Ulkan Mines and Mekiv Caverns. I could easily imagine that the side quest in this Mining Town playing out like the Dwarf Cave segment in Trials of Mana where the party was tasked to look for Nitromyte from Watts the Dwarf, and ended up encountering Jewel Eater, the dungeon boss.

After you defeat the boss monster that was terrorizing the Mining Town, you’re given a pickaxe, and, with it, the ability to mine gemstones yourself. It feels disappointing. A big reason for it is that this mode of play, the mining loop, boiled down to mashing buttons mindlessly until the gems you desire pop out. Plus progression is quite arbitrary and not at all dependent on player skill or input. In other words, it did not follow the idiosyncrasies of mining at all.

What I would think a good mining mini-game would be would involve a system that assigns each party member to different roles. These roles are all dependent on different stats, and the success of the mining operation depends on the desired stats of each assigned party members. For example:

• The Driver would need to have a high strength rating to maximize maximum carrying capacity, high constitution for endurance, and knowledge in Dungeoneering to determine the safest paths through the tunnels.
  
• The Skirmisher would need to have high Dexterity/Agility in order to detect and defuse traps, and to be able to strike at any threats first before they could come into attacking range.
  
• The Geologist would need to have a good head on their shoulders, as well as be armed with the knowledge of precious gems and minerals in order to find high-value mining nodes.
  
• Finally, the Miner would need to have good Strength and Dexterity/Agility stats in order to be able to deliver sharp strikes at a good rhythm and pace, so as to not go too fast, or too slow.

What this would all build up to is not just the acquisition of rare gemstones, precious metals and accessories, but the potential to feed into a weapon and armor crafting system.

My personal idea, if I were to design a system around mining, would be to include similar mining locations scattered throughout the world. Some would be well-known, some would be hidden, each location offering different types of minerals, gemstones and metals. Each of those locations would expand as you mine in them, sometimes connecting to various underground locations, maybe even each other. Perhaps they might even eventually form a global network of mines and caves that could span across and in between continents.

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The RP Punch-Up (Fight Club)

This is probably where the primitive quality of this game really starts to show. Arena style side quests are supposed to bring out the best of a battle system by introducing volatile mechanics that would be considered too overwhelming or difficult if implemented in the main story battles. As it stands, the Fight Club assignments are underwhelming. There is no anticipation at all, no lead up, or narrative elements to really put the next target “Over”. I was just given a battle with mostly generic, increasingly tankier single enemies. Not satisfying at all.

I think when it comes to this kind of side-content, each target should have specific behaviors and gimmicks that make them not just powerful, but also weak to specific strategies. Think of the asterisk battles in the Bravely Default games. I also don’t think that those fights should just be given to you. I think that with each target given, the players should go through the following gameplay loop:

• Research: Players should travel to the target’s home town, ask around in bars, and around the target’s usual haunts in order to learn of their habits, vices and weaknesses that could be exploited.
  
• Preparation: Often, exploiting the target’s weaknesses may require, specific skills, gear, and party configurations. The process of acquiring these advantages would oftentimes be out of the way, and require a gear hunt, which means traveling and raising funds. During research, players may learn about specific combat conditions that must be honoured on top of everything else. (Things like solo duels, no healing magic, no items, etc.)
  
• Meeting: Players are then tasked to approach the target to arrange a duel. Some may be willing to fight right off the bat. Others may require some favours done, or for the party to prove their worthiness by going on a secondary mini-quest.
  
• Report: Once the target is defeated, players must then report on their victory to the Fight Club representative to gain a reward, and be given the next target. The cycle then repeats.

Occasionally, previously defeated members, or members one or two tiers up would challenge the player party to (re-)assert dominance. This would add gravity to the choice of joining the Fight Club, and keep players on their toes.
Rewards could be unique gear and accessories that are not available anywhere else, which would grant unique skills.

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The RP Punch-Up (Battle Royale)

Looking at the Battle Royale events, they are little more than search-and-destroy missions with almost no variety to the encounters. They don’t even offer any challenge to me as I played through those events. This is greatly disappointing because they really should be all about testing the adaptability of the player party, challenging them to make decisions based on changing conditions like item locations and increasing enemy strength.

My idea would be that the player party’s gear and inventory would be confiscated at the beginning/orientation phase of the Battle Royale event. Enemy participants would fight each other, would collect loot and grow stronger over time, while the player party seeks to do the same, starting from scratch, and needing to collect gear upgrades scattered throughout the arenas in order to keep up.

Each party member would be given a role, which would serve as a temporary “class” that gives them access to different gear and weapon types unique to the Battle Royale arenas; <<Striker>> for damage-dealing, <<Shielder>> for tanking and drawing aggro, <<Medic>> for healing and protection, and <<Support>> for crowd-control, buffing and debuffing. Over time, repeated participation could lead to the learning of unique skills as AP accumulates with found gear over time. While any party member can assume any role in the Battle Royale events, certain classes would fare better with specific roles. For example:

• Eleara would be well-suited for the <<Striker>> role, due to her fast and powerful physical and offensive fonic abilities.
  
• Axe would fare well with the <<Shielder>> role, possessing a large HP pool and a selection of taunting and various aggro-drawing abilities.
  
• Chicken, on the other hand, works well with the <<Medic>> role, with Solar, Lunar, and Entropic fonym at his disposal.
  
• Jason, thanks to his chosen class, would be excellent with the <<Supporter>> role, giving out morale buffs, and oppressing the enemy party with debilitating skills.

Of course, there are options for each alternative role and character combination that could work well with each other, and in the context of party synergy.

At the end of these events, all items and gear would be returned to the player party. An alternate form of currency might also be awarded that would only be redeemable at those Battle Royale locations, likely for things like the unique gear found in the arena.

One final note of suggestion I could provide would be to have rival parties occasionally join the Battle Royale events. Given that the levels of the rival parties would scale much more closely to the party’s average level than that of the generic contestants, this could be a way to add a fun spike to the challenge.

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The Company

As far as side content goes, this could easily be its own quest line, thanks to it playing very similarly to the main story. It could have been a nice way for players to go down a different story path with a satisfying conclusion. However, there are a few issues that really kneecapped its effectiveness as a piece of side content.

For one, the introduction and initiation made no sense. Why would anyone wander into the 5th floor? What kind of hare-brained system would even allow people to wander into the 5th floor? As part of The Company’s recruitment strategy, relying on random people wandering in doesn’t seem very wise.

What’s more, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason why the portal in the Company’s HQ couldn’t let players choose their destination instead of what it did, which is to set the portal to take the party to the mission destination. This could easily be a factor in stranding the player’s party in a location with no easy way to return to where they were previously.

Moreover, there had been no cross-interactions between this quest line and other quest lines, which made it hard to believe that the missions in the Company quest line had an appreciable effect on the world. I believe that, given how the Company missions diminish the Chimera Clan’s hold on various parts of the world, that should be reflected in how the story and narrative flows in other quest lines.

Another idea to change up the gameplay, that could distinguish it from the main storyline’s mode of play, would be to expand on the interrogation mechanic that was introduced in a couple of the missions, namely the mission in Dao. I think this could have been revisited several times throughout the quest line. Going further, the process of gathering information could also be expanded upon, putting players in a situation where they’d need to gather pieces of evidence, either via questioning various NPCs, or by subterfuge, before confronting their mark. Think Disco Elysium or Paradise Killer. The Netflix series The Blacklist, or the Southern Reach trilogy of novels by Jeff VanderMeer, especially Authority, could also be a good source of inspiration to draw from.

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The Brewmaster

This quest line had a few good elements, but overall, it was fairly underwhelming as it failed to satisfyingly capture the idiosyncrasies of brewing, mixing, transporting, and running a bar. The quest line did not touch on brewing, reduced the experience of mixing drinks to a series of random multiple-choice questions, reduced transportation to a couple of retrieval missions, as well as a couple of undifferentiated travel missions, and running the bar...that was the most disappointing part of this quest line. Instead of a way to passively earn income by setting up a bar and managing the various aspects of running it, it was essentially just a dice roll that the player can just mash through for a chance to accrue small amounts of gems each time. There was no real idiosyncratic or engaging mechanics like deciding on supply lines, the security detail, the menu, or the staff.

Brewing itself can be difficult to translate into gameplay in an engaging and satisfying way, as the process of brewing can span several months, which, even when accounting for accelerated in-game time, is still a lot of time to make players wait. However, this could be handled in a more abstract way by putting the player through a few lessons, perhaps a few quests to thwart rival sabotage attempts, culminating in a short test. Players would then be, upon passing the test, be awarded a book that would serve as a guide to brewing. (In gameplay terms, a key item that unlocks brewing.)

On delivery and retrieval missions, how I think it could be handled would be akin to escort missions in TF2 or Overwatch. Which would involve a caravan with a payload of a number of barrels, and crew members. The player’s job is to protect both the crew members and the barrels of product from occasional bandit raids. Some bandits would prioritize attacking the caravan crew, while others would go straight for the product. This would mean splitting the party into two squads, where one half is responsible for being the crew’s bodyguards, and thus requires a lot of muscle, while the other half would be responsible for loss prevention, meaning that they would need to be fast. The two parties would be complimented with generic security detail hired by the Brewmaster. On the retrieval phase, if any, the player’s party would be tasked to track down the stolen shipment, wipe out the bandit presence, and then accompany the caravan back to its rightful owner. In both cases, players will be awarded based on how much of the crew survived, as well as how much of the product remained intact throughout the journey.

As for the bar gigs, I feel that this could be handled more like Overcooked where the player have to take patron requests in real time, and mix them by manually filling the drinks portion by portion, and then choosing how to garnish and mix the drink. This would be a great way for the players to really learn how to mix those drinks, in a way that could translate into real-life skills. A recently-released game that captures this experience well is Dine-in Dungeon by Looey, (http://lui421.itch.io/dine-in-dungeon) an indie game released for the RPG Maker 2025 game jam.

All of these experiences could come together and culminate into a satisfying conclusion when the player is finally given the chance to open up a bar. They would have the opportunity to pick staff members, and then train them to run the bar, using the player’s collected knowledge to help decide on what traits to look for in each member of the crew. Then when everything is set up correctly, this could be a source of income that players would accrue over time, as stored gems in a vault somewhere, that the player could withdraw from as needed.

This could have also lead to a new quest line to revive the town of Crown, and lead it towards a renaissance of prosperity, commerce and trade. This could also tie into the Company quest line, where, as long as the Chimera Clan is still active under their leader, emergent missions may become available that would have the player deal with bandit raids on the town of Crown, or have the player deal with extortionists looking to muscle in on the town and bar’s profits. This may even be a way to properly segue the player into getting involved with the Company.

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Fishing

Gen 1 Pokémon was what came to mind when describing how the fishing mini-game was handled. However, this does not fit the game for several reasons:

• In Pokémon Gen 1, the fishing mechanics serve as a mere prelude to the core game loop, which is encountering and catching wild Pokémon. In fact, this serves as a way of encountering Pokémon unique to aquatic regions. In contrast, all fishing did for this game is to give us fishes as items that could be consumed for HP recovery, or sold for money.
  
• As a method of generating income, it is inferior to mining, as there is no requirement to invest in tools in order to mine, unlike with fishing, which requires a constant supply of bait. What’s worse, to get the fishes that generate a lot of income, players must make use of the worms instead of dry bait, and for each fishing attempt, players must manually select the worm bait each time, making it just involved enough to make mashing through the dialogue to grind for fish impractical, while offering nothing substantial in terms of engagement.
  
• At the end of the fishing quest, there is a very esoteric set of conditions that would lead to an out of the blue encounter with Riverson, an impossible super boss. There was no signposting to this, and Riverson is impossible to deal with, due to its multiple immunities, and sky-high AGI stat. More on that later.

I do feel that fishing mini-games should either be made to be a completely chill, relaxing idle affair, with zero risk to the player, as a way to pass the time, or its own mode of play with an entire quest line, set of unique locations, fights and loot. I do have a few ideas on how to make these ideas work, but that, if I were to pursue them for real, will take considerable prototyping.

Fishing Idea 1 – Idle Mini-game

This idea would involve the use of autorun common events that would automatically generate fishes, and successes, based on the party member who is fishing. Bait would be purchased as needed, and the price added to a ledger. Similarly, all successful catches would be prepared and sold automatically, and the sell value, with a multiplier applied based on the fish processor’s survival skill, and on the seller’s selling skill, would be added to the ledger. With each catch, depending on the fish processor’s skill, fish guts can be added to the pool of available bait, which could be used as a higher tier of bait that could be used to increase the odds of subsequent successful catches. And finally, the spotter could make use of their strength and perception skills to improve the pool of fishes that are available to catch, and to help reel in supersized fishes.

At the end of a session, usually at sunset or sunrise, all costs and profits would be tallied, and all profits or losses would be reflected on in the player’s Gem count. And the running catch totals will be used to improve the various skills of the party members that were involved. This will eventually lead to access to better and more challenging fishing spots.

What makes this idea work is that it would be a non-demanding change in the mode of play. Though, the challenge that this idea presents would be in the scripting, balancing the temporal resolution of each processing tick, and game engine performance. Lag would be a real challenge to deal with. Another challenge would involve the creation of a set of bespoke assets that may not appear elsewhere in the game.

Fishing Idea 2 – Monster Hunting Quest Line

This idea would involve the conceit of an ecological society, specializing in aquatic wildlife, possibly part of the guilds already present throughout the world, who are dedicated to culling unruly monsters who got too strong and are disrupting the local wildlife. (Think of the Tyrants in Xenoblade Chronicles 1/2/3/X) These monsters could be found on land, on the shores, at sea or deep underwater. In this context, the idea of fishing could be stretched and bent a bit with the idea that some fish have developed air bladder systems that would allow them to float through the air.

Upon receiving a mission to hunt down a monster, players are then tasked to make use of tracking skills to find and draw out the monster. Upon finding said monster, a fight ensues, which would often involve special conditions to keep them interesting. Conditions like fighting at the edge of a cliff, rendering all grounded and melee attacks from the player’s side completely ineffective against the monster. Another idea would involve catching the monster with the aid of a fishing pole, or any other restraining implements, rendering the designated trapper immobile and bound to the monster. Or the monster could be confronted underwater, with the aid of air bubble, or gill mutation spells, necessitating a dedicated caster to keep the air bubble up, or spending a turn out of every few turns to reapply the mutation spell/item effect.

Upon a successful hunt, the carcass would be harvested for its meat and trophies, to be shown to the guild as proof of the hunt. These trophies could later then be used to craft unique gear and accessories. On top of that, the player’s party would be rewarded with unique weapons, armor and accessories. Perhaps, additionally, an advancement through the ranks of the guild, leading to more riskier, and more bountiful hunting missions being made available to the player.

The advantage of a system like this is that it slots nicely into the main gameplay loop, not needing many new scripts and event systems for this to work. Though the biggest challenge would involve writing dynamic lore that would react to the hunts, and how they would impact the world around them. Things like the local ecosystems, the locals , as well as how the presence of these monsters, or lack thereof, would affect the flow of other quest lines; All of them are important considerations for the writing process.

Fishing Idea 3 – Using a Plugin

This would be the simplest and easiest option, as most of the work would have already been done for us, and all we would need to do is to set up our assets and customize the provided options to suit our needs.

However, without a working knowledge of how each piece of code within the plugin works, flexibility would be limited. And there would also always be a possibility of plugin incompatibility. Moreover, there would be potential ethical concerns for editing and modifying the plugin code.

Not only that, there is a good chance that the kinaesthetics of the mode of play provided by these plugins may not match the intended mood or aesthetics of play for the rest of the game. This may result in an incoherent experience overall.

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Book Club

The way the Book Club quests are set up was functional, but there was so much more that could have been done with this concept. For one, having to go through the inventory system to “use” a book and refer to its contents can be a pain. Given that most of the available books are riddles that serve as clues to dungeon puzzles, there’s no reason not to implement an auto-reminding system that could display the riddle on screen as the player approach relevant areas.

The reading assignments could also have been an opportunity to introduce ARG elements by assigning reading tasks to players that involve books that exist in meatspace. The solution to riddles in dungeons and puzzles could then be found in passages within those books. Although, with public access to books being more and more of an issue lately, it might be prudent to source from public domain books, or the original works from the author(s) and/or collaborators.

The segue into the anthropology and ancient aliens aspect of the quest line seemed to have come out of nowhere, making it feel like the Book Club quests could have been more of a recreational activity like the Foamy Card Cult instead of being a part of this quest line. I feel like this could have been handled as two separate activities, with Book Club activities eventually leading players into exploring the secrets of the viewing tables, and that line of questioning leading players to research books to read, and gain knowledge from.

Obviously, the challenge associated with making use of fully-fledged works is that a lot of reading material has to be included, and that could potentially be a lot of work writing, and typing up stories, articles, theoretical books, etc. However, I do feel that this is the perfect opportunity to introduce more lore of the world to the players.

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Super Bosses

I talked about Riverson earlier in this post, and I think it’s time I elaborate on it and the other super bosses that popped up at various points while playing through the side content. My biggest gripe about them was that they were thrown at the player out of the blue with no anticipation, and with stats, skills, and abilities that are just impossible to deal with outside of just brute-forcing the stats.

In my eyes, super bosses are meant to be out of the way encounters that players would learn about over the course of the game, and would be encouraged to actively seek out as a side challenge. Their great strength and capabilities would be hinted at long before the encounter happens, would be put “over” by a series of increasingly challenging encounters leading up to it. Most importantly, they would present gimmicks that, although very difficult to deal with, would not be impossible to get around.

This was not what I saw in this game. The post RP Punch-Up super boss, Death Toll was triggered by a yes/no question from an NPC sprite that players would never, in a million years, would assume to be that of the “Strongest Warrior in the Galaxy.” As for Riverson...you could easily explore the world several times over and never figure out how to encounter it. I had to look at the events in the editor several times over in order to figure out how Riverson could be encountered, and I still haven’t figured out how to get to the next bit of this quest line. (The “Here, Kitty! Kitty!” switch.)

And, much like Death Toll, Riverson possessed astronomical AGI stats, far above anything else that had been encountered before, complimented with substantial ATK, DEF and SPR stats. All of which ensured that it not only hits hard, both physically and magically, it also takes a lot of hits. It is also immune to all detrimental status effects, magical elements, and debuffs, and it doesn’t end there. It also possess a Tier 3 Drain spell which, coupled with its high SPR stat, would ensure that it could potentially out-heal any damage the party could throw at it, healing itself for up to 5000 HP per turn. All of this meant that there was absolutely no possible counter-play possible, without grinding up Gems via mining or fishing, for hours on end, in order to purchase stat up seeds. I spent 2 hours doing nothing but grinding up stat up seeds this way, and it still did not make much of a difference. It was not until I went into the editor to reduce its AGI stat to 150 from 200, removed its elemental immunities, changed its status & debuff immunities into resistances that I stood a chance against Riverson.

Again, I think super bosses should be capstone encounters that serves as a culmination of all of the challenges that the player’s party had faced beforehand, and as an ultimate test of the player’s knowledge of battle mechanics. They should be puzzle fights hyped up by previous encounters that lead up to the final encounter by following a natural progression of rising challenges. They would have a distinct set of immunities that are balanced out by well-defined and precognizable weaknesses that would be hard to, but not impossible to exploit. These fights would require players to change up or adapt their strategies in order to come out on top.

These encounters are supposed to be fun challenges that are satisfying not just to beat, but to also attempt. The moment players are forced to grind for stat growth seeds just for a chance of hopefully surviving these encounters, is the moment that those challenges are no longer fun, but a tedious exercise in the patience of players.