Game Inspirations #2

Final Fantasy. Enough said.

My first FF experience was Final Fantasy VIII. I jumped on the bandwagon a lot later than any of my friends because other FFs was never on the console I had..! I always seemed to choose the most unpopular console. When my friends all bought a Nintendo, I had a Sega Master System.. Then later I bought a Sega Saturn, everyone had a Playstation... Then, just before I was gonna buy a Sega Dreamcast, I thought twice and bought a PS2 lol. I even missed out on the awesome Sega Megadrive dammit.

Anyhoo, back to Final Fantasy. My friend lent me his Playstation along with VIII. Everyone was raving about VII and VIII had been out for a while. When I played it... It blew my mind! Had some really fun elements, a great story and the way they did the graphics was just awesome!

What FF had was getting a player into the game and making them get to know the characters, the villains, the world. It made magic and summons common place and made it feel as if we could do magic outside the game.

In recent times FF has become quite epic. The graphics are so phenomenal and I love how Full Motion Videos (FMVs) / cut scenes seamlessly blend along with the game. X did this really well. XIII series introduced load screens though, but what I really loved was XIII-2 "..the story so far" cut scenes when you load your save game.

I have done everything I could iVIII, then eventually went back and played and did all I could in VII. I think I still have my PS memory card saved games as proof lol. I've finished IX but couldn't get into the story enough to finish all the side stories unfortunately. But X.... Boom, that was so awesome. Finished it and played it so much that I collected enough materials to rebuild everyone's Sphere Grids to the point of Over Powered (OP). XII completed to max if I recall, XIII 100% all trophies, XIII-2 all trophies and XIII Lightning Returns 100% all trophies.

When I started developing some basic games, I started with FF concepts with turn based battles. But nowadays I find that there's lots of games like this already so in my developments I hope to make something different and hopefully a bit more innovative.

Current progress so far is slow but every bit of work is steps to completion!

Games Inspirations #1

I love video games. Everyone has their own escapism whether it is reading manga, watching TV series or even cooking. For me it's video games! I particularly like games with an excellent storyline that allows you to immerse yourself in a whole new interactive fantasy world!

One game that really inspired me was Persona 4. First released on PS2, I only started playing the Persona series when it came out on the PS VITA; Persona 4: Golden. It totally surprised me!

At first I thought it would be another Final  Fantasy style role playing game as the initial game sequence was turn based. But I quickly noticed the large amounts of dialogue and how long it took the devs to really paint the picture and set the scene. I began to really pay attention to the dialogue and soon enough I was hooked! It was like living in a manga/anime!

It was more about the story with some action fight scenes/dungeon crawler thrown in. What an awesome combo!

The game was so popular that an anime and manga spawn from it which too became very popular!

The story had a simple premise at first but as it progressed, became complex and surprising! I was amazed at how a story so simple could become so epic! I love Final Fantasy stories but the difference here is that Persona 4 starts off somewhere in the real world and takes you beyond, whilst Final Fantasy takes you beyond and pushes you further and further into fantasy. Persona 4 lets you relate to the characters and then you experience what the characters experience as their world turns upside down. It's genius.

I hope I can at least write stories that can take people on a journey as well. Writing games is challenging and time consuming, so even if I can't get the story out through the video game platform, if it's good enough, maybe I'll look at other avenues.

That's how passionate I am about the primary story if the game!

The Journey Begins!

Well hello there!

You may know me from FriedRiceBANZAI, my tech/cars/fried rice blog! A little side hobby of mine is game development, specifically story telling!

I've decided to keep this part separate from my main blog to keep things nice and neat and easier to follow!

I've had this concept of a game for awhile now and I've seen some other games that seem similar to it. After my thoughts reached critical mass, I knew it was time to put this thing together! I won't give any clues yet to what it is to keep things interesting!

Developing a game takes a lot of time, effort and possibly moneys. I'll be relying on free sources for assets but will try to develop a lot of things myself to keep things unique. The game will be targeted for the mobile/tablet market as it's something you can do on the go or something to tuck into before bed.

It will be a learning curve to get back into coding since my main background is more tech hardware'y stuff. I have learnt Java, C and C++ in my tertiary studies and since then I've developed some command line games just for myself. I thought it was time to implement some better code and get sprites animated and happening!

So here goes!

Story I want to tell. Check.
Development environment. Check.
Magical Sword and Unicorn. Check.
Magical Sword and Unicorn. Uncheck. Okay, may not need this so much.
Time. Chec... We will see.

And so the journey begins......