Blogs

Surprising Update

Posted on 14 January 2023

Every timeline is here.

I finally did it! I sat down for the last few weeks and finally (almost) finished Messiah Quest II! The game is now playable until the credits roll. Basically, I was hung up on the ending scenes. I struggled to translate vague visions to the art assets needed to convey the ends of each story. To exemplify this struggle, the first ending script was started in June 2017, and then of course tweaked over the years. Before I could start the next ending script, I needed to finish the rest of the game, so that script started in February 2020. It took me THREE YEARS of procrastinating and working on other things to finally finish the second ending. Starting between the holidays of 2022, I generated 7 out of the 8 scenes of the ending cutscene. The difficulty was each scene couldn’t use many of the other assets used throughout the game. I had to create large images of never-before-seen landscapes, and I can only hope they send the right message. I hope that the first fan of Messiah Quest who has played the first game three times sees this cutscene and says, “Oh, that’s neat!”

So the last ending script was much simpler and only took four days of composing a song (which was a mash-up so it was simple), drawing an extra sprite sheet or two, and scripting the animations. I kind of surprised myself with suddenly being done with Messiah Quest II. However, I did say “almost” finished.

I will probably say the same thing when and wherever I release this game, but I am not a real turn-based RPG fan. I haven’t even played a lot of those games. Earthbound is the only game in this genre I finished! In the past I had started playing a couple of Final Fantasy games, but I never got very far in any of them. I never even truly finished Pokemon! Basically, my history with this genre isn’t strong enough to design a game in said genre. I didn’t know good design from bad. However, after I had started development, I began watching streamers and experiencing RPGs second-hand. Just because I don’t play these games doesn’t mean I hate them. I very much enjoy the stories of these games, and the music and art as well. My biggest problem was that I never noticed how complex the systems of these games could be, and I had already made my game so absolutely simple. Messiah Quest II was flawed from the beginning. It was doomed to be boring.

I find it to be boring, but I’m the only one who has played it. Someone might enjoy it in its current state, since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and fun is in the hand of the gamer. On the other hand, I had finally done my research on other games in the genre, and comparatively Messiah Quest II will most likely be viewed as archaic.

So now I sit here pondering about how I should release Messiah Quest II. I feel my motivation to finally finish this game was the desire to move on. I couldn’t let this sit on the back burner forever, especially when it was pretty close to being done 5 years ago. So I can’t truly move on until the game is released. On one hand, I can release it very soon in its current state, which is boring and kind of buggy. On the other hand, I can keep it festering in my computer while I dig deep into the core and implement a few ideas I have for retooling. It would be difficult to change such basic mechanics this late in development, but I am intrigued by the challenge. I will find out how well my code truly is when such changes work successfully or completely destroy my entire architecture.

Either way, I’m leaning on the side of giving Messiah Quest II out for free. I know in the past I stated I was holding off development so I could sell it in a better market, but I have a lot of regrets about using Windows Forms as a game engine. In the last paragraph, I used the word “buggy” because there is one bug I don’t know if I can squash. It always goes back to the music, too. In short, when Windows Media Player isn’t ready to play a sound, it throws an exception, and because of how WMP is built, I can’t with my knowledge program against it. For what I’ve found out, it is not possible with C#. There is no way for me within my own code to check if WMP is ready, or even really catch the exception thrown. I believe my only options are remaking the entire game in Unity or something, or just releasing it as is with the disclaimer that this error might halt the application completely if it occurs at the wrong time. That’s the worst part about it. It can happen during a scene change because the final menu doot of a battle wasn’t ready to be heard, and the game hangs on the black screen between the scenes. Sometimes it will happen mid-battle, with the battle music, the attack sound effects, and the menu beeps and boops, and if the user clicks “Continue” the game will pick up where it left off. Otherwise, the game doesn’t know what to do next, and your only option is to close the app.

I don’t know if Messiah Quest II will be a success or a total flop, but I know I’ve learned through this whole experience. First and foremost, RPGs are NOT a quick and simple game to develop. I thought designing physics in games was complicated, and because my game didn’t have any, it was going to be easy. This was in a way my first real game. Sure, I had the first Messiah Quest, but it was text based. It was basically a visual novel without the visual. Messiah Quest II had graphics and music! I show it to friends and they say, “this is a game!” Sure, it’s made from essentially scrap using Notepad and MS Paint, but those aren’t the real flaws. The flaws were in my design. I was foolish to think such a game would be an easy first project. I’m somewhat glad it has taken me this long to finish MQII, because now I can still improve it. However, the real goal is moving on. Like I said, this game is festering on my hard drive and in my brain. If this was my masterpiece, I could keep improving it until it was perfect, but I’ve realized this is not my masterpiece. I will never make a masterpiece if I dwell here forever.

Messiah Quest II has been in development for almost a decade, and it deserves to be played by others if not sold. Perfect or not, I’m letting it go. If it is not available in the next few days, take that as my answer about retooling the core. Again, the challenge would be fun for me, and it would improve my designing skills. Either way, the time is soon. The moon is rising. Messiah Quest II will be released.