- Decided to take a break from Black Mountain
- Made most of a town!
And Now For Something Completely Different…
The grind on the Black Mountain maps has been wearing me down. I’ve been finding it hard to feel motivated the last couple of weeks, and I’m not the best a “relaxing” at the best of times – I’ve been finding myself in that awful loop of not feeling up to working on my thing so I just kind of try to do something relaxing but have the buzz of anxiety in the back of my head about how I should be “productive”.
Brains are dumb.
Anyway, there’s actually something that is somewhere in between actually relaxing and being productive! I am a huge sucker for games that feel like you’re doing something productive; I have to be careful sometimes with games like Cities: Skylines or Factorio or I end up going to bed when I intended to get up in the morning. Turns out, one step from that is to do something productive that feels like a game.
Enter RPG Maker MV and yet another unnecessary sequel! RPG Maker can be used to build some solid, real games – but also if you lower your standards it can be used to make dumb, terrible games, but (comparatively) very easily!
SimpleQuest 2
Or, more fully known as SimpleQuest 2: The Heroic Legend of the Epic Quest for the Mystic Crystals of Power. I might add more to the name, who knows, a game can always use an extra ALPHA MEGA TOURNAMENT EDITION or something added on there.
SimpleQuest (as you might remember) was a smallish game that I built as a test game for an engine that I abandoned. It followed the adventures of a guy named Hero (because his parents had high expectations) dealing with a dragon that was (supposedly) terrorizing a small town. I also built it (almost) entirely of freely available assets.
SQ2:THLOFEQFTMPCOP is a follow-up sequel that literally no one asked for. It follows Hero as he reunites with his sister, “Treasure Hunter”, his childhood friend (and “secret” crush!) Wizard, and their travelling companion Corwin, who has a normal name and does not understand why they keep calling him “Healer” no matter how many times he tells them his real name. This time they’ll be hunting down four crystals of power and squaring off against an evil wizard who has an unsettling fondness for orbs. I’m taking a similar tack and only making assets when they are “necessary”; I’m editing sprites to make the main characters and I’ll (probably?) draw some portraits for the characters, but I’m going to spend as little time doing asset creation as possible.
Will I keep working on this? I don’t know! I’m going to work on it for a bit as a break, and I’ll try to keep it in mind as something I can come back to in the future if I need another break. I don’t really want to spend an extended period working on it instead of Black Mountain but so far it’s working as a bit of a mental trick to help me just chill the hell out, at least a little.
Have a good week!