So, a while back I bought a program called RPG Maker VX Ace (yeah, I know, odd title for a program). Its a simple game making software that can be used to make quick and easy games, or be used to make heavily scripted and moddified games that truely scream "I'm someone's personal hard work, see me roar!"
Figured I'd goof off with it, and see if I could do a couple small 5-10 minute games, and just to have as a novelty item that I can mess with here and there. However, I started working on a game, first with little to no story in mind. I kept adding to the starting area, expanding it little by little, adding sub maps (kind of like a town inside a world map, but smaller scale). I started with just an island, with a forest and a house setting on it. Nothing complex. Added in random encouter battles on the island and tweaked the monster's strengths so that they weren't just out right hard to kill right off the bat.
The whole time I was thinking to myself, "I should see about actually doing something with this.", but never really thinking I'd go far with it. So I kept making adjustments to the map, trying to learn tricks and tidbits about the engine and how to do some simple cutscense and what not. Added a second character that could be recruited to the part to the game, and made a very simple cutscene to the game. Ended up with this scene:
Well, before I realized it, I started adding a second island to the current map, and added two more sub maps. One was a tent that housed some NPCs and another recruitable character. The second was a dungeon of a ruined tower that only had the first floor available to explore. I thought about it for a moment, adn decided that the current 'world map' was just going to be a sub map of a better world map, and set off creating a larger map overall. So my starter map ended up being just a small set of two islands in the northeastern area of the, now much larger map. It was at this time that I started talking to a few friends online about what I was doing, but hadn't shard any version of my creation yet. Afterall, I had a blank world map.
More on this in the next post, tomorrow or the day after. For now, got some editing to look into!
