Today's musings

I may not garner as much traffic on this platform as I ever did when RMN was alive/around. News of which I still wait, gaining trepidation as the one-year anniversary of it’s down time draws ever closer.

Still, I can’t help but to find it at least somewhat fascinating that there have been no comments on the lack of title screen. For what it is worth for me as the developer, it certainly helps in the debugging process to not have to press “New Game”, and just pop into the game either playing it was meant to, or in the debug room to test whatever needs to be tested. Should I consider it some kind of quality of life feature, and leave things as they are for the full game?

The contents of treasure chests might also be something to reconsider. On one hand, because they they probably should not contain equipment, Runes, or anything other than raw gold or consumables. I obviously don’t mind chests containing Lucky Cards, and such chests might be as good as a piece of equipment? The thing I’ve been thinking about more and more, though, are ways to use treasure chests as additional methods to manipulate ECN.

Let’s give a brief example from Wild Arms 3, which is, largely, where I borrow the ECN concept from. In that game, your party can find gems in dungeons that recharge spent ECN. I may not recall the exact amount that was recharged this way, nor how frequent one might find such gems. However, what if there was an in-game object that reduced ECN? Having ECN means being able to remain undetected. Being able to decide if a fight is worth fighting. Being able to engage with that fight on one’s own terms. So, if an object that reduces ECN exists, it might be, either literally, or proverbially, an alarm bell. At the very least, it would be an object, or perhaps a destination, worth the risk of exposure. This is still very ephemeral.

Story-wise, well, while the idea was to have a more faction based approach, and allowing players to chose which they like best. To be honest, I’m more and more inclined to only have one quest line to explore. I think back to my days of writing custom content for Heartache 101 - Sour Into Sweet. Darigaaz, that feels like ages ago with RMN gone. In any event, the comments I can recall was that the writing, itself, was excellent, but, the amount of playable content was lacking. Maybe I just burnt out too quickly as to not be able to give those characters the attention they deserved? I don’t know. I’ve never been particularly good at pacing myself. It’s like, I either work myself to an absolute frenzy, or I don’t work at all. There’s rarely anything in between. This writing is more “absolutely frenzy” state, needing a space to just vent. I’m gonna try stopping here, but, if I need to do something like this again, this is going to be the blog to do it in. I apologize in advance.