original article here EPILOGUE

*With a feather light touch and more than a little relief, mellytan uploaded v1.0 of Oathguard Part 1 as an official RMN download.

It had been a long time coming, and the game was by no means perfect. Despite hundreds of hours of heartache and toil, the reality of the final product did not match mellytan’s flagrant fantasies: whole scenes were missing, bugs and limitations plagued every aspect of gameplay, graphical errors were abound, and veteran voice actor Steve Blum had (politely) declined the role of Sepp von Domtrau.

In short, there were a lot of things about Oathguard Part 1 that mellytan was not proud of. And then there was that niggling feeling that the fact that the words “RPG” and “Maker” had anything to do with the game’s development made it an object of shame, something to be feverishly concealed like so many inside-out Haruhi hugpillow covers.

But there was something to be said of finally finishing something, of having a vision on the astral plane of Imagination and replicating it as closely as possible in reality. There was something very special about having other people play the game and experience that vision, and knowing that people where seeing and feeling exactly what they were intended to.

And so it was with satisfaction that mellytan closed this chapter of the Oathguard story, of her life, and giddily looked forward to the next.*

KNOWN ISSUES
- SFX cuts out randomly; sorry for the awkward silences

• Jamming on the shift key (run button) at the same time you touch an event triggered by On Hero Touch condition will bypass it. If it seems you’ve skipped an event trigger, retrace your steps.

• On that note, do not jam on the shift key during cutscenes if you are playing the game via the RM2k3 editor; you’ll mess up animations

• The canyon ambush battle refuses to add LP to Gela…sorry!

• A lot of “mapping errors”—misplaced/missing/misused tiles, etc

• Stun Baton doesn’t always Daze, despite supposedly having 100% chance of infliction and the enemies being susceptible to it; I guess this is an rm2k3 bug

• No Bocheul/Rhedon portrait; thanks Ghost (jk jk :3)

• The Rhedon multipart battle is pretty phoned in. Sorry!

• Tossed Vorpal Sword and Stun Baton back in at the last minute. Hope they don’t break the game :p

• I changed one of the events that controls adding your weapon’s command in battle at the last minute; did testing, but not extensive. If you have two weapon commands, it means something went wrong…

FONT
If it looks weird, it means you don’t have MS Echoes font installed. It is included in the folder, or available here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/18221407/MS%20Echoes_0.fon

EXTENDED CREDITS
I didn’t have time to re-do the credits image at the end, so here’s the full version:
Beta testers Eike, Ciel, Ocean, Electrical Kat, PentagonBuddy, argh, alterego, and Dyhalto. Thank you for your time and extremely helpful feedback, you made this game way better.
Thanks to Ghost for making the beautiful character portraits. I forgive you for not getting the last one to me. ;)
Special thanks to Ocean for making Gela’s sword-drawing animation, and designing the tutorial templates!
Thanks to alterego for the cool fanart (see it in the gallery). Now all Oathguard needs is fanfiction and I can die happy…

SOURCES
Graphics, music, and sound sources can be found in the readme included with the game folder.

SAVE PACK
In the game folder, there is a sub folder called SAVES that contain saves pretty much after every battle. Try one of those if you are a baby and can’t get past a certain enemy. They are in chronological order (first one lands you right after the intro, last one I think is right after Domtrau).

CUTSCENES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktUqUW_bs4E
Here’s a video of all the cutscenes in case you really hate ATB that much. Note it’s an old version so there may be some jankiness I’ve since fixed in the game.

FUTURE
Oathguard’s story certainly doesn’t end here; this is just the prologue. Something about the next part will be released sometime in Spring/Summer 2013. Sorry for the delay, but I will not have access to my PC for the next 13 weeks (at least), and besides, I need a break from Move Charset Up Right Down and Wait 0.0s….If you want to contact me about the game during this period, your best bet is to get my email or add me on Facebook, please PM if you want my contact info. I would enjoy discussing and idea jamming with others.