Dearest reader.

It's been a month since the release of Owl On His Own, and I've been thinking for a while about making a blog post on this matter. After all, this is all new to me: This is my first game ever published online. So I thought it would be cool to share some of the "behind the scenes" of this game, and talk about my plans for the future.

The Beginning

I've been using Rpg Maker since 2015. My friend showed off his game, claiming making games was never that easy with this engine. And I was fascinated by it. I bought a copy of Rpg Maker Vx Ace and began my adventure on making my own shitty games that would never be released due to lack of ongoing interest.

Owl On His Own started as a small project to be featured in a Rpg Maker Game Jam, where the goal was to make any kind of game you wanted in a month. I was doing alright with the progress, but due to lack of time because of university, I couldn't finish the project in time. The frustration made me choose to not upload my unfinished game. And I'm glad I didn't.

The story was much simpler back then. Geco (The main character) gets lost from his mother, and his goal is to find her. There were no flowers, drugstore or mazes. You would simply spawn on a randomly generated spot in this huge map that used the default Rpg Maker textures, and as you'd explore the forest, you would find many random characters and events to interact with. One of these events was your mother, which triggered the ending. Also, that was the first game I ever tried to make original music and sprites (They all sucked).

Still, I was very interested at the premise of a game about an owl getting lost from his mother, so I continued the project as time went on.

The Creation of Geco

Between 2016 and 2017, while in high school, I started writing a book with a fantasy story. Without getting into tangent, that book was all over the place. It had magic, technology, edgy characters, a kingdom with an evil king,  good vs evil plots, post apocalyptic vibes, etc. In other words, it was a cringy attempt of a teenager to create the next Lord of the Rings. 

But what does Geco has to do with this? Well, in this world I had created there were animals, and some of them had the ability to communicate with humans. Geco was one of these animals, and the protagonist would later meet him and become friends.

Geco before Owl On His Own was and old, grumpy but fascinating character that could time travel using his heart shaped collar he'd always wear around. Besides his scarf (Which I decided keep in his final version), he would sometimes wear a pair of sunglasses and a cane (Which was just a bigoted way to portray him as a blind animal). He was also married with a Toucan.

There was something about that owl in particular that made me like it very much. He naturally grew on me. It got to a point that while writing that book, I would create as many scenarios as I possibly could that would envolve the protagonist and Geco. I was very fond of it, which is also very funny because I have absolutely no idea about what inspired me to create him. Maybe it was a movie, or a game, or a book, but I honestly can't remember. Hell, I wasn't even into drawing animals at the time, but after I created him, I started drawing all sorts of anthropomorphic animals.

I still have that book saved in my hard drive. I can't bear to read it for a minute without feeling pain, though I still recycle some neat ideas I had written at that Microsoft Word document. And while I may have gave up on that book, I didn't give up on that owl. I knew I still had plans with it.

Making this game

Programming was probably one the worst things I ever learned in my life, and that's why, just out of spite, I decided to use Rpg Maker to create this game. Yeah sure, this engine is constantly made fun of for many different reasons, but I had a comfortable amount of experience with it for years, and I had all the tools I needed in this engine to make this simple game I had in mind.

The story was being made as I was developing this game. Opinions, mindsets, and your world views tends to change a lot when you grow up. That's why this game had many different iterations with many different plots, and I am one hundred percent satisfied with the final result. I had many inspirations from Yume Nikki and Le Petit Prince.

A lot of things were cut from this game for many reasons, but a majority of them were due to the many changes in the story. One of these changes was a character named Murdóque. He was a kid dragon and a close friend of Geco that would appear in the third level (The town center). Since Geco already had a lot of interactions with Nica (Assuming you became her friend), I decided to cut him for being unnecessary to the plot. There were also at least five tracks that were unused in this game, either because I couldn't find a place that could fit it, or because it was for a scene that was cut (Such as Murdóque's theme). These tracks might be reused in future projects though.

Brazilian Portuguese translation

Eu sou Brasileiro. Quem diria, né? This game was originally intended to be released with two download links: The English version, and the Brazilian Portuguese version. However, due to my anxieties, I couldn't bear to wait any longer to release this game. So the Brazilian translation was postponed, but it is still in the works, but no release date yet. I don't like promises, but it MIGHT come in the next few months or so.

Plans for the future

I am glad to inform that I am working on many other games, also made in Rpg Maker (Of course). One of them is a very ambitious classic turn-based Rpg set in the same world as Owl On His Own, but with a different plot that has nothing to do with it. For now I won't reveal more, as this is not the purpose of this blog post, but I'll keep posting some updates in the future, so stay tuned.

Thanks for reading,

Own Doing.