Posted November 22, 2024 by KrimsonKatt
Hello everyone! My name is KrimsonKatt, and this is my first blog post released on itch.io for my game Chronicles Meteorfall. This game has a long story behind it, so stay tuned for all the juicy details. Anyways, you may know me from another site, rpgmaker.net. However, this April, April 2024, rpgmaker.net met it's unfortunate end, at least for now. Since then the servers for that site have gone kaput, and the website likely won't return for years on end. With RMN largely gone and relegated mostly to it's discord community, so goes my original community, but also my infamy. You see, I wasn't exactly... the most well liked person on RMN. I got into fights, I got combative, I said a lot of stupid things many times, and was just overally not the nicest dude. But what can I say, I was an emotionally unstable teenager back then before I really got my stuff together. I'm not BANNED from that site, don't get me wrong, but I definitely wasn't in the good graces of the mod team over there and was kind of on thin ice due to repeated mistakes, mostly in my youth. (alongside one really big misunderstanding regarding game reviews)
Anyways, with a new website comes a new start, and I'm happy to say that itch.io, at least for now, will be the new home of all my games, both released and future! Gone are the days of RMN, and now lies a greater, more professional, more mainstream future. Anyways, who am I? What am I about? What is my history? Well, I'll tell you.
It all started in the Christmas season of 2014, before a lot of you were probably born. Since I first got introduced to video games in the late 2000s with the Nintendo Wii, I had always wanted to create my own video games and tell my own unique stories through that medium. I tried to write a few silly comic books and mini-novels in my elementary years, but they weren't really able to fully capture what I was going for and what sort of crazy ideas were in my head. A video game is the perfect medium to tell a story in, a perfect combination of visuals, music, fun, and interactivity. You weren't just watching events happen, you were actively participating in them by controlling the characters. Detailed stories turned into living, breathing worlds, far more in-depth, expansive, and explorable than worlds portrayed in movies, TV, or books. You could actually talk to the characters, explore in real time, and the entire story was gamified into a sort of evolved board game with rules and gameplay that perfectly intertwined with the stories being told. I wanted to create my own video game so badly.
However, I ran into a major problem. From everything I learned about making games from my friends and family, you NEEDED to understand and write code to be able to make ANYTHING. Some of my friends used the website "scratch" to make crappy maze games and the like, but even that was too complex for my math-hating brain to handle. Was there any way for me to be able to create my own video game without a single bit of coding knowledge? Well, one day, while looking for things to add to my wishlist on Amazon and with making my own video game on my mind, I randomly searched on Amazon "game creating software no coding". And that's when I discovered it. True magic. RPG MAKER!!!
It was like a dream come true. A software to make my own video games, without any coding knowledge or even any artistic skill? What sorcery was this? I was amazed and flabbergasted that a software like that even existed. I immediately put the software in question, RPG Maker VX Ace (deluxe physical box set version), at the very top of my wishlist, and that Christmas day I not only got the software, but also a book. "RPG Maker for Teens." It was this book right here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11414448-rpg-maker-for-teens This book was a MASSIVE part of my childhood and basically introduced me to the RPG Maker community through it's detailed chapter almost fully consisting of shilling the website rpgmaker.net. I couldn't join then since I was only 12, but I joined the second I turned 13 and began posting my games there. Thus, the legend of Dragonsprit99 (misspelling unintentional) began, and eventually, the continued legend of my current username, KRIMSONKATT!!!
My first ever RPG Maker game was called "The Legend of Light." It was very bad. While technically a finished product, it used almost entirely RTP including the built-in skills, enemies, and items, just slightly edited. The game was full of bugs due to not fully understanding the engine and having absolutely no idea how switches and variables worked. I finished the entire game in only a few months, and in spite of how poor the overally quality of the game was I was EXTREMELY proud of the finished result. Sadly I no longer have the files to that original game and I'm afraid that it is lost forever on my old Windows XP home computer that's long since been recycled and trashed, so it's impossible now to directly see how far I've grown and improved since the very beginning, the absolute origin of my gamedev career.
After The Legend of Light wrapped up, I immediately began work on my next game, which was also my first publically released game, Zero Gear Fighters. You may have seen that game floating around on this very page. I released it on RMN and expected tons of praise for my hard work. Instead, I got very harsh but fully constructive criticism, which I did not take very well to at the time. What? I was 13. I was a child. It was impressive enough that I was able to create ANYTHING, let alone an RPG. Nevertheless, ZGF defiantly deserved a 1/10 for it's laughably bad quality, multitude of glitches, overall bad and amateur design, unbelievably bad and childish writing quality, poor balance, and other such factors. The only praise it's got was for it's "charm", aka it's "so bad it's good" and "a little kid definitely made this aw so adorable" qualities. Me, an immature 13yo with a massive ego, insecurities regarding my masculinity, and severe lack of self awareness, took my game being called "adorably terrible" as a grave insult to me as a person, and had an entire multi-week long temper tantrum over getting negative reviews. Honestly one of my lowest points on that site imo, something my reputation never really recovered from.
While ZGF was getting slammed by makers who actually knew what they were doing, I was actually making a sequel to ZGF. Originally called merely "Zero Gear Fighters 2", I renamed it in development to "Dragon Ascension" to disconnect it to Zero Gear Fighters and removed all details of it being a sequel despite the game obviously being one. Dragon Ascension was also pretty notably bad with damage sponge bosses and a broken class system, but something was changing. With every game made, with every failure, I was becoming better and better at making games. Not only in design, but also in writing quality, creativity, art, and gameplay. I was evolving.
Dragon Ascension's development didn't end smoothly. I never ended up finishing development the game, and took a long hard break from RPG Maker for 2 to 3 years, both due to my depression and due to being burnt out in RPGs in general, but that's a whole other story for another time. (My Complicated Relationship with Xenoblade Chronicles 2, movie coming soon to YouTube) When I came back to the RPG Maker community for good in 2019 after multiple failed attempts to get back into gammak such as the doomed "Draco Anima Origins" game and various event games on RMN, the RM scene had drastically changed. MZ, a very contraverisal engine, was on the verge of releasing. Yanfly, the biggest RM plugin developer, had quit out of sheer spite after one Russian scumbag stole and illegally resold his plugins, paywalling all his plugins when they were previously free and started attacking the community viciously. The dreaded plugingate, though thankfully that's all calmed down and Yanfly's new team, visustella, is on good terms with the community now, I think.
But due to Yanfly's actions combined with multiple other factors such as RMN shutting down, the quitting of the majority of the old guard (Yanfly, Galv, SRD, Echo, etc), stricter rules in the community over rips and piracy, and the shift from paid content (plugins, assets, music, games themselves, etc) being heavily looked down upon to being outright expected, and the "professionalization" of RPG Maker, the engine and it's community were changed forever, and maybe not nessessarily for the better. 2019 was the beginning of this transistion for the RM community, and it wasn't the only transition happening. Also at this exact same time, I myself was breaking down. Short answer: gender dysphoria baby! Long answer? Let's just say that I was in denial of my true self for quite a long time after initially questioning my gender after discovering genderbend fetish content on DeviantArt in 2017 or 2018 or so, and used hatred and bigotry to cope, being led down dark places by the people I hanged out with online and the videos I happened to watch. "SJW" this, "woke" that. If you didn't realize already, I'm talking about the alt-right pipeline, and I nearly fell head first into it. Using hatred and conspiracy to cope with my own self-loathing and dysphoria. Not healthy. My own breakdown due to my long-standing insecurities and delinquency at school as well as the total breakdown and cultural restructuring in the RPG Maker community caused everything to fall apart, in my life both in reality, and online.
But then, in the endless darkness, there was hope. A woman reached out to me, a woman of light. I cannot name her due to privacy concerns, but let's just call her... "the lorekeeper."
Early on in 11th grade, I was expelled from my high school due to repeated poor behavior skipping class, running away from school multiple times, deception, general rudeness, and other disorderly conduct. Before I got expelled I had detention every day, partially because my teachers were total authoritarian butts, and partially because I was just a bad kid. I got sent off to a school for kids with emotional issues, and honestly it was a HUGE help. Yeah, it completely ruined any chances of me making a single friend since my new school had like 25 total students and not a single one liked the same things as me, but I did make an adult friend. A shining light to give me hope, the lorekeeper.
She helped me work through my issues, helped me confront my inner darkness, my insecuries, my fear, my hatred. With her guiding hand, I broke free from the chains of hatred, and decided on my own to abandon the sons of hate and move forward down my own path. I faced my fears and began to explore my gender as the pandemic hit and we were all left locked inside. At long last, after many years, I finally discovered myself. I was actually a woman all along, repressed and confused all this time. Through breaking free from all that hurt, I was able to discover who I really was and who I really wanted to be. Who I was CREATED to be. And through that revelation came greater spiritual understanding, and through that understanding came a revelation. The Legend of Light, Zero Gear Fighters, Dragon Ascension, Draco Anima Origins, even earlier stories like Super [Redacted], Duper [Redacted]. the Adventures of Ninwalk and Aussie, Ninheys, and the Legend of Zinja, all led up to one revelation. One world, one sky, one beautiful new universe. A grand tapesty of space and time, a story to tell for all the ages, a tale so grand that it would transcend all that came before. A story everlasting, repeated over and over across the ages, echoing across all worlds, all made one through it's transcendance, this is...
As you can see, there is still a lot more to be done outside of just the work needed for the demo, and development will continue well into the following year before this game, Chroncles Meterofall, can see it's long awaited, final release as v3.1. Thank you for reading all of this if you made it this far. Can't wait to release my demo. See you all soon! Happy gammak!