GAME LENGTH: THE DECIDING FACTOR

@eplipswich: Actually, the hilarious thing is beta5 WAS supposed to have the most story content out of the entire game. There's actually MORE content that was cut early on (which was a bunch of "downtime" events between dungeons) which would have had more interactions and whatnot between characters. I deemed it as being too much though and cut most of it out. There's a lot I feel I could've done with the story overall (especially in earlier parts), but that's for much, much later if I ever decide it needs fixed (if at all). Can't keep going back fixing things forever, ya? ^^;

But yeah, I already cut out the 11 dungeons in beta6 where you'd have to go back to old dungeons (that has new areas to explore) and find your old party members and defeat them to get them back. I'm just going to go the route of "What happened? Did we end up knocked out after that last bout?" in response to the event directly before the Hakurei Shrine Forest event. Originally, each beta WAS going to have around 5 dungeons or so only...but that didn't work well with the story I had going. ^^;

@ RyaReisender: I try to make it a point to myself as a developer to make each dungeon and boss fight as unique as I can. Granted, this doesn't always pan out (I'm terrible with puzzle dungeons for instance) and a lot of early game areas are pretty sameish in that you just traverse them, but I try at least the further into the game the player gets! ^^;

But yeah, I normally wouldn't have cut anything out, but then the game just would never end if I did that. I've been told by a lot of people before I should've just made like...a Visual Novel or fanfiction instead of a game because of how much there was in it originally. ^^;


@Sooz: Yeah, if I included all of that, it'd be pretty lengthy. There's actually a lot that goes on in quite a few of those dungeons, although that's not always the case (for instance, most of the dungeons in beta5 involve having to go find a Magic Stone (there's 5 of them), and throughout the dungeon there's generally some sort of event (for instance, at Valley of Corpses, there's a couple events involving the Malboros that lurk around there, and then at the end before getting the crystal is an event that involves Tiamat). Sometimes there may be no event at all, or very minor (for instance, Winter Forest's only event really is the boss fight, which isn't even that hard. It's basically a dungeon that's there to add content to the game. It COULD be cut out and nothing would be really lost but...eh).

Basically, what I'm saying is when I had those dungeons placed in the game, I had already thought of the story behind each of them and why the party goes there and whatnot. I already had the ideas for most things set up before I began, though while working on the game obviously some things were changed (for instance, the main character Hope in my game didn't even exist at first. In fact, none of the fragments of Pandora existed. Only Pandora herself did, and originally Sariel was never a major villain in the story either and was never seen at all in the game).

In fact, sometimes I have rough drafts of what I want to do, but not the actual dialogue or scenes. In these cases, I actually run a movie reel in my head and go from there (that's actually how I handled the entire scenario for the second runthrough of Remains of Hell, as well as the events of Eientei). I run better that way than trying to force myself to do it otherwise, although admittedly sometimes I fall asleep when I do that lol...

I suppose so, but I only worry about it due to how long it'll take otherwise to get it actually done. If it weren't for that alone, then I myself wouldn't even think about it. But since it's already been close to 9 years (next year will be 9), and I really just want to be done with this game, I've been thinking of ways to speed it up and whatnot so...^^;;

I suppose so. If there IS a next project, anyways, heh. After this one, doubt I'll be making another one (if I did, I'd want to be 100% original and not be a fangame at all. Though I'd also want it to be more "fun" and whatnot, much like the Neptunia series is (yes, that series has been inspiring me a lot lately. I realized after watching a LP of the latest game that a lot of the games that I've played or reference and whatnot are just...too serious and whatnot, and not enough fun). Of course, doing this without ripping off anything or whatnot is another thing entirely ehehe...). ^^;