Release devlog

Hello! Aaron here.

On August 23rd, 2023, a dear friend of mine posted in our discord server of high school friends that RPG Maker 2003 was on sale for $2 on Steam. It just so happened that I had $2 in my wallet so I went ahead and bought it and started drafting up this game.

The first week after purchasing RPG Maker 2003, I brainstormed and drafted ideas for the main plot of the game on a Google doc. I already knew that I wanted to make a fantasy game that starred my close friends. With the overabundance of works in the isekai genre, isekai was on my mind and so I made an isekai story. This stage of pre-development for the game was really fun, but I could tell it was a dangerous stage of development-- it was very easy to go off the rails with all sorts of ideas and plans. I had to keep consciously reminding myself not to get too ahead of myself and going overboard with the story when I haven't yet even started any other development (programming, art, etc.).

The second week I spent learning the ropes of RPG Maker 2003. I found several handy tutorial series on YouTube by ninjaconor86and Colin Sandquist, and after binging them, I started to work on the game using the game maker.

For the next month I would often work on the game probably for like ten hours per week. First I cemented each of the playable characters' stat distributions, skillsets, etc. Then I worked on building the map linearly, making sure that it was easy enough to naturally move from start to finish. As I worked on each part the map, I would add mobs and NPCs. I knew that I wanted to keep the game very short for those friends with short interest spans, so I tried to keep game mechanics simple and straightforward. Almost exactly one month after purchase of RPG Maker 2003, I finished the game up to where the tutorial was playable, so I created a playable demo and sent that to my friends to gauge interest and cringiness because I had reached a point where I was cringing at my own creation. I had a lot of self doubts about whether or not I should continue development of the project, but seeing my friends' reactions to the work so far was a good confidence boost. I worked on the game for another week before my actual job (software engineer for a corporation) picked up and life got busy.

I would work on the project here and there sometimes in the next months, but it wasn't until March of 2024 when I got my groove back and I made significant progress on the game. I had like a week of vacation so I worked on the game a lot and finished what I had planned to be Act 1 of the overall game. But just as I got through the start of Act 2, work got really messy and busy so I had once again lost my creative drive. Once work died down and my drive came back, I decided that I didn't want to work on this specific project anymore. I had been eyeing making something else from scratch with the Godot engine rather than using the archaic game maker that is RPG Maker 2k3. Rather than outright cancelling the project and stopping working on it, it was more my style to put a meta ending/cap on the game itself, so I did just that.

The GBaesIsekai game is fully playable through Act 1 and partially through Act 2. While the story isn't fully fleshed out and neatly finished, throughout the whole development, the GBaesIsekai experience has been more about throwing the characters (who are my friends) through imaginary, fantastical, absurd scenarios and seeing how they reacted. I would like to think that that essence has been successfully captured and conveyed. I crammed in a bunch of inside jokes and references, but even more really random, improvised jokes. If I could get even one laugh out of any one player be it a friend or a stranger, then I would be satisfied.

Wow this was a long write-up. At the end of the day, I'm happy with what I made. I don't know who would read this large block of text but whoever you are, I hope you enjoy GBaesIsekai. I'm gonna go work on my next project now.

--Aaron