I think most of you had been hearing about me brag about my H-game and how busy I was trying to work on it. I also mentioned how it is now all done and over, but I think the juicy details would fit well as the first (actual) entry. No, there wouldn’t be anything H about this particular entry, just my past experience with games and this dreadful site called newgrounds.com.
Ronin was not the first game that I made and posted to newgrounds.com. My first original big project was Dark Prophecy; that, having failed, I proceeded to do GunBlaze. Dark Prophecy failed because even though the gameplay was top notch, the graphics looks outdated and so I guess people didn’t want to invest the full whoopin 5 minutes to find out what the game actually is.
So I went ahead and make GunBlaze instead. That failed on the other side of the spectrum: it’s so graphically splashy that it lags on my own computer, so much that most people quit before the game finished loading.
Those two failures are devestating to me: all of these games consumed entire vacations and to have it go down in flames in 24 hours is just so depressing that I’d want to slit my wrist. So as the old saying goes “third time is a charm”, I took my time with Ronin, starting all the way back in the end of the Summer Vacation. My idea is that I need to combine good gameplay elements with good but not laggy graphics, I also need to satisfy hardcore gamers, people who don’t have a lot of time to play the game, and 13 year old sex deprived kids who browses newgrounds for porn. So I threw everything together and made Ronin – Spirit of the Sword.
My plan was perfect, I thought: The full RPG adventure mode is perfect for hardcore gamers who want a full gaming experience, complete with a Max Payne Noir style storyline and 3D dungeons (that has never been done in Flash before). For those with no time to spare, there’s the Arena mode, cutting out the dungeon crawling and throwing tons of enemies at the player to hack and slash. For the perverts, there’s the H elements that I threw into the game. I made it so that the H content can also be turned off, so people have no reason to complain if they don’t like the H elements.
Boy, newgrounds is a tough crowd to please.
The game was posted at around 2:00 pm on Friday, April 11. At the first 2 hours I recieve my first bug report and the rating was 3.88. Hence the patch rush begins: this is the time when people complain about things that you’d never imagine they’d try. So naturally you’d haphazardly go back to the source code, fix it, and post it as soon as possible, only to find more errors. By 5:00 pm, the majority of the bugs were fixed, but I had such a big nervous break-down that I’ve decided to say “f*ck it” and head over to Golfland to the better half of the night. By the time I went back it’s already past midnight and the daily poll is over.
I aimed my project to be NG front page material. For those of you who’s not familar with how newground works, everything that you submit goes to the portal – where your thing is listed along with about 150 other entries that’d join the portal in a day. Your thing gets judged by a crowd of about 150 people who’d play and review your game in the first hour… usually, if your thing is good enough in that first hour or so, you’d be able to make front page and have about 100,000 more people view your entry. Having failed that, the game only won Feature of the Day and by the time of its meaningful existance, it collected some 10K views and 1K vote.
The only reason I should feel bitter is that the front page at this time had some really horrible crap – things that just by rating would be far below a lot of other entries in the portal. They happen to be chosen just because it’s either 1) tribute to old 16/32 bit video games or 2) stupid things where you smash on Saddam’s face for 5 seconds. Of course, I did post onto the portal knowing that most things that are going on up there is pretty random, so I ended up not knowing if I should laugh or cry.
So it’s over now. If you still want to see all its (past) glory in the portal, you can still find it here at
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view.php?id=93066 . And don’t forget to turn Adult Mode off if you don’t want to catch yourself seeing some nasty hentai.