Well... I'm back.

I haven't really touched this profile since my last blog post a year ago. To be honest, all of my data got corrupted, and I lost the will to continue the project, mainly because it was almost done. Since then, I have had some time to think about what went right and what went wrong with the previous development of the original demo. 

What went right:

1. I was able to get my feet wet and learn the steps I needed to take to fully develop a working breathing game.
2. Using this medium, I was able to use the art of storytelling, building a breathing, living world with a whole cast of characters, all with different goals, dreams, personalities... things that made them human. 

What went wrong:

1. Because of my lack of knowledge in game development, I went through numerous revisions of the demo itself because:

•              I didn't write a script, or even make a timeline of events that happen in the story.
•              The story at times not making any sense because of my lack of planning.
•              I didn't use plugins, make my own art, to my detriment admittedly, or put any effort into making my game stand out more from the other RPG Maker games.
•               I didn't think I should have made a budget for the game to invest in different assets, even if I would lose money.

    2.  Due to things out of my control, both in my personal and financial life, I couldn't get the necessary upgrades to properly make the 2D JRPG of my dreams. I couldn't make the story as believable as could be, my world had a lot of loose ends and retcons that didn't make sense with the theme of my game.

Which brings me to my next and final topic: What the theme of the story was.

Through and through, it's a love story. A tragic one that, at its core, all begins from the villain's own love story. While his motives are, admittedly, childish, they make sense. More often than not us as people do things off of pure emotion, and either benefit off of. or regret the decisions we make based on those emotions. Up until a few days ago, when pre-planning the story, I didn't know that the villain of my story, the person doing all of these horrible things to the protagonist, had no true reason why he did what he did. 

I say all of this to say, if you haven't figured it out yet, that Forever and Always is back in active development. This will be the last blog post from this page, and all future post will be held here.  I will take what I have learned in the past year and work to do better this time around. 

I'm also gonna keep this page up. A reminder of where I started, if you will.

Thanks for reading,

Ethan.