Versus Software   game + free time = duck

Few days ago I got fan mail from a game I developed, Solis.

The e-mail I got basically complemented the game, saying he liked the style but thought it had too much text hahah. Always good to get feedback from my projects.

Solis is sort of a special project to me. It was the first BIG project that I developed and every now and then I check how many downloads it managed to get (5000+ and counting). It`s not a big project and it ain`t no RPG Maker killer but it was a fun game to make.

With this game I learned 3 very important things:

1. No matter how close you are to finishing a project you will only, and only after you finish it, be able to learn and truly take a critical perspective of it. This is the sort of thing you can’t really explain why. Basically you know why when it happens to you and after that you understand why it can’t really be explained.
2. Different games take different amount of resources. Quite obvious, but it’s the sort of issue that gets commonly overlooked. Solis was a 2D rpg game, and with it came hundreds of sprites, tiles, images, maps, sounds… The list just kept getting bigger and bigger and I was soon to find that I needed an artist.
3. Know your user base before doing the project. During halfway through developing the Solis tool set, I thought I had actually found a development niche. You see, people make RPG maker maps and images all the time, write tutorials about it, etc. But most of them use pirated versions of it. I thought an open source RPG maker would fill that need and actually be able to create a community out of it.
   Boy was I wrong heh. The RPG maker community is mostly of artists and script writers and since Solis was written in C++ that didn’t really appeal to them. Maybe if I kept investing into it I could have pulled that one off. But after such a long development process, I felt I wanted to do something else.

And I guess that`s it. There was one interesting side effect of developing this game though… and hasn’t faded yet:

I never managed to play a JRPG again. Ever. I finished Solis and could not stand looking at JRPG…. Pretty weird heh.