The time of salvation is almost upon us! Come, children of the cosmos, and rejoice, for in like 3 weeks I will be releasing Godless Tactics to Steam! Took a few years, but I'm finally ready to shove this pile of code out the door. I'm like 86% confident it all actually works now, and it might even turn out to be fun to play!
I spent most of my game dev time time month setting up the steam store page, and creating all the little images that go along with it. Also made a low-effort trailer, since steam won't let you post without one. And I've also many a 50 minute opening game walkthrough that I will post once the thing is out, which explains all kinds of things and pro tips.
Now I was reading on some indy dev blogs that you 'shouldn't release a game until it has 50,000 wistlists'. I have about 700. I'm winning! Not really sure how you are meant to convince that many people to wishlist a game, but perhaps it was talking more about 'big' indy games or what have you. I hope to sell the game to youtube viewers as a 'support the channel' sort of things, as opposed to donations, so once the whole release is done, I'll have that option forever. Plus, when Creative Assembly gets spooked and comes to buy me outta the business, I'll cash in big!
The nice thing was that getting only steam was made quite easy by their process. You go through this long checklist of things you have to sort out, very easy to navigate. Pretty sure they've idiot-proofed it as much as possible, which I appreciate. I guess technically making a game is hard enough that you'd expect people applying to steam to be 'good at things', but I don't wanna have to READ, or TYPE, I just wanna CLICK, and fortunately I was able to click my way to success. even with my mouse acting up and treating single clicks as double clicks recently. Literally every day I go to click the X on a window, and it also hits the one on the window behind it. Stop it! I've re-logged into youtube a billion times now! STOP IT!
So what else is happening with the channel? I've nearly finished The Fire Margin! I've played past the 'final boss' in the game, probably just need a little more footage for some sort of epilogue, and I'll have finally 'beaten' it. 170 hours that took! Will be <55 episodes in the end, and somewhere between 180-200k words. Quite the novel! Once the game stuff is all over, I will work on piecing the scripts together into novel format. They are currently full of line breaks, not to mention mistakes, so step 1 will be actually re-reading it and backspacing between all the paragraphs and lines of dialogue. Guess that will take a while for such a long document, but with any luck the result will be worth it! Official Fire Margin ebook, featuring original art too, coming soon!
Aside from that I've been playing Mount and Blade 2 Bannerlord, and will make an abridged commentary series for it. Probably going to be VERY abridged, as that thing is a real grind. While I looked forward to the game, based on liking M&B, this new entry is astoundingly unrefined. It has the same jank as the old one, but I really thought we'd be seeing some of that improved. I won't bother with a full rant here, but I'll absolutely have to drop some snarks in the videos. Still no RUN. Still can't RUN! How much of the game would be improved if you could RUN?! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS? DID YOU EVEN PLAY IT? HALF THE DIALOGUE OPTIONS DON'T WORK! SURELY YOU MUST HAVE NOTICED THIS DEVELOPERS?!
Excuse me. It's "Early Access", despite being a version 1.+ release. Maybe a version 2 will overhaul this stuff?
The other big world events news is that the Final Fantasy VII Remake came out, and it's pretty good! So...
### WHAT I PLAYED THIS MONTH ###
This month I played the Final Fantasy VII Remake, and it's pretty good.
AND THAT'S-
Okay why don't you listen to my high quality 'Two Sephiroths' re-write idea? Which contains spoilers for the remake by the way...
Roughly speaking, the remake has this goal of creating an in-canon justification for not following the original plot. It does this in a postively bombastic fashion, in which the motorbike mini-game at the end of Midgar suddenly transitions into a JOURNEY TO HYPERSPACE TO FIGHT AGAINST THE GOD OF FATE. You kill fate, which then allows the writers to change any key details for the rest of the story.
Now writing-critic Devin would point out that a) the whole sequence is an insane non-sequitur on the rest of the game and b) fate is a super dangerous writing thing to bring up. The fate-based plotline as it stands includes the closest thing to in-universe plot armour you could ever imagine, which main characters being killed and revived right away due to 'fate'. Doesn't that ruin the stakes? It even, you could say, undermines the original game, by implying that it was just the 'fate' timeline, and the new game is the 'free will' timeline. Well the good news is that since the whole point of including this fate thing is to make a big deal about removing it again, the problem is solved by the end! However, can the same goals be achieved without opening this can of worms? I mean, the only can of worms more squirmy is to start bringing in time travel....
SO HERE IS MY TIME TRAVEL BASED ALTERNATIVE.
The new timeline is created at the end of the old one, in which defeated Sephiroth jumps back in time to redo his failed quest. But there are two catches - he loses all his powers in order to create the time jump, and once he is back, the 'original' sephiroth is still there, so now there are two! Really, the best way to up the stakes for an FF7 remake is just to have two sephiroths, and I don't think there is any denying this. And now you can have all the narrative excuses to change the events of the game you want, as it is this new sephiroth trying to make things be different. And new sephiroth is trying to stop both you AND old sephiroth (only one Jenova to fight over after all)! You could write pretty much anything for the plot from this premise.
This way the twist ending of the first game could be the reveal that there are 2 sephiroths. You could probably still do something as flashy as killing god, but keep it more in-universe and in-plot.
THEN AT THE END OF THE FRANCHISE THEY MERGE TOGETHER AND YOU FIGHT THE TWO WINGED ANGEL AND EVEN SAFER SEPHIROTH.
You know, you can still have it be like 'ah it's not gonna go the same way as the original so stay on your toes players' thing, but the original didn't have to be predestined either. And you get two sephiroths. TWO. As usual, they should have let me write it. Although that said, all the stuff that is based on the original is 'perfection', 'nailed it' and 'beautiful' to quote highly memeable moments. Easily the best FF game since... FF7?!
### AND THAT'S WHAT I PLAYED THIS MONTH ###
Now playing it again on Hard. It's hard!
Hope everyone's having a fun time not spreading diseases out there. If you get bored, why not watch a video from the OfficiallyDevin channel? I've heard good things about it. This time next month I'll have a video game to force you to play instead, so look forward to that! May 15th!
Now, let's all sit quietly and wait for FF7 remake part 2.
DUH DUH DUH DUUUH DUUUHH DUUUH DUH DUH DUUUUHH
