work on JO1000 (there are no good acronyms for this game's name - this is what i've settled on for now) began on 10th February 2025. initially, the game was being made as a joke in RPG Maker XP; we realised soon that making a game proper would actually be fun and pivoted to doing that instead. the game continued development in XP for a while, with many graphics, pieces of audio and areas being created for the game in this state.
probably about 20-30 minutes of content had been made for the RPG Maker XP version over the course of 3 months when we concluded that switching over to RPG Maker MV would probably be worth the hassle to not have to deal with the incredibly outdated software that is RPG Maker XP. this switch began on the 17th of May. while this sounds like a good idea because it is a good idea, there's no way to directly port projects between XP and MV, meaning we'd have to rebuild everything from not-quite-but-almost the ground up.
going through this process makes you very aware of any issues with the existing content in the game and very much wanting to resolve those issues. some of the initial stuff we did really needed improving, particularly the game's opening. the original starting area was a one-screen desert that became a one-screen grassy mountain that became a one-screen spacey crystal area where you fought a clay version of Dry Baby from The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (with all of those areas mostly constructed with built-in RPGMXP assets). it then got replaced by a series of clay desert islands that also kind of sucked, despite our best efforts and worst blue banana PNGs. it's since been replaced again by a larger pink-purple desert area that looks way cooler but is still in progress. none of the other areas have seen changes quite so drastic, but a lot of them have had various minor improvements that have very much added up over time.
(original opening area vs. current opening area - clay desert islands not included at ernest's request)
there's another major downside in porting everything over from XP to MV. tiles in XP are 32x32, while tiles in MV are 48x48, meaning the original spritework could not be used. initially, we tried just stretching all the graphics to be 1.5x larger, but stretching such small tiles like so results in upscaled images that are either blurry messes or weird and blocky. the incredibly lengthy alternative is to instead manually redraw every single pixel art graphic... so for 3 months, that's what we've been doing. 48x48 tiles look so much better than 32x32 tiles, it's incredibly welcome to have these sprites look so much better, but going through it all is a time-consuming process. we're finally getting close to finishing it, thankfully, but there's still a little more to go.
(example comparison between original 32x32 sprite, original upscale and redone 48x48 sprite)
here's still some pretty major things we haven't done - the different maps haven't all been properly sequenced yet so the game is not fully playable, we've done very little work on the battle system, some cutscenes still need porting over, and at some point we'll need to start work on a trailer - but things are going well so far. devlog 2 soon. it will probably be formatted better and more detailed than this -ben
