Sorry for the delay, things have been tough recently. On the flip side, as of yesterday, I have a solid plan for the next little while. TL;dr: Hybrid 1.1, Customizable JRPG, and then 1000 Adventures.
Hybrid 1.1
Some of you may recall that I made a game for blind gamers. I even organized an entire month-long jam about making blind-accessible games.
Well, it turns out blind gamers are awesome. I almost ranked fifth in the jam (ended up 17th because I didn't add any audio), and received nothing but positive feedback from blind players.
I never finished the game due to time constraints. So, I'm going to work on that first. There's something oddly satisfying about making text games, and not having to worry about drawing stuff. I also find it really rewarding to make games for this niche of players.
Customizable JRPG
I attempted to make procedurally-generated JRPGs as far back as 2016-2018. I recently found out that, while that idea itself is not appealing, what is appealing is that players and/or gamedevs seem interested in it, if you can customize the game; things like duration, theme, party size, and classes.
I imagine this will end up spiraling into a huge project. The goal for this one is something like "make me a randomly-generated game like Final Fantasy V" (first world) - so 10-ish hours of a classic JRPG experience, albeit with modern features (like fast travel and a turn-based and realtime hybrid battle engine).
It's a huge project. I can see myself working on it for years. So this will probably be my main project (as it is my dream game) for years. I can see sequels spinning out with different niches (such as a horror-esque one with a completely different battle engine). You can see the current progress, with placeholder art, in the screenshot above.
The plan here is to ship a playable version as soon as possible, and start building a community around it and adding content to it. Meanwhile, between releases, I'll work on other stuff. Like what? Read on.
Short JRPGs
I really like making, and to some degree playing, short JRPGs; something that's classic-inspired by the SNES/PS1 era of JRPGs, but also small enough that I can build. This probably means something that's:
- 4-5 hours long
- 1-2 characters at most (probably one)
- A meaningful story
- Possibly weird and experimental
- Mostly inspired by classic SNES/PS1 JRPGs
I already drafted up a couple of really interesting stories, like "the AI that saved the human race." I'm not sure yet if I should:
- Make and ship these as independent games
- Collect them together into a single game with independent chapters
- Something like Live-a-Live with independent chapters but connect them at the end/somehow
If you have any thoughts, let me know. Once I make one of these, theoretically, I can knock out a second or third one rather quickly, so this will fill up my project space between versions of Customizable JRPG.
In Conclusion
Hey, thanks for reading all that, you're really awesome. If you could send me a reply/poke/message/tweet and let me know that you actually read this, I would really appreciate it, especially if you have any feedback on anything in it.
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