Download and play Julie's Quest, an RPG Maker VX game I wrote

Back in 2009, I bought a copy of RPG Maker VX as a Christmas gift for my step sister. To complement the gift and to be able to give her a hand if ever she came to encounter difficulties using the software, I wrote a small game project with it. I used the assets provided with the software so it only took me maybe 15 hours to make it.

I kind of half forgot about it until I recently stumbled upon it in the depth of my game development archives. I booted up the game and gave it a run. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the story is inspired and quite decent and contains interesting dramatic surprises. I actually had a blast going through the one hour of game time it provides so I decided to give it out to whoever would like to try it.

Download it now!

You MAY need to install the RTP (run time package) for the game to work properly.

Pro tip : Get your team up to level 10 before fighting the final boss. You will benefit from the best spells.

Let me know what you think!

Ringside Hero : some interface sketches

Happy new year to every reader! 

Work has resumed slowly on Ringside Hero's sequel. Now that I've setup my work environment for cross-compiling with the Haxe language, I'm ready to start the "real" work with some interface design. At this point I'm mostly trying to figure out how the game will be played globally and what the user interface should contain. And I'm moving stuff around a lot.

Ringside Hero : Setting up for the sequel

Quick update on the game's launch :

Nearly a month has passed since Ringside Hero's release already. While the game made a good debut, I was surprised to see it pop-up in the "Hot New Games" section on Kongregate's front page recently. The rating increased, and I received a lot of very interesting comments from the community which are precious for making the next version.

Next step

As I mentioned, Ringside Hero rings a creative bell that I'm planning on exploiting. The next version however needs to be portable to more than just Flash because there is not much to support my work financially in this field anymore.

Continuing work on Ringside Hero : new title screen

Ringside Hero has it's strength and weaknesses (which we may look further into soon) but it was nevertheless well received by the player community. It's fair success motivates me to keep on working on it as there is plenty of room for new ideas and mechanics.

I'm sorry for it's fans, it was not the case with MegaDrill and a sequel for it will have to wait. I never got inspired enough to make more out of MegaDrill but somehow Ringside Hero rings my creative bell.

Here's some work on a possible new logo and title screen in which I'm pushing the "manager's desk" metaphor :

Earlier version : 

Ringside Hero's launch : how did it go?

Ringside Hero was launched last week with a fair amount of success. While not a ground breaking game, it receives rather good notes, let's say above average, on Kongregate and Newgrounds. It got featured in Newgrounds' game page and reached a second place in Kongregate's weekly contest. Because of this it started spreading very well around the web.

I didn't expect anything more than a fair success from this game so I'm glad about it all. However, it's not returning much money and I doubt it will pay for itself as is. Next step will be to find out how to monetize it in subsequent versions. Let's look at what could be planned for an eventual sequel.

Everything is too Fast's environment and character sketches

My new project, currently titled Everything is too Fast, will make heavy use of hand drawn graphics and animations. Ringside Hero was but a practice ground for this project.

Actually, the idea behind RH was two fold :

1) to finally finish an old project I started long ago with a friend and

2) to test and practice the production of hand drawn graphics for game use.

Character

Since I'll be making a LOT of animations for that new game, the first thing I decided to do is to scale up my character design a bit so I get more control over the finesse of the movements :

Sneak peak into character sketches for my next game.

Before starting work on the soon to be released Ringside Hero, I did concept arts, research and prototyping for another project. I'm now finally coming back to it so let's look at a few sketches for the main character.

Here's a few preliminary sketches. At this point I only had a vague idea of what I wanted.