Posted February 12, 2024 by Ud0n
With the demo now available, I think it's about time I spoke about how Veiled Skies came about.
To begin, I'm a quiet person by nature and tend to keep most of my thoughts to myself (this being the internet and all) and prefer
to work on my projects in silence. So no real promotion on Twitter (I refuse to call it "X"), no TikTok, no Youtube or even reddit.
But on the inside I am still a very passionate game dev who loves making jRPGs (Japanese-style Role-Playing Games) because I feel they're the culmination of all my hobbies packed into one interactive medium: world-building, creating fun, larger-than-life-characters, doing art, working out the gameplay (within the limits of RPGMaker MZ) plus a whole lot more. And I've been doing them since 2009 if we include my hiatus'.
So fifteen years. A decade and a half. In those 15 years I've been active in maybe a handful of RPGMaker communities going under various alias' over the years: StarFantastic, Luchino, Lyla2284, Luchi, the list goes on and on. I've written close to 100 blogs on rpgmaker.net alone with regard to my projects.
And whatever was inspiring me at that particular period showed itself in my work, like Accelerated World was clearly inspired by the classic
Phantasy Star titles or Enelysion/Tiranogg's character design, writing and simple story was inspired by the early GBA-era Fire Emblems.
But not once did I consider making my "dream game" in those 15 years. I just wanted to make good games and finish them (the most important skill any dev can have, regardless of what engine you're working in). But I felt I was stagnating skill-wise; everything felt the same. I fell into a slump and became inactive on almost every RM community. I needed something to re-ignite my passion.
And then I came across a browser game back in 2017 called "Granblue Fantasy". At that point in time, GBF was a little over 3.5 years old and massive hit in Japan due to industry superstars like Hideo Minaba and Nobou Uematsu working on it.
It changed everything for me as a developer.
My writing started to evolve, my character designs and art advanced, I was completely taken aback by the sheer amount of polish and worldbuilding that went into this browser game that has since gone on to spawn 2 anime seasons, two fighting games and of course, Granblue Fantasy: ReLink, a stunning aRPG that had been in development since 2018 and that I have personally sunk over 70 hours into. 16,000 Mostly Postive reviews on Steam in 11 days is unheard of for a non-Final Fantasy jRPG.
I became an instant fan back in 2017.
GBF warrants mentioning because it is impossible to talk about VS without it. It played a huge inspiration in creating my game's setting and characters, a vast world set in the skies, leaving infinite room for adventure (for the record, GBF celebrates its 10th anniversary in March and its main story is still ongoing). I wanted to create something on a much smaller scale, something that I could expand on with subsequent games. However, it wasn't until the IGMC 2022 contest when Rina made her first appearance in "Guilty Red" that I started developing plans for VS.
The kemonomimi aspect was inspired by other mobile games as well. It also made me love foxes and wolves. Kitsu having smelly tails like real-life foxes was a funny piece of trivia I added to the game as well ("They don't just smell, they PONG.") Or Lupos being savage loners. I also spent a lot more time on character designs, with some designs taking up to 8 hours alone for line art.
I broke free of my "Fire Emblem" era designs and starting looking into Tokyo street fashion as inspiration (something Tetsuya Nomura does as well) for my characters. I wanted them to feel like jRPG characters without being over-the-top and I wanted them to feel iconic - Rina's red longcoat or Aya's distinctive yellow jacket. Setting a world above the clouds conjures up all sorts of fantastic locations that aren't grounded in medieval fantasy or sci-fi cyberpunk and allowed me to take a lot more creative liberties with regards to my level design.
On another note--
I did consider remaking Enelysion in RPGMaker MZ but dropped it after the idea for VS came to me. I had already sort of "soft-rebooted" it as Tiranogg and didn't want to do the same thing for the 3rd time.
Screens from the abandoned Enelysion remake. Visually it did inspire some of the art direction behind VS. Also by this point I was kind of over Fire Emblem as a whole and wanted to move on.
Future plans:
The full game for Veiled Skies itself is about 99% complete, I wrote the last scene a few days ago and scheduled for release in August 2024, after Steam's NEXT Fest in June. The demo is available on Steam as well. While I do have soaring ambitions for Veiled Skies as a franchise, it is best to keep myself grounded, lest I crash and burn and never get up again.
Until next time, this is Ud0n signing off.