10 Years of KrimsonKatt! + December Update

Hello! Today is a very special day. Not only because it's Christmas mind you, but also because this is my 10 year anniversary of using RPG Maker! Yes, 10 years from this day, December 25th, 2014, I opened RPG Maker VX Ace for the first time and started work on my very first game. Man… it’s really been 10 years, a whole decade. Time really does sure fly! Throughout these last 10 years I’ve had many highs and lows, made friends, lost them, made games, and built a small yet thriving fan base. I’ve improved by art, storytelling, writing, and general game making skills tremendously in the past 10 years, from the humble beginnings of Zero Gear Fighters to the grandness of Chronicles Meteorfall. While I’ve had my own ups and downs, and many years where I felt lost and confused on what to do, I still pushed forward and continued making progress on my games, no matter what form that takes. Heck, the fact that I’m even standing here today and not dead and buried in a ditch somewhere is testemount to my determination to push through adversity, fight back against all my hardships, and make actual content.

As for the actual updates this month for Chronicles Meteorfall, that will come later in this post. But for now, let’s celebrate these 10 years and look back on all the memories made, from 2014 all the way to this fleeting year, 2024.

2014

• I discover RPG Maker VX Ace while searching Amazon for “video game creation software no coding.”
• I put RPG Maker VX Ace on my Christmas wish list.
• I receive RPG Maker VX Ace for Christmas and begin work on my first ever RPG Maker game, The Legend of Light.
• I discover RMN (rpgmaker.net) from the book RPG Maker for Teens that I received alongside the engine for Christmas.

2015

• I complete my first game The Legend of Light, though it remains unreleased due to its poor quality.
• I start developing and then almost immediately cancel a game called Elvengard. It’s ideas would later be reused for Chronicles Calamity.
• In April 2015 I create my RMN account, originally called “dragonsprit99” (“spirit” spelled incorrectly)
• I begin work on my second game, Zero Gear Fighters.
• I release Zero Gear Fighters to the public as well as make numerous updates to the project.
• I begin work on the sequel to ZGF, Dragon Ascension, originally titled “Zero Gear Fighters 2.”
• Zero Gear Fighters receives scathing reviews, greatly upsetting me.

2016

• I continue to work on Dragon Ascension throughout most of the year, releasing updates expanding the game periodically.
• In April I create a short meme game called Crypt Challenge, now known as Crypt Challenge Classic. This will be important later.
• I planned to develop a short game called Strange Dreams that was more like an exploration game with minimal to no combat, but it got cancelled partway through.
• In December 2016 I become severely depressed, losing all motivation for developing Dragon Ascension and leaving the game on a cliffhanger after the 4th to last dungeon right before the last town.
• I receive RPG Maker MV for Christmas, an upgrade to my previous engine of choice VX Ace. However, I quickly found out that the engine was unusable due to our family’s old Windows XP computer not being powerful enough to run MV games. (It had like 2 GB or RAM. $100 school laptops were better than it, no joke.)

2017

• For an RMN event called “Swap in the Middle With You” I planned to make a game called “Slime Quest” that would carry over some elements from Crypt Challenge. The project ended up becoming too ambitious and I had to scrap it and quit the event.
• I created my RPG Maker Web account, which I became much more active on compared to my RMN account.
• I began work on my next game, Stardust Saga, which would later be known as Draco Anima Origins.
• I stop development on Draco Anima Origins due to scope issues (I wanted to have FMVs) and our family getting a new computer, which also led to…
• Me losing the files to The Legend of Light as well as all my other cancelled/unfinished projects. Thankfully I was able to recover the files for Zero Gear Fighters and Dragon Ascension via backups on RMN, but those were the only ones that survived the purge. This purge included the loss of all the files for Draco Anima Origins, but finally allowed me to make use of MV for real this time. But then…
• Xenoblade 2 happened. A game that is both simultaneously my least favorite and favorite game of all time. It’s systems are so complex, so baffling, so overly-complicated, barely explained, and it’s QoL so poor that the game frustrated me to the extent that I got burnt out of RPGs for an entire year and didn’t find them fun anymore. Later on I grew to not only like, but ADORE Xenoblade 2 after giving the game a second shot after playing XB1 and watching a combat guide+speedrun of the game. This, obviously, made developing MY OWN RPGs very difficult.
• To keep on going with the list of failures 2017 had to offer, I planned to start work on my magnum opus, Firebrand Chronicles, but I was super indecisive of what I wanted the game to actually BE so it never got past the planning and databasing stages.

2018

• The year that I accomplished the least amount of work, for sure. However…
• Most of this year I was beginning the groundwork and planning stages for my massive overarching series that would bridge all the stories I already had together into one cohesive narrative. All games previously made would be rebooted into this new series through various remakes and reimagining, and my plans for this series would be written down in a disconnected series of google docs, sketches, and story outlines.
• I changed my username on all my socials, including RMN, to “KrimsonKatt.” This is the name I’m most known by online.
• When I wasn’t making the plans for my grand series, I was developing a new game, “Generic RPG Quest III.” It originally started out as a simple game lazily parodying FF1, but later in development evolved into something far more ambitious.
• During this year I experimented with placing my games in various different existing continuities, from Fire Emblem to Shining to Legend of Dragoon. I eventually decided on making up my own setting taking elements from all my favorite game series and mashing them all together, able to make various diverging genres fit together by all taking place on a vast timeline of 20,000 years.

2019

• I ended up scrapping Generic RPG Quest III due to the files becoming corrupted through multiple file transfers between PCs. I only released up through the second major dungeon, but had developed most of the way through the third before the files went kaput.
• In October 2019 I finished my first full released game since Zero Gear Fighters, which I made in only two weeks: Crypt Challenge DX, a reimagining of Crypt Challenge made for RMN’s “revive the dead” event. It received average reviews. CCDX also served narrative as an epilogue for Meteo Chronicles, which would later become known as Chronicles Meteorfall.
• Immediately after finishing Crypt Challenge DX I began work on Meteo Chronicles, the 1.0 build of what would later become known as Chronicles Meteorfall. (the 3.0 build)

2020

• I created my itch.io page sometime early this year. (Probably February)
• I spent most of this year tirelessly working on Meteo Chronicles.
• In December 2020 I realized and accepted that I was trans. It would take a few years before I would fully come out to everyone, and even now 5 years later it’s still a process.
• In the same month I received my very own laptop PC!

2021

• I finally released the “finished” 1.0 build of Meteo Chronicles. It was received very poorly due to numerous issues including tone and lore inconsistencies, extremely poor balancing, dull gameplay and combat, and glitches so numerous and game breaking that the game was literally unplayable past a certain point and it was impossible to see the ending.
• Due to MC’s poor reception I decided to remaster the game as Meteo Chronicles R, the “2.0 Build” of what would eventually become Chronicles Meteorfall.
• I spent the rest of the year working on Meteo Chronicles R.

2022

• During interim periods between developing Meteo Chronicles R I developed Crypt Challenge EX, also known as Chronicles I Epilogue, a remaster of Crypt Challenge DX, which is in itself a remake of Crypt Challenge Classic.
• In October 2022 I developed and released a short horror-themed RPG called Chronicles: The Lost Page. It ended up receiving actually positive reviews for once and was praised for its non-linear structure, combat, and difficulty, but was criticized for its tonal issues (mainly in the Chimera Den dungeon) occasional glitches and obtuseness, and mildly annoying level design. (mazes of both the regular and teleport varieties)
• My computer completely shattered one day after my backpack fell down the stairs, the back completely opened up and all the parts went flying. New parts for my specific model of laptop were very rare and expensive so they couldn’t fix it. I had to get a new computer.
• Due to my losing my computer, all my files for Meteo Chronicles R were lost. I needed to get a new PC, which I did that Christmas. (my current laptop!)
• Due to losing the files for Meteo Chronicles R, I decided to start fresh with a brand new game made from the ground up, Chronicles Meteorfall, the game which I am still working on to this day.

2023

• 2023 was the year of one big distraction, my game Noel and the Tower of Doom. Originally intended to be, and I know you’ve heard this before, a short, simple game made for an RMN gamejam, ballooned into a much bigger and more ambitious project that took the entire year of 2023 to develop and release. Noel and the Tower of Doom has received very little critical feedback so far besides being called “so bad it’s good” by a random commenter on Reddit and the opening monologue being heavily panned for lore dumping way too fast as soon as you open the game. That’s not the best sign.

2024

• All year I worked tirelessly on Chronicles Meteorfall, and will continue to do so going into 2025, hopefully the year of this long-anticipated game’s final release.
• RMN shut down in April of this year due to server issues. The mods got a new server, but the website couldn’t run well at all on the new server because the source code was so outdated. Now the website is being remade from the ground up and will release sometime in the future.

Like I said, lots of ups and downs. I had good moments, like finishing my games, and I had bad moments, like multiple canceled projects and other various mistakes. But I learned from them, I grew. The last 10 years was like the prologue of my gamdev journey. Learning the engine, learning art, learning code, learning storytelling techniques, playing new games that helped inspire me, and yes, learning proper social skills and online etiquette. And don’t forget me facing myself like I was in Persona 4 and discovering what I truly wanted, who I am as a person, and what kind of person I wanted to be. It was straight up a plot from a Persona game. I was so lost within the fog of my own doubts and insecurities that I became wrapped in some insane far right anti-woke conspiracy cult.

This is why they should reimagine Persona 4, not remake it. Golden is perfect as is and has aged spectacularly minus the 3D graphics, which while outdated, still have their charm. The same themes, the same message, the same small-town countryside setting, the same “vibes”, but with a new cast, a new storyline, a new OST, everything. The original Persona 4 can stay as is, but there is SO MUCH missed potential in Persona 4’s themes that went completely untapped in the actual game. The spinoffs COULD have remedied this, but instead they just shifted the themes from “truth, perception, fake news, inner struggles, accepting your flaws, etc” into just “friendship is magic.” The themes in Persona 4 could be SO GOOD if modernized and brought to the forefront instead of going all wholesome chungus 100 best friends happy funtime like pretty much every release after the PS2 P4 leaned towards. Go all-in on the misinformation and fake news angle, which is INCREDIBLY relevant in the modern age with the rise of AI, russian-led misinformation bot farms, social media altering people’s perception of reality, etc. I could be a nice change of pace from the inevitable Persona 6, which will likely have an environmentalist theme and message as implied from the few things and leaks we know about the game. What I’m asking for is basically Persona 4-2, not Persona 4 Rewind which would just be the same game again but with P5 graphics, shift, thurgies, and more broken skills. Maybe a Youske romance route and reworked Naoto social link if we’re lucky.

But, rant aside, what about my own game, Chronicles Meteorfall? Well, there’s a lot I got done this year for the game. Currently, the game is 95% feature complete up through Chapter 3, (missing 1 sidequest) though some content for all the other chapters has already been made. All but one of the overworld maps are done. The only one missing is Baetas. All the enemy sprites are finished up through Ch3. The database is 100% done minus the enemies. All arts are functional and all game breaking glitches are fixed. Honestly, if I used sideview rather than frontview, the demo would already be out by now. But since I want to be special, I have to have custom front view animations for each of my characters. Currently, I only have the animations for Koros, and he was so hard to make that I’m constantly dreading making the other ones. The second thing I need to make for my demo besides the animations is the menus. I want my game to have a distinct look and feel, and for that I need a good menu. I have the pro version of SRD’s HUD Maker EX, but making a menu that can be traversed with the arrow keys rather than the mouse is easier said than done when using HUD Maker. So I’m still working on that. The last thing I’m making is the filters for the game to help my game stand out. Reflections on the water, leaves blowing in the wind, pixi filters, visual overlays, etc. I will need those if I want my standard RTP game to stand out in any way. The last step is to actually playtest the game and make sure everything works as envisioned. Then I can make the trailer and release my game’s demo on itch.io and maybe Steam??? IDK, still thinking about it.

But yeah, that’s my game so far. But what have I been doing this month, since the last update? Well, I haven’t been really able to get too much done because most of my time was being spent doing my yearly Terraria playthrough with my brother. We’re currently post-mech and about to fight Plantera and T2 Old One’s Army, which if you aren’t familiar with Terraria is around 3/4ths through the game’s progression. But I did get some stuff done, that “stuff” being making unique sprites for nearly every weapon in the game! Currently, I have every sword, every katana, every dagger, every axe, and every spear made. Making fists and bows is really hard, so I’ll probably only make the fists and bows that are in the demo and then go on to make all the staves, which are much easier to sprite. But yeah, that’s the current progress of Chronicles Meteorfall. I’m a bit disappointed that I wasn’t able to get my game or even my demo out by my 10 year anniversary, but these things take time, especially for a project as ambitious as Chronicles Meteorfall. So, I say to you all, merry Christmas, and here to another 10 great years of KrimsonKatt! May the legacy live on!