Princess Maze Demo Release - This Project was Cursed!

I'm excited to announce the release of a new game demo, Princess Maze!

This game puts you in the role of a Princess who must conquer a labyrinth to become the Queen of Everything!  It's a retro-RPG that features brand new pixel art and a new 8-bit soundtrack!  This demo was created for the Anime Game Dev Community #1 Game Jam, and it was made in one month.  Well... kind of.  It's complicated.

Originally, this was going to be a first person dungeon crawl.  In the first two days of the jam, I made insane progress towards that goal.  I had a neat looking interface, a first person dungeon view, an automap that was revealed tile by tile as you explored, and even a database that made it possible to ignore RPG Maker MZ's entire database system.  It was working great, until it wasn't.

It turned out, it was all too much for me.

I don't know what happened.  Stuff just started breaking.  Everything worked until it didn't and I couldn't figure out why.  But as the days went on, it became more and more apparent that this project simply wasn't going to work.  So I deleted it.  And remade it.  And deleted that one because it too didn't work.  And then I remade it again, and deleted it again.  And at that point, I started spiraling.

I quit the game jam.  I thought about quitting game-dev entirely.  I thought I was a worthless person, since this stuff is the only thing I'm remotely good at, and apparently I was bad at it.  I just started sulking and became kind of an emotional black-hole for a few days.  And then, for some reason, I decided that I was going to finish the game anyway I could.

By then the game-jam was half over, so I had to change the game entirely.  I know the NES color palette very well, and I can write NES style music very quickly, so I decided to, once again, go with that aesthetic over the MSDOS / PC98 thing I was going for the first time.  I also couldn't afford to make a new battle system, nor could I afford to stray too far from RPG Maker MZ's default functionality at all, so the end result is a pretty bog-standard RPG Maker MZ game with some neat features thrown in.  

What I was able to use was my special "Better Messages" plugin that allows for dynamic portrait selection and word-wrap, which is very convenient!  Unfortunately, the word-wrap broke halfway through this project and I still don't know why.  So I had to go through and redo every single piece of text in the game.  I am 90% certain I fixed it all, but if there is a line of text trailing off the screen, that's why.  Feel free to let me know in the comments so I can fix it!

As this game-jam reached its final days, I started burning out.  I'm exhausted.  I stayed up until 4AM drawing that mediocre artwork for the thumbnail.  I'm typing this devlog in the final hours of the Game-Jam, and it looks like I'll be submitting it at the last minute.  I'll be taking a few days off game-dev activities, and I'll be starting some proper coding tutorials so that someday I can make the game I was trying to make in the first place.  I really don't know where I was going with this devlog, as it seems to have devolved into kind of a vent.  I guess the lesson here is that you never really know your limits until you hit them, and brute force will not get you past them.  Go back, study, learn, and try again.  At least I hope that works, because that's what I'm intending to do!

Thanks for reading this mess of a devlog, and have a great day!

~Ayback