PENTAGONBUDDY'S PROFILE

nice

Was gonna post this in the above mentioned thread, but hopped back to the outdated talk in here since eh, it's me being nostalgic at 3am about a later time!

I am well past the early days, but i came into the RMN scene at a weird transition point that's interesting to me as an extension of this sort of Oral History. i interacted with a lot of early/mid 2000s rpg maker legacy while being on the cusp of some pretty big changes



In particular, it's interesting to me how i had such an anti-marketing stance for awhile, due to how much cool vaporware i saw carefully curated via screenshot and limit-testing tech demos (and indulge in, myself). It's such an ass-backwards approach to think of in Today's Indie Scene, but at the time trying to profit off of something i could only see as a hobby seemed alien.

I barely dipped my toes into RRR and had no idea what people on RMN were talking about when they referenced gw. I only got to RMN in 2011, after a couple years floating between different forums

Like many people, the tribal, isolated nature of individual forums stands out in my memory. I had a friend who, around 2008/9, was big into rm but was my only point of contact with this world. I remember testing his broken games that had this amateur, reverent passion that i unironically enjoy. (see: one of my highest review ratings going to TRINITY/SING, a game i dearly wish i had more of) From my pov at the time, he was doing something magical and amazing and wonderful and impressive...that would have without a doubt been mocked to pieces. (iirc it was his fursonas and complex anime geopolitics a la Xenosaga, as told through 2k3 rtp edits and random midis. I loved it at the time and i'd love it now, albeit for different reasons)

And then in true teenager fashion, i was smug as fuck to him about how superior rpg maker vx OBVIOUSLY was to 2k/2k3 while i made "super cake buffet" (I tried XP, but could never get my pirated version to work)

I'd mostly lurk places like rrr and even rmn for quite some time, while rarely interacting. When i finally started, I became known mostly as a weirdo who made rtp resources on rpg maker vx forums circa 2010 tooo...2014/15ish? I don't consider myself famous or noteworthy, but in my respective puddle i was a moderately-sized fish b/c I provided resources and filled lots of requests. People love free stuff!

At one point i was a mod on 3 separate forums created as the result of various drama on forum #1 (rmvx.net), and joined all sorts of small communities to hunt for scripts/resources i could shove into my game

THAT is the legacy that I feel has come to form a Core Part of rm game identity from XP-onwards: stitched together code that crashed on the regular and bloated games with all sorts of vestigial design anatomy.




sup, lockpicking and lighting system...now done through SCRIPTS!! wow!

I have a fond memory of the first forum i modded for, when one of the admins went down in a blaze of glory to protest changes from The Management, ientry. He made every page play the rap version of bloody tears and we had all sorties of "mods asleep post whatever" parties until he got banned (which OF COURSE I hopped on......while being a mod)



The site has since been deleted but i have half-legible detritus saved

The atmosphere could still be pretty harsh and tbh i'd rate it as a bad influence even though I met LOTS of cool people through My Experiences. irc was known as the place to go only if you were tough enough to stand being called the n-word and mocked for not adhering to the channer-esque channel culture. (which was supported by one of the mods, who was an honest-to-goodness white supremacist. I didn't understand what that meant at the time, despite not being white, and was also coming from 4chan culture)



I'd do things like deface game awards for reasons??? like many channers, I was a depressed asshole lashing out at other people under the pretense of jokes and memes

By the time i'd made it to rpgmaker.web in 2012 i'd cleaned up my act somewhat. I wonder where i'd be at if I'd stuck with it--i eventually quit modding b/c It Sucked and i was tired of staff in-fighting, plus i've never been one to do much with social capital. I don't regret giving it up, but i know some people like archeia have made a career that sprung from involvement in rm stuff. we'd worked together for various things, so would I have ended up in a similar boat if I'd stuck around? who knows!



On the positive end, i can say my involvement in making resources did WONDERS for my art. You can really see the difference! vx/vxace rtp style still lurks in my art to this day (this wip is a strong example). people were IMPRESSED I could mimic the rtp style so well.........even though rtp is really mocked by a lot of folks.



Looking back, one of my favorite things is all the characters from existing series i made. I like to think someone, somewhere, saw my crude attempt at vx rtp cloud or albedo and thought "finally!". As an art form i consider it inferior to the dadaesque collages you'd see in lots of 2k-era games, per previous discussion. I don't know if this was in earlier parlance, but i got my start making frankensprites/frankenportraits of rtp stuff



i think i filled every gay request i caught on the board b/c it was the kind of time where meeting someone else gay BLEW MY MIND



I also made lots of tutorials lost to various forum deletions, though they must survive SOMEWHERE in some fashion, since I semi-recently had someone ask to use materials i made for them in a commercial game. it weirds me out when it happens even though I suppose it's flattering



mmmmm and forum signatures + banners. can we bring those back? please? i could just start using one again and no one could stop me

Anyways, hope this doesn't come across as tooting my horn. It's stuff that stands out in my memory from the POV of someone who primarily made resources. When i came in, rpg maker was still this hobby in a bubble, and when I left things had changed...somewhat. There were more serious commercial ambitions, and it wasn't until like 2016/17 when I moved over to twitter/discord for gamedev talk. That's recent history plenty of people remember!

The projects i have left in rpg maker use mv and gut it so much my dev partner and i will probably make the great Unity leap...depending on how well Unity fares after their Recent Changes. Unsurprisingly, based on the art i've shown here, i still do character portraits and the like, but primarily for visual novels. (I say i moved to twitter for gamedev talk, but as anyone aware of that account knows 99.9% of it is shitposts and retweeting other people's art/games/resources. bet you can guess my discord username, and i have the illustrious id of #6693. even there i'm only active in like, 2 vn/queer dev servers while being a member of 10+)

I like to think i've become obscure again, which suits my lurker nature just fine!

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Ha ha, it was for NaNoReNo so it'll need some serious TLC before I think about sharing outside of very few people! I've thought about putting it online somewhere for free, though "very few people" would still be accurate for readership, at least from what I've seen for that

Still! It was a good experience even if it ends up as just a novelty

Yeah man, solid advice

Game pages to find stuff to play, mostly

edit: wait also to occasionally holler on the forums but it's not why I visit