Game
Rock Beyond Time
3 years ago

Daydreams of a better Rock Beyond Time


Let's be honest, making a video game is hard. REALLY hard. I've written stuff that could fill two books while making this game, and that's outside of this game. I've even had a few other story ideas while making this game.

Sometimes, things get lost from your original vision. Sometimes, you realize something works better as a regular boss instead of the final boss. Sometimes, your originally planned final boss theme works better as the main boss theme. Sometimes, you need to do rewrites to figure out what our heroes are after. Sometimes, that little platform game keeps crashing when unpausing, and you bounce back to this little project.

So, I might as well talk about a few things about this game...

The many ideas before settling on Rock Beyond Time

I could write about Fantasti-Cross (where the idea of Myles in the Future and the Eisenklauss Factory came from), Tales of the Wind Fish (a writing which came before Dragonian, meant to be a two-player Zelda-like game), Dragonian II (where a researching heroine and Hzzraxk the Plague came from), and Project Dragolanx (the prototype that led to Rock Beyond Time mostly inspired by Quintet's SNES lineup), but I know that'll be too much info.

Dragonian Paradox

Why should Rock-themed games be exclusively rhythm games? Fantasy games are not exclusively JRPGs, and Castlevania is NOT a Survival-Horror franchise. A theme doesn't dictate a game's genre. Also, if there's one thing that GM Studio is ill-equipped to handle without coding wizardry, it's the rhythm game.

Also, I was thinking (cue Seinfeld music) "What's the deal with anime post-apocalypses? Every time one happens, we're back in European medieval times! It was just contemporary America/Japan a few hundred years ago! Now, we've got kings, castles, monsters, and magic? Why is that?"

So, that led to the intentionally ironic time-travel from a contemporary Earth-like world to a European-medieval-inspired world, where the past looks like it should be the future, and vice-versa. Originally, the Past was supposed to be a pre-cyberpunk world, while the Future was meant to be full medieval. It's kind of a joke. I do that.

Also, you might be wondering what's the deal with that title. Well, it started off as a two-player Zelda-like game in the Dragonian universe, but I don't think it's in the same canon. Parallel universe, wrong canon. We aren't gonna talk about how some Hans Christian Andersen story ended up in the Dragonian universe, so Rock Beyond Time's universe is more parallel, and devoid of a wholesale Hans Christian Andersen story. Also, the Paradox part is kind of a spoiler.

My Originally Planned Vision

When making a game, sometimes, you need to scale things back. I don't really have a budget to work with. Just time, and the skills of an artist and third-rate coder.

What are my plans to finish the game at the moment?

Music. It's taking me a while. I've only got an old build of MuseScore, and I'm making Midis. Also, I have quite a few IRL jobs getting in the way, and a lot of stress.
Once that's done, I have to test everything, especially the HTML5 version. I'm aiming for HTML5 because it's the lowest common denominator, and if it runs on a terrible PC, it should run on anything.

What's gonna be lost from my original vision?

Music quality, for one, since my vision is studio-quality '80s music that could loop perfectly. The right to sell this build, for another, because I'm so used to "borrowing" sound effects, and I'm doing that again here. I'd love to do full-screen animated cinematics with voice acting, but I'm not THAT kind of animator.
I also had planned for my dungeons to be as complicated as they were in Dragonian, but I scaled that down. Some of you would probably think "thank goodness", but the dungeons I've made for this game are probably underutilizing the mechanics I've programmed into the game.
Most importantly, I wanted the songs I've had planned for this game to be sung. I've got quite a few songs pumped out, and a good chunk of them were written with lyrics in mind. I'd need people who can sing AND act.

I'd also like to add a rogue-lite mode, because why not? That'll really spruce up a console edition, when/if I get around to it.

...despite all this, I'm close to completion, and I'm gonna keep saying that until the game is done. I can't stop at 80%, not without music.

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