What I'm Working On: RMN 10th Anniversary Project

I have to say, the best thing about not having any readers for my blog is that I don't have to feel worried about losing them when I forget to post anything for half a decade.

So, RPGMaker.net (henceforth RMN) just turned ten years old.  My first instinct is to say "So Old?", but then when I think about it a little more I wonder if so young? might be the better reaction.  I joined the site in July of 2011 (and had lurked for a few months prior to that), and the site already seemed as well established then as it is now, so it doesn't really feel right to me that the date that I registered an account is now closer to the site's founding than it is to the present day.

Before I go on to the main topic of this post, I will digress a little bit to clarify something that might be misinterpreted from the previous paragraph.  Though I said that I've been there for the majority of the site's existence, I haven't really been there.  As with pretty much every forum that I sign up for (or blog that I establish), I pretty much lurk and don't really contribute in any way.  Giving my history on RMN a quick glance, I have...

• 2 games, both of which were small-scale things for contests.  Neither of which were good (the games, I mean.  The contests themselves were great).
• 15 reviews.  Only 12 of these are still available due to some of the games being pulled from the site.  There's also apparently a review for MinST that I began writing and never finished (and now never will, as the game has gone some upgrades since I first played it).
• 88 forum posts.

So overall, it looks like I contributed one thing every three weeks.  Not bad given my usual nonexistent presence in web communities, but also not as active as I'd like to be.  This goes double once you take into account that most of those things (especially the reviews) were bursts of activity, so the time between contributions is in reality even longer in most cases.

As a digression-digression since we're already on the topic of activity, I'll likely be queueing my RMN reviews for this blog.  I've already posted one such review a few years ago when the game was pulled by its creator, and now I'd like to finish the process with the others, even when they are still available.  This is definitely something that I am doing because I would like to ensure that my work remains accessible and easy to find, and not because this blog desperately needs content and I'm too lazy to come up with anything new.

So anyway, end digression.  Then end that other digression as well.  I'm going to be talking about the currently-unnamed project that I'll be submitting to the 10th anniversary event.

The game, in all of its incomplete, nameless glory

The theme for the 10th anniversary event is retro.  Several people on the site have pointed out that since 98 percent of the site users use RPGMaker, which even in the most recent versions of the program has SNES-level graphics, the retro theme pretty much translates to "Do what we always do".  Still, it seems that people are making an effort to go even further back.

My project is going to be a Wizardry-style dungeon crawler RPG programmed in Verge.  This will be a rather interesting project because I've never actually played Wizardry or any similar games, so it'll be more like a cargo cult copy of the original thing than anything else.  There's also another layer of retro feeling to me, because Verge was what I used to originally teach myself programming way back in 2005.

...huh, guess there's really not much to talk about at this point.  That seems to be what happens when you spend time writing blog posts instead of actually working on the game.  Who'd've thought.