This game has been in development since early 2016. It is now 2023.

I've decided to put this project on-hold indefinitely because the drive and creativity never matched up to make serious long development periods of the game happen often enough. This game had a lot of ambition behind it and cool ideas but continued to drain bits of my willpower even after trying to simplify it down numerous times. 

I could never plan out a decent enough plot for the game. The progression of the game had been laid out with ideas of 3 main game missions, each one with their own ending that would leave the player at a soft-locking dead end but with a clue to solve a puzzle to the final end game path. Players would have to utilize older save games and knowledge of previous playthroughs of the game to unlock meta puzzles. Each save game would also have increasingly randomized and conditional values so that sharing knowledge of the game with friends or online would slowly lead to the complete experience. This angle was to instill a sense of extreme obscurity in playing through where each person could help with a piece of the puzzle. As interesting as this concept of gameflow could be, the fundamentals and assets of the game had not even caught up to being complete in order to even block or test for game segment ideas.

I could never make up a good enough personality for Greg as a main character besides being an every-man who can't catch a break, which is not a personality and circumstantial at best. A lot was hinging around the main character so having him react to all these meta puzzles in his own way would either have him seem like an idiot who just happened to get lucky or someone just playing dumb when they really knew way too much about how the game would work. Greg, as he currently stands, is practically built to be overshadowed by the rest of the party that follows him in the game. Greg would have to have SOME personality though in order to kick of the motive for why the player should leave the house to go exploring anyway, to find Greg's brother as prompted by the narrative. Greg would have to chime in only whenever the story needed him to make his own decisions just to keep the narrative moving, which probably would not mesh well with the player having their own motives.

Most of this game was being scrapped together with assets I did not make. As I polished more and more sections, I tried reducing the amount of content even within the games project files that had been placeholders, but I would spend endless hours in photoshop over making the actual game just trying to come up with original assets. Call it being lazy or just not having a good eye for pixel art, I never made progress on saying "this will be enough to fill out the entire rest of the game."

Working with the actual RPG engine in RPG Maker MV to flesh out common mechanics was never consistent. I kept seeing spells in other RPGs that I wanted to try and recreate but they either couldn't be implemented with how limited the ruleset of RPGMMV was or they didn't feel fun or balanced.

A huge focus of the game was abrupt presentation with a surprising amount of immersion. Attention to detail was taken with sound design to include panning audio with a plugin for the engine. Some visual contrast would also come from the game looking at first like MS Paint splurge then switching to portions of artwork being hyper-detailed or photo-sourced. 

You start out the game fighting cartoony zombies, then quickly find one monster that looks like a dog photoshopped into eldritch horror while behaving radically differently from any previous enemy. Monster behavior and appearance has been a passionate spot for the world building of this project, and continues to be a source of inspiration for me in future projects.