hi everyone. it’s been a long while since any devlogs or really just any updates to the game in general. i do mildly apologize for that because going silent is never a good move, but i’ll explain more about it in a bit. before anything else, i want to say thank you to everyone who’s stuck around and kept up with the endless development of a game that at one point was supposed to take less than a month to make. it genuinely excites me (and also makes me a bit nervous at the same time) that anyone outside of my friend group gives a shit about this game. so i wanna say upfront: the game is NOT canceled. i would have posted about that if that was the case, i swear. you’re probably wondering why this one is labeled as devlog one and that’s how i want to segue into the meat and potatoes of this, so let’s get into it. it’ll probably be a bit of a read but it’s worth it. trust me lol. 

THE STORY AND THE DIFFERENT REWRITES

in all my other devlogs (which will probably be unviewable after this one gets posted), i made a lot of claims about how much work was being done and all the ideas i supposedly had and all that shit. i don’t want to come off like none of that was true, but it was misguided. from the start, after the loss of the original version and trying to start from scratch pretty much, i was struggling. i know i made that known but it wasn’t like how i said it. i didn’t want to work on alcohol quest because of what type of game i was forcing myself to make and how i chose to go about it at the time. the biggest issues were always gameplay and the story. for a long time, i actually had a “co-writer” that helped me, i guess. he definitely tried, don’t get me wrong, but as i’ll go into in a  bit, it honestly didn’t make a difference. i’m going to show a lot in this devlog, by the way. a lot of old story notes, old gameplay ideas, stuff like that. anything i show will most likely never be used, unless specified otherwise. 

but that’s where i wanna start. from the beginning, alcohol quest was an rpg. not particularly because i really strived to make an rpg but because of the engine i was trying to use. and honestly, i only ever chose rpg maker because it meant that i didn’t have to code anything. i was afraid of coding for reasons i’ll go into later (as it’s more relevant to the current state of everything rather than the past) but it’s why i stuck with rpg maker for years when i should have switched after the first year, if even that long. and with no experience on how to make a game or how to write a story for a game or whatever, it kept getting me stuck. i focused on the story for most of the development because it’s the only thing i felt i was good at. and that’s where the co-writer came in. in my original draft (which was before the co-writer joined the project for a while), the game started the same as what me and him eventually settled on. 

this was always the start. i think i may have mentioned this in a previous log, but the start was always to involve the shopkeeper and give the player some reason to keep going. again, i didn’t know what i was doing.

i had art for heisenburger drawn and i had most of this scripted out from the second i came up with it. the problem from the start was i couldn’t put my heart into it and it all felt too disconnected and random to actually feel worth it to keep going . . . and yet i did anyways. after this was where the original draft to what me and the co-writer came up with split into two paths. in my draft, i turned a side character with a one-off joke into a main story beat that you HAD to complete. the character itself was a guy who loved coca-cola. that was the start and end of his personality traits. and the joke was you’d have to get him a coca-cola because his friends dug a hole, put him inside of it so he’d be waist up only, and then superglued him into the hole so he couldn’t get out. i still think the idea of a side quest like this was interesting if it actually had any worth as a quest. but because i was struggling so much, i took this one-off thing and turned it into an entire plotline for no other reason than that i needed something to work. i already knew by this point that none of this was working and that my passion for this project was falling fast. but i kept going. i introduced this concept for a recurring problem called the “alcoholics anonymous task force.” it was the one idea i really liked, but even still, it’d be a 6 or 7 out of 10 at most when everything else is below a 5. and that’s kind of how all of this went. i put dr. phil in this for no reason (which with what he’s done as of late, really glad that never made it in). the final boss was supposed to be fucking chris chan because ???????????? it was all just nonsense. and this inevitably led me to a burnout where i took one of my infamous breaks. 

but after this came the co-writer. he actually was kind of a friend but mostly a co-worker of mine that took interest in the overall idea of this game. he had given some ideas in the past and so i asked him if he’d maybe help me figure out this story. to be honest, i only asked because i was feeling so little confidence in my abilities as a game maker, a writer, etc., that i wanted someone’s help. because i still didn’t want to give up. whether that be because i felt i put so much time into this at this point that i felt like i had to see it through. it became less of a project i wanted to work on and more of a sunk cost fallacy. it had been years since i started this game and thankfully, their additions did make me feel okay working on alcohol quest again. not forever though, but long enough. he saw my intro idea and wanted to keep it, like i said. however he thought it’d be a good idea to only have the player complete two introductory quests with the shopkeeper before having to go somewhere else to start the first act of the game. and this i liked especially because i was trying to wrap my head around what kind of ideas would work as quests with this character and it was burning me out mentally again. but he also gave me an idea that i tried to keep even after he had stepped away from the project.

the party members of the game were always supposed to be my friends. at first, it was ben, jeremy, and gavin. and then after ben and i had a huge falling out, he got replaced with a friend at the time named meme. and then meme also stopped being friends with me so instead of trying to replace it yet again with someone who might stop talking to me at some point down the line, i introduced the sister to ayden as a proper replacement. gavin and jeremy stayed though. and besides ayden, the only party member with any sort of defined character was gavin. he and i came up with it pretty quickly because gavin was basically my universe’s g-man. not in that he’s the one affecting the plot or anything, but that he could do whatever he wanted, had a void space that was his own, was maybe human but no one could be sure, and a number of other things. and gavin’s character quickly became a focus between the two of us. probably because he was really the only other defined character. ben was the straight man. the one who wasn’t clinically insane and could actually go “why are we doing this?” when something insane happens. and jeremy was the silent one. why? i don’t really know. we just thought it’d be funny if jeremy never spoke a word until the end of the game to piss ayden off. but gavin’s story was the most interesting. what we managed to come up with was after the initial quests and recruiting of specifically ben to the story, a black cube would appear which would require the player to go into it and would lead to somehow getting gavin into your party. here’s the proper notes for anyone who’s curious about specifics. 

but it was still a mess. a more coordinated mess sure, but a mess. at one point you visited fnaf because i don’t know. it sounded cool? i still don’t understand why we put that in there. the other big problem, which was a big problem with the first draft too, was that there wasn’t gameplay. even with an engine that is really good at making pretty much j-rpgs, there wasn’t gameplay. and i didn’t want to mention it until now on purpose. 

GAMEPLAY PROBLEMS

i didn’t want to make an rpg. i really fucking didn’t. it’s so unnecessarily complicated in ways that i couldn’t understand and it stalled me more than anything else because i was trying so hard to wrap my head around an idea i didn’t care about. i went on the rpg maker forums. i went on reddit. i went to the rpg maker discord all asking the same questions. and no matter what answer i got, it didn’t answer my question. because yes, i was literally asking “how do i make good rpg gameplay?” but mentally i was asking “how do i make this work when i don’t care about it?” and that was why no answers were actual answers to me. and so came the first of like two or three different “restarts” before i just straight up gave up. and then came the second. and however many more i felt would finally make me want to work on it. months passed and all i cared about was the art. and to be fair, i drew some really good stuff. but none of that matters if there isn’t a game behind it which there wasn’t. 

the most i ever came up with for gameplay was the heisenberger mini-boss and the battle pool system. the boss is not worth talking about but i will talk about the battle pool a bit. i still like that idea and if god forbid i kept working on an rpg, it would have stayed. the overall idea was that as you leveled up and progressed through the game, the random encounter enemies would swap in and out depending on what level you were. each area was supposed to have a set of different enemies where some were stronger than others and would only appear as others left. it was a great system in concept honestly. the problem was just that i didn’t want to make an rpg and so no matter how hard i tried, i couldn’t make it work. i struggled to come up with different enemies, different attacks, skill levels, the special moves each player could use, etc. this is what eventually made me give up completely. the last update i posted about either the art for jeremy or the custom textboxes was literally the last thing i did before putting it down and never picking it back up again.

THE FUTURE OF THE GAME

and that’s what leads us to the present; to where i have the game now. before anything else, the game is no longer being made in rpg maker. i am so tired of using it and with where i want to take the game (and what genre i actually want to make it), rpg maker is no longer the right choice. and as well, i am uploading a build with this devlog that features just about everything i had done before stopping the rpg maker mv development. it has all assets (used and unused) as well as allowing access to every map i had made pretty much after going through what little story i did put into the game. i do hope all of you are able to find some enjoyment out of it. it’s scuffed as fuck and most definitely breaks in more ways than one. at least i’m guessing because i am not going to bother playtesting it to any degree. this is also my way of really showing i’m starting over.

where i’m at now started with two revelations: one for the story and one for the gameplay. since i knew for so long that i really didn’t want to make an rpg, i wanted to change the genre of the game. i have a friend on discord that i actually would message a lot about my struggles with the game because i just needed someone to hear me. i was lying on gamejolt and to my other friends because some part of me was (and is still) afraid that it’ll never get finished and i’ll have spent all this time and effort on nothing. BUT i am confident more now than i ever have been. here’s one specific conversation about this which on my end clearly shows how i really felt about the game (i censored their discord for privacy. you can’t friend mine so i don’t honestly care if it gets shown).

but after months of genuinely just not thinking about the game or anything to do with it, i realized where i wanted this game to go. the one idea that’s stuck with me since the beginning, but i quickly pushed down and then gave up on because i didn’t know how to execute it in rpg maker is the idea of puzzles. i love puzzle-oriented games. portal is my all time favorite series of games and things similar are always fun to me. same for platformers like celeste. and then it hit me. make the game a puzzle-platformer style of game. and that’s what the genre of the game will be. with that, the party system as a whole is getting scrapped entirely. there will be two main characters still: ayden and jeremy. the main reasoning is i want the puzzles to require both of them to solve. not in a co-op way, but in a mario and luigi kind of way. and that revelation alone made me so fucking happy. but the story ideas so far are what really made this worth it. what i’ve done is i went out and bought a journal that i’m using to write down whatever ideas i have for the game. some don’t fit. some do. and that’s all a part of the journey.

for instance, one idea i wrote down that i quickly nixed within like a day was the idea of tying this to my stupid lore for a character simply known as eric. trust me when i say that the lore of eric is too complicated to go into in a single post, mainly because the entire story of his character is shit i make up on the fly for whatever reason is necessary in the moment (which also means stuff gets retconned and then un-retconned and then retconned again because nothing matters in the eric lore). i thought it was a cool idea for all of three seconds before thinking to myself and realizing as much as alcohol quest is not a serious drama or anything, the eric lore is so convoluted and stupid that i just don’t want to mix the two. now, when it comes to the story that i’m creating at this point, i don’t wanna give most of it away. however, i don’t have half of it done yet. i don’t know how the game is going to end yet and i don’t know about the entire second-half either. i will share the start though because i want to show the difference because to me, even though it’s still silly and dumb enough to feel like alcohol quest to me, it finally has heart in it imo.

to quickly go back to the original couple drafts of it, the game always started with quests from the shopkeeper. i still plan to keep that as a semi-tutorial for the quests in the game (although this time completely optional and NOT story-focused). and before i say anything else, nothing is final and everything is subject to change at any point. 

this time, the start of the game is that ayden runs out of alcohol like before. however, he before the start of the game caused a lot of . . . uhm, problems let’s say, and it led to him getting a lot of warrants on his head that he just never took care of in any way. he then isolated himself for 5 straight years (will probably change this, i don’t know right now) until the start of the game. he runs out and goes over to jeremy’s to try and see if he has any, to which he doesn’t. this however causes a problem because there are wanted posters and all that jazz for ayden because of the warrants that were never dealt with. so him and jeremy get wrapped up into getting chased by the police through a couple towns and a city before being arrested. they then get transferred to a state prison that they have to break out of. that is how i’m starting the game this time. in those towns, you’ll find the shopkeeper who can give you a couple quests to show you how it works and how the puzzles work potentially. it won’t just be a chase sequence. yes, they’ll be on your ass, but most likely it’s going to play out that no one will recognize you for a minute which gives you some time to look around, go into different buildings, talk to people, find puzzles to solve, etc, before the police are back on the two of you. and again, it’s still dumb. it’s still silly and like wtf? but in a really good way this time. i think it fits so much better and doesn’t feel like a hodgepodge of bullshit ideas that shouldn’t even be on the same planet as each other. 

and when it comes to the engine of choice and gameplay and all that, i don’t have anything to show right now. and that’s fine. i’m going to make the game in gamemaker studio 2, which will be scary for a while but worth it in the end. rpg maker had so many fucking restrictions. SO MANY. for reference as well, here’s the list of every plugin i had in my game up until the moment i stopped working on it.

i appreciate the support i've gotten since i started this project, both from you guys and my friends. it's the one thing that kept me going even when i didn't really see how. it'll be a while before i have anything to show again, but this hopefully will lead to a proper demo at some point down the line and will get me to finally finish the game.

the final rpg maker build is live now. go give it a shot and see the insanity i had up to that point. thank you so much for reading this as well. it's long as fuck and yeah. i'll be back soon. alcohol quest is very much alive and well :)