I have a history of letting small commitments snowball into massive undertakings. OH JOES! was a 2-month project that took 2 years. My YouTube playthroughs of the NES Mega Man games were a 3-week project that took 3 years. More recently, Make a Good 48 Hour Mega Man Level (MaG48MML for short) was a 2-day project that has lasted over 3 years and counting.

MaG48HMML (48H for short) was conceived as a shakedown cruise for Megamix Engine, the game engine that would be the basis for the larger and more involved Make a Good Mega Man Level 3 (MaGMML3 for short). The plan was to hold a small level design contest during the summer of 2018, get the levels judged quickly, and crank out a simple game showcasing those levels. When submissions for MaGMML3 opened in the fall, the judge feedback and technical improvements from 48H would help participants make better levels. I was already a judge and devteam member for MaGMML3; I had no time or intention to get involved with 48H beyond submitting a level.

However, those plans fell apart. 48H attracted more contestants than MaGMML1 and 2 combined, the levels took years to judge (well overshooting the submission period for MaGMML3), and the final game was hardly simple. I became massively involved: I wrote ~75% of the non-cutscene dialogue; designed a weapon tutorial and a section of the fortress; provided extensive playtesting and proofreading; fixed (or attempted to fix) numerous glitches; made corrections or modifications to several art assets; programmed more things than I thought I was capable of, including what is arguably the biggest Easter egg of the game; conceived or helped plan countless major and minor aspects of the game; wrote copy, edited judge bios, commissioned artwork, and hosted downloads for the website; and helped revive the project when it was nearly dead—twice.

Also, I submitted a level.

Several weeks before the contest opened, I discovered that I had been added to the 48H devteam chat on Discord. I hadn't requested a devteam role, no one had asked me whether I was interested, and I knew basically nothing about the project. I didn't even have an official role; "any help you wanna offer would be appreciated" was the direction I got. I now appreciate what it's like to be a summoned monster in a Final Fantasy game. As long as I didn't have to do anything, I had no problem being on the devteam to discuss ideas. I spent enough time on Discord already; what difference would one more channel make?

The rapid-fire conversations that transpired over the next month were riotously funny, and they shaped the foundation of the game. Almost nothing had been planned at that point, aside from the premise of giving contestants mystery boxes full of randomized assets with which to build a level in 48 hours, and we had a field day shouting out ridiculous ideas that somehow stuck. Of course, several ideas didn't stick (aimable Spark Shock, a Wily Assist weapon that shoots out a flustered-looking Dr. Wily at a 90-degree angle, GIANT CARDBOARD BOX WILY MACHINE - FOR PHASE 2 HE UNFOLDS IT), but the ones that did stick were agreed upon quickly and amicably.

Mega Man wins a free cruise, but it's secretly a distraction so Dr. Wily can do evil deeds without Mega Man coming after him! (Unanimous agreement.) Let's name the ship the Elroy, after MaGMML community member Cruise Elroy! (Unanimous agreement.) Actually, forget Wily; the villain should be box-themed! (Dissenting suggestions of Crystal Man from Mega Man 5 embezzling money from Wily, then Clock Men from Challenger From the Future, then these characters as part of a series of fakeouts leading to the real villain). The single absolute worst level should be on some dingy old raft floating behind the cruise liner, circled by sharks! (This elicited a "lmao".) Even in their rawest state, our ideas weren't too far off from their final form.

Before long, we started discussing the contest rules. As a judge for MaGMML3, a soon-to-be contestant for 48H, and a professional editor, I felt a strong obligation to ensure the rules were as clear and comprehensive as possible. I volunteered to copyedit the rules document, which soon turned into me taking the lead on incorporating feedback and finalizing the rules. Once that was squared away, the contest opened and I got to work on my level. Regrettably, I forgot to pencil in a rule mandating that I win the contest, but that's hindsight for you.

To make the most of my 48 hours, I requested my mystery box on a Friday night after dinner. I had nothing planned for the weekend, I was in good health and good spirits, and I had a few friends on standby for playtesting. Conditions were perfect. My plan was to stick with the first box I was given (unless it was utterly unusable), wait to see what I got before starting work on the level (I felt like planning the architecture and aesthetics in advance was against the spirit of the contest), and craft a "normal" level that might feel at home in an official Mega Man game (not too long, not too wacky).

It was more like a 30-hour level, really. I slept at least 6 hours a night, lost 20-30 minutes every time I compiled a test build, was waylaid by a series of asset issues (eg, monkeys falling through floors) that required devteam intervention, and spent entirely too long futzing with a laser gimmick that was long on possibilities and short on documentation. I also didn't count on how long I'd spend trying to get Rain Flush to block lasers (to no avail); getting the volume balance and loop point right on the music; and fine-tuning so many precision-oriented puzzles that were fine on paper but messy in practice, due to the nature of the assets involved. Fortunately, the nature-themed enemies and military-themed gimmicks made it easy to decide on an overall visual theme; and it took no time at all to pick Dyna Man as the boss, given how well his vaguely military aesthetic, incessant hopping, and use of explosives fit with the rest of the level.

There's plenty more I could say here, but in light of everything else, my participation as a contestant is almost insignificant. Those 48 hours were fun and memorable for me, and I'm proud of what I accomplished in that time, but my level is 3 minutes of entertainment in a game that takes upward of 20 hours to complete. My level came in 18th place, neither anyone's favorite nor anyone's least favorite, not sufficiently noteworthy or contentious for people to ever bring it up in conversation—except to comment on the music. The real legacy of "Base in the Boondocks" is bringing "Portrait of a Ghost Ship" from Castlevania: Rondo of Blood to the 48H jukebox and inspiring one question for the music trivia sidequest.

After submitting my level, I stuck around the Discord server for another 8 months. I provided advice and playtesting for other entrants during the rest of the entry period, and I continued to weigh in on devteam matters, but planning discussions soon began to taper off. By the end of March 2019, I was so busy judging for MaGMML3 and so little was happening with 48H that I decided to leave the server, with a standing offer to return if anyone ever needed me for anything specific.

Ten months later, I reached out to ParmaJon, the contest host, to see if I could help out with anything for 48H—hub design, NPC dialogue, etc. I was nearly finished with judging for MaGMML3, so I figured I could spare some time to help push 48H along to the finish line. The answer was yes, so I rejoined the server and started skimming through devchat to get caught up.

48H was in almost exactly the same place I had left it.

Granted, one judge had almost finished judging, and another was relatively close behind. Planning had begun on the weapon tutorials, some important technical stuff had happened with the game engine, the map function was being developed, and a couple tier hubs were in the preliminary stage of design. There had been some changes to the composition of the devteam, too. But we're talking about a game whose main content was thrown together 18 months ago in the span of two days, and we still didn't have screenshots to put on the website. From the perspective of anyone on the outside, 48H was dead in the water.

Perhaps more accurately, 48H was rudderless and functioning with a skeleton crew. ParmaJon was a judge as well as the contest host, and judging was drawing focus from leading the project. Any planning that had been done was scattered across multiple Discord conversations and Google Docs. Several devteam members were simultaneously working on MaGMML: Episode Zero, which was nearing completion, and/or MaGMML3, which was still very much in progress. In short, hardly anyone was available to work on the game, and hardly anyone knew what to work on in the first place.

With ParmaJon's blessing, I started developing a master design document, pulling together everything that had already been planned or discussed and filling in any gaps with my own suggestions. (I've saved a copy here, if you're interested.) I also suggested that we designate someone to make day-to-day decisions in ParmaJon's stead. It took two weeks for us to iron out the design document and less than a day to get CSketch on board as game design lead.

Suddenly, 48H was back on course. Devchat was more active than it had been since the contest closed, and the project felt exciting and relevant again. Although a few of my favorite ideas from the design document didn't make it into the final game (namely, Mega Man's cabin being like the Sky Room from Command Mission, and BomBoy from the Battle Network games running a mystery box shop), I wasn't precious about my suggestions. The purpose of the design document was to organize past discussions, spark new discussions, and give us concrete tasks to work on, and that's exactly what it did.

Around that same time, I got a copy of the judge EXE and played through all the entry levels. If I was going to be involved in planning the game, it behooved me to know what the bulk of the game was going to be like.

It was going to be terrible.

In their submitted state, without Skip Teleporters or Beat or anything else that the final game offers to mitigate the difficulty, the entry levels were torturous. I could count on two, maybe three hands the number of levels I genuinely enjoyed. 48H's tight time limit amplified some of the pitfalls of amateur (and even professional) level design that annoy me most, and it didn't help that I was already pretty burned out on Mega Man after judging 170-odd levels for MaGMML3. Consequently, I was very vocal in devchat about introducing features that would sand off the rough edges and balance the difficulty of the entry levels.

One such feature, which we were already working on, was a series of weapon tutorials. What better way to give players an advantage than to help them fully understand the tools at their disposal? I called dibs on the tutorial for Homing Sniper—I had some ideas about how to elevate the training to something more than "mash the attack button to win"—and I made it a point to playtest all of the other tutorials as well. Aside from participating in all the usual devteam discussions (which now concerned the Box Cartel fights, possible postgame content, and whether to let players unlock extra checkpoints), my focus was entirely on the weapon tutorials during this period; everything else seemed to be under control and moving smoothly.

Once again, I decided to hang around the server for about 8 months (until mid-October 2020) before taking my leave. All the weapon tutorials were finished or just required finishing touches, and there wasn't really anything else I could help with. I was trying to cut back on Discord use and focus back on MaGMML3 as well. As before, I left an open invitation to call me back to the devteam if I could help with anything else in the future.

When I checked in with ParmaJon and CSketch a month later, it sounded like the game was almost finished, aside from judging. The devteam really only needed help with graphics and programming—two things that were best left to the experts. The only thing left that suited my skill set was NPC dialogue. It was still too early to start writing anything, but I could at least do some prep work.

Knowing that most of the NPCs were going to be regular stage enemies, I set up a sprawling spreadsheet so we could keep track of which NPCs were available, where in the game we wanted to put them, whether we needed to create custom sprites for them, and any notes or suggestions. By the time I was done trawling through the enemy/miniboss lists of every Mega Man game we were likely to pull from, there were well over 500 NPCs on the list, not to mention Duo, Reggae, and several other named characters who might show up. I even included Daidine, a spinning platform from Mega Man 5, because "The fact that this spinning platform has an actual name makes me want it to be able to talk".

Another month went by before I formally rejoined the team—not to write NPC dialogue, but to help design a section of the fortress at the end of the game. It's MaGMML tradition for each judge to make their own fortress level, but only ParmaJon was in a position to do so, and in a limited capacity at that. It fell to CSketch to design the first fortress level and co-design the second with ParmaJon. The third and final level was an independently collaborative effort involving the entire devteam, meaning that we all got to create our segments in isolation before smashing them together.

To start creating our segments, we selected one of the unused mystery boxes from the entry period—I picked mine at random from the master spreadsheet, but others chose the specific one they wanted. As development progressed, I started noticing a fair amount of overlap in the assets we all were using for our segments. In the interest of showcasing a wider variety of assets (and giving players a reprieve from too many segments where they were required to shoot the terrain), I set up a spreadsheet so we could keep track of our progress and which assets were used in which segments. I threw out my box and rerolled until I got something novel that I could work with.

First reroll: "Your choice of a destructible block". Pfft. I was trying to avoid shooting the terrain. Next.

Second reroll: Venus Waterfall Spawner. Ah yes. The janky gimmick that had become a running joke, on account of it showing up in an alarmingly high number of boxes and being the bane of the programmers' existence. NEXT.

Third reroll: Wave Man Jet Ski, Cricket, Bikky Bomb, Tamp, Nombrellan. I could work with this. And so I did.

Development of our so-called Final Box levels was slow but steady. I provided as much feedback on everyone else's levels as possible, going so far as to fire up Mega Man V for Game Boy and thoroughly examine the physics of the bubble floor gimmick, which was implemented differently in Megamix and causing playability issues. By the beginning of February 2021, my Final Box level was finalized. Two months later, I hadn't started any new projects, and I was having second thoughts about sticking around for that other thing I had offered to do.

"If we need dialogue for any of the weapon tutorials, I can help with that," I wrote. "If we reeeeeally need help with other NPC dialogue, I'll consider it, but I had previously mentioned the possibility of un-volunteering myself if we had enough people to cover everything. I'm not as confident in my ability to write snappy dialogue for random NPCs, and it's been very challenging lately to work up the energy to get back to my creative projects. But if it's the difference between the game launching on time and the game dragging on even longer, I can give it a shot."

After a little bit of discussion with the devteam and with my wife, I was persuaded to try my hand at NPC dialogue after all. Nothing had been written outside of the weapon tutorials, so I had my pick of every tier in the game. I started with Tier 5, the minigolf course—I enjoy minigolf and had been watching a lot of Holey Moley at the time, so that was the natural first choice. It took me all of four days to pick out and arrange the NPCs, write dialogue for them, and implement their sprites.

A little over a week later, I was ready to mute the 48H server and get back to working on MaGMML3 unless someone pinged me for something. Any last requests before I disappear again? Well...okay. I guess I can write a little more dialogue.

I gave the devteam a few options and let them decide which tier I should do next. They chose Tier 3, the dining hall, which was perfect because I love talking about food. This one took longer—slightly under a month—in part because I got a little more ambitious and asked for both programming help (for the Hologran gag) and custom NPC sprites for a few enemies from Mega Man 7 and 11 who needed to be redrawn in an 8-bit style.

Afterward, I announced that I had it in me to do one more tier. I went with Tier 9, the ice skating rink. I love ice and snow aesthetics; figure skating is one of my favorite sports to watch; and I thought it'd be good to break up my tier claims so that if someone didn't like my writing style, they weren't stuck with me for multiple tiers in a row. I started work toward the end of May but didn't finish until early July, due to life craziness and some unexpected graphical and programming needs.

As my work on Tier 9 was nearing completion, I realized I had finally hit my writing stride. I could probably manage one more tier, if not a few more tiers; despite how exhausted I was from multiple multi-year Mega Man projects, I was having fun. However, I wanted to balance "helping finish the game" with "hogging all the fun stuff," so I asked the devteam about who else actually had an inclination to write NPC dialogue. Half a dozen people were interested, but burnout and busyness were very apparent. Spade_Magnes was working on Tier 6 (ballroom) and had finished Tier 2 (cargo hold) after picking it up from snoruntpyro. The main deck and passenger cabins were at least partially reserved for CSketch and snoruntpyro. Otherwise, everything was up for grabs, and it really didn't matter who took what. We all just wanted to get the game out the door.

Spin Attaxx claimed Tier 10 (water park), and I put Tier 8 (library) and Tier 4 (engine room) in the queue for myself. My plan was to keep churning out NPCs until we ran out of tiers or someone told me to stop, whichever happened first. Tier 8 took me only three or four days, and I knocked out Tier 4 in a single weekend. I was bolstered by positive feedback from the team; they seemed to like what I was doing with the NPCs, and any critiques were basically always constructive and beneficial. This part of development was easily my favorite: the project had a sense of momentum; I was fully in my comfort zone; and I felt good about what I was doing, because of both personal satisfaction with my work and recognition from the devteam.

My next claim was Tier 1 (lifeboats), which was a one-day project. As with all the tiers, however, I would go back later to finesse the placement and creation code of the NPCs and polish the dialogue. Tier 1 was attached to the main hub, which was being updated frequently for one reason or another, so I had to make sure no one else was working on that Room file in GameMaker Studio when I was. The last thing I wanted was having my local changes overwritten in a dreaded merge conflict when pushing my work back to the master file, so I suggested we implement a system where anyone who wanted to work on the main hub had to announce it first, in case anyone had unpushed changes. This system mostly worked.

Now that I was mucking about in the main hub, I started thinking about what players' first impressions of 48H would be. After the intro cutscene, you step onto the deck of a gigantic cruise ship and have free reign to explore. Where do you start? Is the ship easy to navigate? What areas might you overlook? Player experience had already been on my mind (see: the Giant Telly in Tier 3 who checks in on your emotional state after playing "Megatroid", the Puyoyon in Tier 4 who subtly reminds you to visit the costume shop on your way out, all the NPCs in Tier 1 who try to prepare you for the disasters you're about to deal with), but this is where I started taking on focused projects to make the game more player-friendly.

We had discussed adding some info-oriented NPCs, so I created Iota to explain what 48H was all about, a Jamacy in Tier 2 to warn players about a level with broken ladders, and multiple NPCs to guide players around the ship. I created a Junk Golem NPC to provide hints about where to find new sidequests and how to complete them. To make the main deck less overwhelming to new players, I followed through on a plan to lock some of the cabin doors until later in the game.

Because ParmaJon didn't want a traditional shop, players needed ways to stock up on E/W/M-Tanks that didn't involve grinding in the entry levels. I added an emergency M-Tank dispenser to ensure players wouldn't get stuck on the Box Cartel fights, when the entry levels are blocked off. I also created a Mad Grinder who would supply free E-Tanks and W-Tanks based on sidequest progress and Energy Element collection, respectively. It's all too easy to chug E-Tanks instead of applying actual strategy, so I wanted to encourage players to try special weapons, pursue sidequests (and their rewards), and not get hung up on any one level in the early game, and then to shower them with tanks in time for the endgame and postgame.

Furthermore, I suggested we reinforce Joseph's explanation of Junk by stationing an NPC outside his cabin who would give you Junk to trade in. I also argued strongly against starting the game with a mandatory scavenger hunt to find Beat before accessing the levels; to me, that felt like a contrived and needlessly restrictive way of ensuring players would explore the ship and obtain a special weapon that the levels weren't designed around. Although I was overruled both times, I found other ways to influence the player experience. For the Beat search in particular, I moved the invisible barriers to more organic locations, and I revised the generic "I shouldn't go that way" message to a fairly blunt reminder/hint about what you should be doing.

I was more successful about suggesting changes to the sidequests, which were being developed relatively quietly—I didn't know they existed until May 2021, and there weren't any real opportunities to get involved with them until July. After I tried out the music quiz for Funky Fresh Beats, I pushed to include a screenshot with each question, to make the sidequest accessible to deaf players and to anyone playing with the volume off. Because screenshots were too much of a hassle to implement, we agreed on text hints, which I wrote. I also made a few suggestions that stuck for the Mutual Attraction and Poltergeist quests; for the latter, I even recolored the ghost sprite (being obligated to use a canonical color for the Rotom Pokémon it was based on) so that it wouldn't blend in with the background as much.

Love Survivor was the sidequest I influenced most. For a very long time, the cruise ship was going to have a casino, either as the location for Tier 7 or as a standalone area (in the space that the Kickboxing Club now occupies) with minigames to play. The original premise for sidequest, then dubbed "Red or Yellow", was to help fashion boutique co-proprietor Bol'o raise money to pay off an enormous debt to a mafioso called Don Loath (a tip of the hat to Lex Loath from The Misadventures of Tron Bonne). Doing so would require cheating at a casino game where the objective was to guess whether a light would turn red or yellow (an inside joke apparently inspired by a Vinesauce video poking fun at a game called Color Fun).

The casino was scrapped in January 2021 to reduce the devteam's workload, and it was several months before we discussed relocating and redesigning the sidequest. Tier 3 (dining hall) had some unused space that was inaccessible to the player, which could easily be remodeled to accommodate a quest. This inspired me to outline a new quest, which made it into the final game with only one change: Don Loath (who never even received a character design) became Master Reddorgold (whose name is not a reference to "Reddit Gold", but rather a nod to the sidequest's original title). A kitchen stealth mission wasn't my only suggestion, though; I also pitched a Donkey Kong Country–inspired level using dining carts in place of mine carts.

A week later, I formally committed to writing all remaining NPC dialogue in the game. I was the only person adding to the main hub, several passenger cabins were still vacant with nothing planned, and nobody else had claimed Tier 7 (art gallery) or Tier 11 (sky deck). I was least enthusiastic about Tier 7 and had been hoping someone else would take it, though. The tileset contained sculptures and paintings (by eviemaybe and Protty) that I wanted to acknowledge in the dialogue—except half of them referenced things I didn't recognize, and by that point it was taking all my brainpower to write what I knew, let alone what I didn't know. And there was a major deadline approaching: first test build of the whole game for our internal playtesters.

I had about one week to power through Tier 7 and add as many NPCs as possible to the main hub and cabins. Nothing said I had to rush, but the longer it took me to get my work loaded into a test build, the less likely it was that people would see it. This was especially relevant for the deck and cabin NPCs whose purpose was to guide the player. Tier 11 was still in the process of being tiled, so I didn't even bother with that one yet. I'm not entirely satisfied with the dialogue I produced during this time, but "not entirely satisfied" was to become my mantra for the duration of the crunch leading up to the game's initial public release.

By the beginning of August 2021, new playtesting builds were being released about once or twice a week (soon to become once a day), a release trailer was in development, and I was rapidly running out of time to finish everything on my to-do list. The team wanted to ensure a summer release, given the cruise ship theme. Summer, as I pointed out, would last until September 22. They wanted it by the end of August—when I would be unavailable for several days. Eventually we settled on end of August as our internal deadline, with a few days of buffer before the release date of September 4 that was ultimately announced to the public.

My eagerness to get this project out the door had finally caught up with me. Leading up to the crunch, I kept taking on small assignments to ease the burden of more specialized team members. The artists were busy, so I cleaned up the subtle color inconsistencies between the special weapon icons, and then loaded them into a tileset so I could add them above the weapon tutorial teleporters. The programmers were busy, so as much as possible, I tried to figure out how to code complex NPC behavior for myself. I was already spending all my free time on 48H before the deadline was announced; the only way I could crunch any harder was to start sacrificing sleep, aspirations, and quality—and I won't even go into the Big Life Stuff that started vying for my time. The weeks leading up to release were physically, mentally, and emotionally brutal, and they turned my experience with 48H extremely sour.

My key mistake was not communicating to the team just how much I actually had planned for the initial release. I wanted to bring my perspectives as a professional editor, MaGMML3 judge, and fangame designer to the parts of the game I hadn't yet seen. I kept coming back to seemingly finished projects to polish things up and incorporate playtester feedback. I was still working on NPCs for the main hub and cabins, but because I had added any NPCs in the first place, people assumed I was done already. I hadn't even started on Tier 11, which would end up taking over two weeks to finish. And that's to say nothing of all the Easter eggs I was working on, or the Butt Mode cheat that I got involved with at the last minute.

As we entered September, mere days away from release, show-stopping technical issues began to arise. A key devteam member's computer died at an incredibly inopportune time. We kept discovering game-breaking issues and applying fixes that we didn't have time to properly playtest. The only person who could set up the online leaderboards on our usual server was unexpectedly unavailable. On top of that, a couple sidequests and noteworthy cheats were still being developed, and I still had a lengthy to-do list. No way was this game getting done on time.

By September 1, the devteam was discussing the possibility of delaying the release. By September 3—late enough in the day that it was already release day in certain time zones—we came to an agreement that a delay was necessary; the question was, how long? A few devteam members—myself included—voted for "until it's ready", but the final decision was to not keep the public waiting, saving any nonessentials (which included most of my to-do list) for an eventual patch. Release was pushed from September 4 to September 6, just long enough to lock down the most pressing technical issues.

As the guy in charge of the MaGMML website, I did as much as I could to prepare in advance for release day, such as gradually adding screenshots to what would become the download page. As soon as the judge scores were finalized, I commissioned Phusion—who did website art for MaGMML1, 2, and 24H as well as intro cutscene art for OH JOES! and MaGMML1 Remastered—to once again create art celebrating the first-place level for the download page. Once the story was fully locked down and we knew exactly what features the game would have, I wrote copy for the download page for the devteam to review. By release day, all we really needed were download links and one final sanity check before going live.

Release day was hectic and exhausting, owing to miscellaneous setbacks and delays. After the download page went live, I waited just long enough to confirm that there were no immediate issues with the download links or the game itself, and then I dropped off the face of the planet for the rest of the day. While other devteam members were celebrating, I was taking all the time I could to decompress and recharge before getting back to work. For me, the crunch wasn't over.

Given the general public's tendency to quickly find ways to break a brand-new game, I correctly guessed that we'd need to release a patch to 1.01 almost immediately, and then another small patch to 1.02 within a few days. If I acted quickly enough, anything I had planned for initial release could still be a part of people's first experiences with the game. After that, there was no telling how often we'd release additional patches, if at all, so it behooved me to get everything done ASAP.

While I labored away at the rest of my to-do list, I checked in regularly to see what people in the MaGMML Discord server were saying about 48H. Compared with the initial public response to OH JOES!, it was a joy to discover that all my time and effort had apparently paid off. People were sharing screenshots of NPCs I made that they liked, posting video playthroughs containing positive feedback about my design contributions, and talking favorably about the game as a whole...at least, until they started discovering the sidequests.

"Where is Tomothy Daddy?" "What other level is spicy?" These kinds of questions started dominating the chat, and I had no idea what they meant. When I wrote the Junk Golem's sidequest hints, I often had to go off of secondhand information from the devteam and an outdated sidequest planning document; I had yet to play many of the quests for myself. A few days after release, I started playing through all 16 sidequests, and suddenly my priorities shifted. After playing Credit Where It's Due, a tricky scavenger hunt, it was clear to me that players needed more hints, better hints, and reminders of critical information that was given once and never repeated—and they needed them now.

Unbeknownst to me, the day I played Credit Where It's Due was the same day version 1.02 was slated to be released. After outlining my proposed changes to the devteam, I scrambled to implement them—the team wasn't expecting to address any scavenger hunt complaints until version 1.1, but they were happy to include my edits in this patch if I could finish in the next hour or two. The dialogue that I hammered out is serviceable, but there's minimal personality and no humor to it. The patch went live shortly after I pushed my changes, and I haven't heard a single question about Tomothy Daddy since.

Most of the team basically went on break after version 1.02. I kept crunching. I devoted almost every free minute of an entire weekend to Goody Two Shoes, a riddle-based scavenger hunt, first playing through it (which was exhausting) and then planning and implementing a complex network of hints and reminders about where to go next (which was beyond exhausting). I had to dig into the code to understand how each step of the quest was triggered, figure out which NPCs would supply hints, write appropriate hints for each step, program the hints to only show up at the right time, and then test all of that. I also tidied the existing dialogue for the quest and fixed up the black splotches that lead you to your destination—in "Running Down a Drain", for example, the trail inexplicably went cold for several screens, as though you overshot the target.

I pushed my changes on September 19, just over a week after 1.02 was released. Although I loosened my pace a little bit, I stayed focused on getting through the rest of my to-do list as fast as reasonably possible. I scrapped a few ideas that I was now too tired to bother with, touched up the weapon tutorials, added new NPCs and tinkered with old ones, implemented cabin numbers to help players navigate the main hub, and refined/expanded the Butt Mode script.

The farther we got from the release of 1.02, the more the 48H devteam server felt like a ghost ship. People were burned out, busy with other things, or no longer checking in because their obligations to the project had been fulfilled. A few others were working on updates alongside me, but by the end of November, it started to feel like the project was adrift again. I prodded CSketch for a time frame until the next patch, and that set into motion a flurry of activity, which ultimately led to me taking the lead on a couple rounds of targeted playtesting and getting the updated game ready for public release. Version 1.1 went live on December 18, 2021—which means we had been sitting on my changes to Goody Two Shoes for three months. I haven't heard a single question about any of the riddles since.

If you look back through my social media posts, you'll notice I didn't promote 48H until version 1.1 was released. As far as I'm concerned, 48H wasn't done until 1.1. I wasn't about to encourage the general public to play a game I was still actively helping to develop and beta test. It bothers me deeply that most people have experienced a version that was rushed and incomplete, and that the earliest iterations are the ones immortalized for future generations on YouTube and Twitch.

Now, though? I recommend 48H whenever there's an opportunity. I'm proud to share this game with others. I'm proud of the entire devteam for making this game happen in the first place, let alone making it look so professional and polished; proud of myself for the quantity, variety, and quality of work I contributed; and proud of my fellow entrants for pulling off over a hundred MaGMML-worthy levels within (or just barely over) the 48-hour time limit, even if I'm prone to complaining about them. I enjoy seeing people enjoy 48H.

As of this post, devteam discussions are infrequent and rarely pertain to the game itself, chatter about the game seems to have died down on Discord and YouTube, and bug reports have all but ceased. Effectively, this ship has sailed. Of course, no game is ever truly done, least of all one that can easily be patched. In fact, a modest number of changes have already been pushed to the GitHub repository in anticipation of another patch. I have one or two more Developer Diaries to follow this one, some updates I might like to add to the MaGMML wiki, and plans to start livestreaming the game once I can commit to a semi-regular streaming schedule. It's been a long voyage, and I expect it'll be awhile longer before I return to shore.

I haven't been on social media much lately, so here's a status report for all the projects I have going:

1. OH JOES! is receiving a major update. I've added or am in the process of adding 9 new game modes, 14 Achievements, quality-of-life improvements (eg, an option for Quick Lasers to have a warmup animation before firing), an Italian translation, and more. This will probably be my last update to the game (notwithstanding any necessary functionality patches), so I'm making it a point to include everything I wanted to have as part of the initial release but got too burned out to implement. Thank you to everyone who's written words of encouragement and rekindled my enthusiasm for this project.

2. I'm updating this website on a relatively frequent basis. I've been chipping away at various Series Opinions, and I finally added a link to my Mega Man Fangame Tracker under the Games section. Once the aforementioned OH JOES! update is released, I'll post the next developer diary I've been working on, which should be considerably happier than the last one.

3. I'm still working on my Mega Man 8 playthrough for YouTube, I swear. It's hard to work up the motivation to play one of my least-favorite games in the series, let alone replay the same half a stage over and over without any guarantee I'll get decent footage. I'll devote more time to this as my fangame commitments disappear. In the meantime, you can track my progress by looking at the banner image I'm using on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

4. I'm designing a handful of screens for a unique trio of fan-made Mega Man relay levels, where each designer makes a few screens and passes the level along to the next designer to continue the challenges. This is a very small commitment that will only occupy a few evenings total. No release date yet, but probably sometime in the next couple months. (If you'd like to participate, we could use more designers! Click here to join the Discord server.)

5. No further livestreams are planned for the foreseeable future. I do plan to get back to streaming eventually, and I may stream on a whim (like I did recently with a dash-free run of Mega Man X), but my Twitch channel is officially dormant for the time being. I need some time away from actively performing in front of an audience, and I want to direct my attention to projects with a clear endpoint.

6. I'm a judge and on the development team for Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest 3. I will also be designing a judge level and likely making other contributions to the game. I expect this project will consume most of my free time in December, January, probably February, and possibly March. However, after this is all over, I intend to step away from developing Mega Man fangames and refocus on recording. It's been fun to be so active in the fan community and create content based on my favorite video game franchise, but I have a fanbase of my own that's been starved for new videos these last three years.

7. I am a contributor to the Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest website and have been tidying up (read: overediting) the existing pages and adding new pages. There's a little bit more I'd like to do, but nothing I have to do; this might take up a couple more evenings across the next several months.

8. In an effort to complete my playlist of music from OH JOES!, CosmicGem has given me permission to upload videos of his compositions for the game. I just need to take 10 minutes to slap together a background image and make the videos.

9. This has been on the backburner for an outrageously long time, but some diligent fans have added closed captioning to some of my YouTube videos, and I just need to review them. As a professional copy editor, I want to make sure the captions are as accurate and tidy as possible—which means this is essentially an extension of what I do at work all day, hence why it takes me so long to get around to it in my spare time. However, I'm most grateful that people are willing to put in the effort to write accurate captions, sparing my viewers from the inappropriate and nonsensical absurdities of Transcribe Audio.

On top of all this, I've got a normal life to lead—keeping up with boring adult stuff such as housework and bills; spending time with friends, family, and my wife; taking time to relax with books, movies, and video games; and so forth. I'm assuming that all counts as "normal." I'm prioritizing my side projects as much and as often as I can, but there's only so much time in a year, and only so much energy in a day. But thanks for sticking with me as I try to do it all.

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Two years. That's how much of my life I devoted to nurturing OH JOES! from some goofy level concept into a full-blown game with original cutscene artwork, an original soundtrack, ​58 randomized disclaimers for the startup screen, 500 words of dialogue, 1500 words of game over hints, multiple language options, multiple paths, multiple difficulties, multiple playable characters, and plenty of Easter eggs. I participated in every aspect of development—planning, spriting, programming, level design and decoration, music composition, writing, translating, and playtesting—learning any necessary skills along the way, including skills that hardly come naturally. Overcoming my aversion to collaboration, I coordinated with 34 people to make the game better than it ever would have been as a solo project. To me, OH JOES! isn't just another Mega Man fangame; it's a remarkable accomplishment that pushed me out of my comfort zone and helped define an entire chapter of my life.

At first, the game was a fun distraction, something I worked on a few times a week for a couple of hours at a clip. After a year, it was a pleasant obsession, consuming as much of my free time as my sanity (and my wife, friends, and family) would permit. By the last few months, OH JOES! was more of a burden than a joy, an obstacle between me and how I wanted to be spending my life, but I was committed to doing it right.

The good days, of which there were many, were the ones in which I conquered some programming problem myself, designed some challenges I felt good about, had productive interactions with the other people involved in the project, incorporated lots of playtester feedback, or finalized basically anything (menu screens and sprites were especially gratifying). I took it as a very positive sign that I frequently found myself humming the soundtrack, and that I didn't get sick of fighting Joes until the last few months—which, considering the impetus for the project, is rather astonishing. When I posted updates on social media, I could rely on at least a few (if not several) supportive responses to validate my work and keep me excited about continuing.

The mediocre days, of which there were many more, were the ones spent troubleshooting technical issues that didn't make any sense, coming up with creative new ways to use and combine gimmicks I'd grown tired of using, reworking challenges that playtesters disliked without articulating exactly what was wrong, reorganizing menu screens, finessing level graphics, implementing and testing the translations (especially French and German; Spanish I could confirm without too much cross-checking), ​or endlessly adjusting line breaks in the text. These days were productive, but they felt more like work than fun.

The bad days, which became more frequent the longer the project dragged on, made me angry. These were the days where I fruitlessly attempted to solve programming problems above my pay grade. These were the days where a playtester made a reasonable and compelling case to overhaul something that had been completely fine and final for months. These were the days where I sacrificed all my free time to work on this game, for the sake of a release deadline that was always "next month" no matter how much I worked. I took a week of vacation in the summer of 2017, and about the only thing I remember is being glued to my computer for 10+ hours a day in a futile attempt to finish the game that month.

When I set the official release date, I was in a weird place. My need to retake control of my life finally outweighed my desire for the game to be as polished as possible upon release. I knew there were glitches to fix, challenges to playtest more thoroughly, details to streamline, and features to add, but all the most important stuff was in place and reasonably solid. I was happy with it. The game was playable from start to finish. The majority of playtesters enjoyed the game. OH JOES! was more release-worthy than many other fangames I'd played. It was time to hand the game over to the largest group of playtesters yet, take a break, and come back fresh when there was a consensus about what I should focus on for the next update.

The plan for OH JOES! was a soft launch, announcing the game on Twitter, Facebook, Discord, and Sprites INC, where I'd been posting about it during development. It made sense to debut to a smaller audience who knew what to expect, and who was maybe even looking forward to the game. After a week or two of incorporating feedback from the general public, I'd "officially" announce the game on YouTube (to around 12,000 subscribers between both my channels) and on the forums at Capcom Unity, Rockman Perfect Memories, Cutstuff, Talkhaus, and anywhere else I could think of.

Despite all the headaches and hurdles, I was about to fulfill a childhood dream. ​I was nervous but optimistic, relieved but excited. I created a page on this website with information about the game, put together a download package, and played through the game one last time. I uploaded the game to three different file-sharing sites (always have a backup!) and tested that each download worked correctly. Then, I took a deep breath and announced my dream to the world.

It took the world 20 minutes to trample my dream, spit on it, and toss the pieces in my face.

I've been a content creator long enough to know that not everything I produce will be an instant hit with the public. I'm always braced for some measure of criticism, and I've learned to brace myself even more when it comes to level design. I was wholly unprepared for the hostility, ridicule, and indifference my game was about to receive, and I was blindsided by the things people would choose to complain about.

First was that initial ripple of excitement—hey, the game's finally out, congratulations, I can't wait to play it. Next were the first impressions—that cutscene art is fantastic; this music is great. So far, so good. Then came the bug reports—or more accurately, the memes making fun of the shoddy game engine, my horrible programming, and the apparent lack of playtesting. People were getting stuck in walls and crashing the game before even making it to the first checkpoint. Multiple people were outraged by the framerate, as though 30 FPS (more or less the fangame standard until OH JOES! was well underway) was utterly unplayable. Whatever credibility I had as a developer was gone before anyone got to the actual gameplay, by which point OH JOES! was just another no-effort fangame for people to trash. Notwithstanding the remarks about the art and music, the most positive thing I saw anyone say on Discord was that the game overall was "meh."

What a profound waste of my life this game was.

I had to walk away from my computer. I felt sick. What had been a source of tremendous joy and pride 20 minutes prior had rapidly turned into a painful mistake. One might argue that I was being overly sensitive to criticism, interpreting comments as negative when they weren't intended as such. But over the next four months, social media only reinforced the notion that nobody actually liked OH JOES!.

People complained about the lack of infinite lives, the fact that Proto Man loses his charge when hit, and the fact that a couple items require a specific character or weapon to collect—so I was being criticized for staying true to the official Mega Man games. But then people complained about the lack of a stage select or "real" final boss—so I was also being criticized for deviating from the official Mega Man games. I heard that the game was both too easy and too hard, that there were too many power-ups and not nearly enough, and that the game overstayed its welcome but wasn't long enough. There was no shortage of conflicting feedback from the general public.

But it didn't stop there. The lack of original Joes (when the entire point of the game was using tired old Joes in new situations) was disappointing to people. Over 250 screens of challenges, and the game did nothing new or interesting with Joes. Three meaningfully different difficulties, three meaningfully different characters, and a large degree of control over which challenges you face and how to face them, yet the replay value came across as artificial. How was I supposed to work with this feedback? These weren't critiques I could use to improve the game; these were indications that my game was a lost cause.

I'm better at handling the negative when there's some positive to focus on, but there was a gut-wrenching absence of praise for the story, dialogue, level design, tile work, special features, overall execution, and anything else I was responsible for. The only things people seemed to like were the stage music (of course, because Cosmic, Jasper, MiniMacro, and RushJet1 are extremely talented), cutscene art (of course, because Phusion is amazing), and secret character (of course, because she's a silly surprise who completely changes the gameplay nobody was enjoying). A handful of people involved in the project, who had previously stated that they liked the game, reiterated that they still liked it. I appreciated their support, but I also wanted—needed—some affirmation from the general public.

To give some numeric perspective: My initial announcement on Discord, Facebook, and Twitter reached a minimum of almost 600 different people—and depending on how much overlap there was between subscribers across the different platforms, that number could have been as high as 1500. I haven't been able to track the number of downloads from Dropbox and Google Drive, but MediaFire tells me that OH JOES! has been downloaded over 400 times—and I'm not sure whether that's since release, or just since I uploaded the last update. The first playthrough of the game that anyone posted on YouTube had over 1000 views within a few months of release, and my post about the game on Sprites INC had over 30,000 views. Even if, say, 90% of those views were repeat visitors and not unique views, those are still significant numbers.

In short: there were hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands of people outside the development team who knew about OH JOES!. Of these, five people in as many months said anything to make me feel like I wasn't a total failure as a game designer. With the exception of one glowing and articulate review, the praise was concise and tempered: the game was fun, despite [insert shortcoming]. Meanwhile, I continued seeing hostility, disappointment, and indifference toward the game every day, then every few days, then every week, until people stopped talking about it altogether. Whenever I brought up the game's unpopularity in conversation, secretly hoping that someone would chime in with something nice to say, the response was invariably, "Oh, that's too bad." Pity felt almost like an acknowledgment that there was nothing nice to say. Even on the rare occasion when someone tried to defend my game against criticism, their response was usually something to the effect of, "Well, the problem isn't that bad...".

Emotionally, I was extremely unwell for several weeks after the game's release. There's a sickening bitterness that arises from being so proud of something—something that you devoted years to creating, that other people told you they liked—and then having your self-worth pounded into oblivion when you put your creation on display. After a few days, I no longer had the drive to record an announcement for YouTube. After a week, I was this close to deleting the game's page from my website and killing the download links. After two weeks, I nearly stepped down as a judge for Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest 3. I felt like the game's existence was ruining my reputation in the fan community, and I wanted nothing more to do with it.

The game's few vocal supporters eventually convinced me that maybe, somehow, the game hadn't reached the right audience yet. I worked up the energy to advertise the game on a couple small gaming forums, but by that point, the branding was substantially different. "I'm excited to share my game with you" had changed to "Here's this thing I made; maybe it's not a total waste." The only response I've received on any of those forums is a compliment about the cutscene art. I made an effort to review bug reports and update the game if anything critical came up, but I expended a minimum amount of effort in implementing any changes. I also started writing this series of blog posts—partially for posterity, partially to share some insights about what it's like to design a game, but mostly to try to salvage the memory of this deeply personal project.

I didn't spend two years making a game; I spent two years on a challenging, emotional, eye-opening journey to fulfill a dream I've had since childhood. Looking back on the high points, I can be proud of what I accomplished and happy with the personal relationships that developed along the way. Looking back on the low points, OH JOES! caused me an unprecedented amount of stress and suffering for something that was supposed to be fun. If I could go back and do it all over again...I wouldn't.

I think about how eager I was to make more Mega Man levels, and how I would have gotten my fix if I had just waited a few months for Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest 2 and then a few more months for Mega Man Maker to arrive. I think about how many YouTube videos I could have recorded in the time it took to make OH JOES!—and how much happier both I and my content-starved audience would have been. Most of all, I think about how much it hurt to spend two years crafting a keen blade intended to cut through an afternoon of boredom, only to have my peers use it to carve out my heart.

But hey, at least I got some blog posts out of it.

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I'm by no means an artist, but I'd like to think I have some measure of artistic ability. I like to doodle from time to time, I know my way around MS Paint, and I'm pretty decent at modifying and adapting other people's pixel art. At the very least, I'm capable of arranging foreground and background tiles in a manner that's aesthetically tolerable.

Unlike music and programming, I knew for sure I could handle the graphics for OH JOES! on my own. Menu graphics? I could keep those pretty minimal and adapt things as needed from the official Mega Man games. Level graphics? I could mix and match from existing Mega Man tilesets. Object sprites? Almost everything was already in the game engine. Really, all I needed were a title screen logo and an intro cutscene. The former was certainly easy enough:

I can hear you snickering. This, of course, was only a placeholder...though I was seriously tempted for a while to clean it up a little and abandon any semblance of professionalism. OH JOES! was already going to be a ridiculous, tongue-in-cheek romp; why not embrace the absurdity? I eventually tried to design a more traditional logo, using one of the Mega Man arcade game fonts as a template, but nothing looked right. I held onto this logo for basically the entire first year of development.

It wasn't until a fateful Discord conversation that my haphazard MS Paint logo was formally discarded. Someone I knew passed along an image file of the complete English alphabet in the style of the 8-bit Rockman title screen logos. This person couldn't remember who on Discord gave it to them, but they assured me that I had permission to use the graphics in my game. That was good enough for me. The file originator has been duly credited at the end of OH JOES! as "SOMEONE ON DISCORD WHOSE NAME I NEVER GOT." Thank you, anonymous benefactor. Please don't sue.

With the right title font at my disposal, I started piecing together a logo in MS Paint, manually resizing each letter to create the "swoosh" effect we've all come to expect. I was pretty happy with how it turned out:

As far as I was concerned, this was a final product. Now I could turn my attention back to the level graphics, which I had been gradually working on. My policy is to have a general idea in mind of how I want a stage to look, but to use placeholder tiles until I'm confident the level design is unlikely to undergo any radical alterations. More time spent refining the gameplay in its purest form; less time wasted on redecorating rooms.

Although the engine I was using already had dozens of (more or less) complete tilesets from the NES Mega Man games, I wanted to incorporate graphics from Mega Man 9 and 10. Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest 2 (which opened around the same time I was starting to think about this) offered tilesets of all the Robot Master stages from Mega Man 9. After a decent amount of sleuthing, however, I determined that the rest of Mega Man 9 and the entirety of Mega Man 10 were completely unaccounted for anywhere on the Internet. Thus began a side project that would benefit me and the whole fan community.

I launched a campaign to create tilesets for MM9/10, inviting other people to chip in if they felt like it. My plan was to rip tiles from the stages I wanted to use in my game, and then pick up any outstanding tilesets if I still had time, energy, and interest. This turned out to be a fun and satisfying little distraction; I got to use both my eye for detail and my penchant for organization, and I got a good amount of support from the community.

Within 24 hours, I'd produced three (more or less) complete tilesets, with graphics pulled from screenshot maps of the levels—the only things missing were animations for things like water tiles. A couple months later, with everyone's help, both games were almost done. I created my tilesets with flexibility in mind, adding transparencies instead of solid background colors wherever possible, and occasionally offering flipped or rotated tiles for things like spikes that only faced one particular direction in the actual level.

With as neat and tidy as my tilesets for MM9/10 were, you'd think my tilesets for OH JOES! would be pristine. You'd be wrong. The problem with mixing and matching from multiple tilesets is that you don't always know what tiles look good together until you've decorated the whole level...by which point it's a hassle to copy those individual tiles from their source tilesets, paste them and arrange them into a new tileset, and then redecorate the whole level using the new tileset. Consequently, the game's file size is larger than it should be because I am a lazy butt.

Stage 1, despite being only 13 screens long, uses two generic starfield backgrounds and (occasionally modified) tiles from Bomb Man, Knight Man, Plant Man, Star Man, Stone Man, Toad Man, Tomahawk Man, MM3 Wily 4, MM4 Cossack 1, MM4 Wily 2, and MM6 Wily 2. I eventually made an effort to consolidate, but I still ended up with seven different tilesets, 90% of which are tiles I never once considered using. The closest I have to a "main" tileset for Stage 1 is the Bomb Man tileset, with other tiles copy/pasted over the tiles I knew I didn't want to use. Even here, I ended up with a few tiles I didn't use.

I learned my lesson for Stage 3 (which I inexplicably began tiling before Stage 2). I picked just one tileset (in this case, the opening cutscene of MM2) and pasted in whatever additional tiles I thought I might use. I envisioned something like MM3 Wily 1 (visually, my all-time favorite fortress stage), but with a nighttime cityscape for the outdoor portions, a different color palette, and accents from other tilesets to keep it from feeling like a lazy ripoff. The first iteration of the tileset looked like this...

...but I quickly realized that, as much as I love gray and silver, the level was going to need more color. I devised an easy fix for the monochromatic blues: color-code the different gimmick paths. This helped inform the aesthetics for Stage 2, because I just used the generic techno-block graphics from MM2's middle Wily stages and repainted them to match whatever colors Stage 3 used for each gimmick. Pasting new tiles over the ones I wasn't going to use, I came up with this:

I had been looking forward to using more unconventional colors and color combinations in my game. Much to my eternal sadness, the level quickly went from too dull to too bright. Moreover, I determined that the cityscape background was never going to work in a vertically oriented level; it'd look awfully suspicious to see the same ground level at multiple elevations. Grudgingly, I adapted some background tiles from Blade Man's stage and filled in everything after the first two screens with unassuming bricks. I fully intended to throw in a few miscellaneous details to liven up the backgrounds—maybe snaking pipes or gaping holes or wall fixtures of some sort—but nothing ever looked quite right. I tried to compensate by adding accent blocks to the foreground instead. Ultimately, my Stage 3 tileset looked like this:

This proved to be incredibly difficult to work with. Bear in mind that I'm colorblind—at a glance, I can't always tell which tiles are supposed to go together. I frequently found myself making small adjustments to the level architecture, only to have my playtesters report a random purple block in the midst of a blue area, or two different shades of background tile for no good reason. When I got around to decorating Stage 2, I made sure to start with a blank tileset and then paste in only the tiles I wanted to use, arranged in a way where there would be no color confusion.

This one's a lot cleaner, but you can probably tell by the placement of certain tiles that I changed my mind a couple times about how the background should look. After settling on the subdued brick background for Stage 3, I abandoned the subdued  circuitry background for Stage 2 and started gathering tiles that were subtle but varied. One particular element of subtlety was how I would telegraph the length of the stage: at the first checkpoint, there are six red circles in the background; at the next checkpoint, there are five; at the next, four; and so on. I'm fairly certain no one has ever noticed this, let alone found it useful.

As a side note, the "screen" tile used for the pass-through "fake block" gimmick was only supposed to be a placeholder. However, by the time I got around to applying real graphics, I couldn't imagine the blocks looking any other way. They were distinctive (I never wanted the player to guess whether or not a block was solid), and I found them visually appealing both alone and as part of a group. Something similar happened with the Chill Man ice blocks—they were meant to shatter into shards like they do in MM10, but I left in the placeholder explosion animation so long that I eventually couldn't imagine them any other way. I like to pretend they're made of some frozen volatile liquid instead of water.

In order to streamline the tiling process, I decided that each stage's graphics should be governed by a set of rules. There were all the general ones, taught to me by the official Mega Man games: background tiles should always have a shadow on top when placed below a ceiling or platform; bottomless pits should be clearly marked by the background fading to black, etc. Then there were the rules I concocted to prevent me from spending more time than necessary analyzing the aesthetic merits of every single tile combination.

For example: When used specifically as the featured gimmick, ladders were represented with a traditional "hole between the rungs" ladder tile; when used in any other capacity (ie, just to get the player from one screen to the next), they were represented with the charmingly chunky MM1-style ladder tile. In Stage 1, the underground rock tiles had to be contained by pipes and pillars; the player was never allowed to come directly in contact with the rocks. In Stage 2, the foreground tiles had to follow the same repeating pattern across every screen, with every passageway looking like it had been carved out of that pattern. In Stage 3, wall bricks were never allowed to be floor tiles; horizontal pipes had to be used instead, endcapped by blocks that followed their own set of rules, and those pipes generally had to continue extending horizontally until they reached the end of the wall or platform. Obsessive? Yes. But also immensely helpful.

Rules were especially beneficial by the time I got to Stage 4, which effectively utilized five completely different tilesets—one for each set of gimmick paths, and one for the connecting hub areas. I had been somewhat conservative in tiling Stage 2 and Stage 3, trying to keep the focus on the increasingly complex gameplay and not distract too much with the graphics. Now, a little tired of playing it safe (and armed with all the newly ripped tilesets from MM9-10), I pulled out all the stops and put my artistic mettle to the test.

Bold color combinations. Intricate designs. Unnecessary attention to detail, like making sure to use a specific type of square tile behind every Sheep Man block, making it feel like the blocks take out a chunk of the wall when they disappear. It took a great deal of time and effort to decorate this massive stage, but I was very satisfied with the results. I even think the tileset, though not perfect, turned out pretty darn well:

I'm especially pleased with the sunrise effect used in the boss chamber at the end of the game. For one thing, it completes the time-lapse effect I was going for—Regular Joe steals your shield when it's just getting dark, and you're chasing him through the night (seen at the start of Stage 3, which also shows the Bomb Man ball-on-stick buildings from Stage 1 in the distance), finally catching up with him just as the sun rises on a brand new, brighter day. For another thing, the sunrise kinda makes the background look like a Sniper Joe eye, which is the best backdrop for a Joe boss I could've hoped for.

Easily the easiest stage to tile was Dr. Cossack's lab (unofficially, Stage 5). For posterity, here's the tileset for that one—note that the wrench icon was adapted from Mega Man & Bass, my first attempt at converting 16-bit graphics into 8-bit:

It took me 3 months to tile the 300+ screens that comprised the main gameplay. With one major graphical project out of the way, of course I decided to start another one. After successfully adding Break Man as a second playable character, I felt confident about adding an unlockable third character—one who would require custom sprites. I'd been making various graphical modifications throughout the entire development process, from updating Proto Man's sprite to reflect that his Proto Shield was missing, to giving Regular Joe his ridiculous walking animation cycle, to integrating the dome-shaped Quick Laser emitters (which were just random wall decorations from MM10) into existing wall tiles. I was ready for this.

It's always fun to see people's reactions to the secret character (whose identity I will be spoiling momentarily), because it's never whom they expect. For me, it was always obvious. I already had a character involved in the story who (a) deserved more air time, (b) would add some welcome diversity to a franchise dominated by male protagonists, and (c) was perfect "secret character" material. I was inspired by Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, which becomes a completely different game when you unlock Maria, an absurdly powerful little girl who throws cats at her enemies. I thought Kalinka Cossack would follow nicely in Maria's footsteps. Especially if she wielded an oversized bazooka that fired cats.

Although OH JOES! takes place far enough in the Mega Man timeline that Kalinka is a teenager or even a young adult, I wanted to use her classic, younger MM4 look because I like the outfit and think it looks properly absurd when paired with a bazooka. Besides, nothing says her appearance or fashion sense had to change dramatically in the last decade or so.

From scratch, I drew something resembling a bazooka. I consulted reference photos of real-life bazookas, but I ended up going in more of a Worms: Armageddon direction. The only canonical Kalinka sprites I had to work with were two frames of animation from MM4, so I figured out how the bazooka should look in any given pose and then worked Kalinka's sprites around the bazooka. The trickiest part was creating the climbing sprite; I wanted the bazooka to be slung over her shoulder, but I was rubbish at redrawing the bazooka at a 45-degree angle. I may or may not have pasted the horizontal bazooka image into PowerPoint and rotated it to see how it should look. I'm not an artist, but darned if I'm not a problem-solver.

There are very few Mega Man games (official or otherwise) where you get to play as a human instead of a robot. I don't ask for a lot of realism in my Mega Man games, but one thing that's always bothered me is how human characters explode when they run out of health. I refused to let Kalinka explode like Proto Man and Break Man did—that'd just be lazy—so I made sure to give her a unique failure animation that made sense for a human, but without disrupting the lighthearted, family-friendly tone of the game. Hopefully, googly eyeballs and tiny cartoon birds circling overhead did the trick.

The last piece of the graphical puzzle to fall into place was the intro cutscene. Originally, my wife (who's the one with actual artistic talent in this relationship) agreed to do the art; she has a history of sneaking Mega Man–themed doodles into my lunchbox while I'm getting ready for work in the morning, and the cutscene was basically going to be a series of polished doodles. There were two major hurdles: one, she'd never done pixel art before; two, the screen dimensions with which she had to work (256 x 224 pixels, minus space for the dialogue text) imposed a difficult constraint. The project went on the backburner for a while, and when I started pushing to get the game released in early 2018, she was willing to pass the baton to someone with pixel art experience.

Fortunately, I already had volunteers. MJacquelinae, a fellow contestant in Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest 2, had previously reached out to see if I needed any help with the graphics for my game. I took her up on the offer and commissioned the mugshot of Kalinka used on the character select screen. When the intro cutscene went up for grabs, I asked if she'd be interested in tackling that as well. She sent me a rough panel sample that looked promising, but it turned out that her schedule and my timetable for release didn't match up.

I had another offer on the table, this one from a longtime fan of both my YouTube videos and my writing. Based on his art samples and his taste in entertainment, I could tell he knew a thing or two about quality. I asked for one panel as a test run, a generic scene of Proto Man talking with Kalinka. Before the day was over, he sent me this:

I was floored. This was exactly what I was looking for, and I had barely provided any direction. I showed the sample to my wife, and she was jealous of his artistic chops. I officially invited him to join the project, gave him the same copyright spiel I gave my composers, asked him how he'd like to be identified in the credits (he eventually settled on "Phusion"), and outlined what I wanted the cutscene to look like:

From there, we went back and forth—concept sketch, feedback, line art, feedback, full-color pixel art, feedback, updated pixel art. Throughout the process, I paid close attention to the logistics of the scene, making sure that the relative positions of Proto Man, Kalinka, the hanging Proto Shield, and the doorway were always sensible and consistent. Body language was paramount; not only did I want the characters' poses and facial expressions to convey their personalities and fit the tone of the dialogue, but I also wanted to make absolutely certain that Proto Man and Kalinka never looked like they might be flirting.

The whole process went extremely smoothly, and I think it helped that we were constantly communicating and collaborating. Phusion ended up doing much more than the intro cutscene; for starters, he updated the title screen:

After providing feedback on the new logo colors, I commented, "The only thing I might do is flip and rotate it so that the shield is facing upward. Right now the shield looks almost like it's weeping tragically about having been stolen, but I'd like to see it optimistically waiting to be recovered." This is the kind of direction I give people.

Phusion also provided a new Game Over screen to replace the "boring text box" motif I had going. I had to make some programming adjustments to accommodate a static image where there was previously an interactive menu, but I think it was worth it. He turned my months-old concept art, doodled on a tiny notepad...

...into something shockingly close to what I had been picturing in my head:

It's worth mentioning that Phusion was the second person to try adapting my scribbles into actual art. GavinDragon (who also provided cover art for the instruction manual I never ended up making) had previously taken a crack at it. I can't tell you how honored I am to have had anyone freely volunteer their talents for this game, let alone multiple people.

Phusion continued to tweak and tidy the Game Over art as we discussed changes—most notably, Regular Joe's fist. Again, I was looking closely at body language. As I described it, "Even though the player just got a Game Over and has shamed their family for generations, I think I'd like to have Regular Joe with a slightly less aggressive pose. Maybe an open palm, which could be read either as a shrug ('Eh, you didn't make it, oh well') or an invitation to try again. Alternately, a Sonic the Hedgehog-esque pointer finger ('Tsk, tsk. Shame on you.')—though I'm not as sold on that one." You wouldn't believe how much effort it took for us to settle on a suitable gesture. Well, maybe you would.

My favorite piece of art almost didn't make it into the game. Very late in the development process, Phusion surprised me with an old-timey photo of Proto Man and Kalinka, intended for use as a "thanks for playing" tag after the end credits. However, unbeknownst to him, the credits flowed directly into more gameplay. I couldn't come up with a decent way to add the photo without it feeling contrived, and it was too late to redo the whole ending. Thus, this super awesome picture that deserves more visibility was relegated to being a postgame Easter egg for the approximately zero people who close the game via the "QUIT" option on the title screen.

Level design may have been the most fun part of designing OH JOES!, but the graphics were the most satisfying. It's hard to put into words, but there's something deeply gratifying about nurturing a bunch of bland placeholder images into honest-to-goodness art, especially when I've got top-notch help.

I have forgotten how to slow down and relax.

All throughout school, my pattern was to keep adding side projects and extracurricular activities to my weekly schedule—I'd start by joining a choir, then a theater group, then a church group... By the end of three or four years, I'd be so overburdened with activities that I'd burn out and vow to wipe the slate clean after graduation. Then I'd move on to the next phase of my life, be it a new school or the "real world"...and slowly start the process all over again.

For the foreseeable future, there is no "next phase" of my life. No more school, no grand plans of life-altering significance on the horizon. No natural stopping point where I can gracefully walk away from my commitments. "As soon as I finish what I'm working on now," I keep telling myself, "then I'll take some time to myself." But I never seem to finish. Projects that should only take a weekend end up taking weeks, if not months. Whenever one commitment starts wrapping up, another tantalizing one presents itself. I thrive on being productive and feeling like I'm making a contribution to society, so I want to do all these things. Yet one after another, every commitment in recent years has gone on so long that it's more like work than fun. I've learned to devote all my free time to powering through projects so I can finish before they stop being enjoyable.

Which, in turn, makes them not enjoyable. And they still take forever.

The other factor is that I need to finish my projects more quickly if they're going to remain relevant. I've got a blog post about the latest Star Wars movie that's been in the works since the week the film opened. I completely missed the boat on my annual New Year's Resolutions post. My stalled playthrough of Mega Man 8 surely would have gotten a boost in popularity if I could have released it in sync with the second Mega Man Legacy Collection. I'm frantically trying to get my Mega Man fangame released before the next big level design contest opens—because as I found with my Super Mario World ROM hack that should've been released a decade ago, even the most creative ideas will get scooped up by somebody else if you take too long to show them to the world.

But I'm also racing against myself. Five months after playing Chrono Cross for the first time, I still haven't finished the angry article I started drafting for GameCola about it...and at this point, I'm not sure I want to bother finishing it. Writing about the game was cathartic at one point, but now I've moved on with my life. Do I really want to reopen that wound? I think the only reason I'm still considering going back to it is to preserve this sentence, which took way too long to craft:

And with that, the sentence has been preserved. Now eliminating "The Ten Reasons: Chrono Cross."

Well, that's one less thing on my to-do list.

I'm taking this weekend to recover from self-inflicted stress. I'm not thinking about what I should do. I'm not pushing myself to finish anything I may start or resume. I'm going where the winds of relaxation take me. That I've spent today folding laundry, transcribing a dessert recipe into my recipe book, and reviewing fan-submitted captions on my YouTube videos might make it seem like I still have no idea how to relax...but these are things I want to do. It's making me happy to tidy up the all the physical and mental clutter I've been neglecting in my life. Now, if you'll excuse me, I want to go redeem this coupon code I found inside a cereal box.

I've been lurking around the World Wide Web since the days of dial-up, but it wasn't until my first post with Exfanding Your Horizons in 2008 that I established any kind of online presence. Before then, you'd never find anything of mine by accident—if you had my e-mail address, it was because I knew you in person and gave it to you; if you were on my Angelfire website (about which I remember nothing, other than that it was as much an eyesore as anything else from the Web 1.0 era), it was because I sent you the link. I had a brief flirtation with AOL chat rooms in the '90s, but such a presence is ephemeral at best.

The only public trace of my online existence was a website I created for a high school history project, which was ostensibly about the American Civil War, but which was secretly a playground where the popup text for hovering over Roger B. Taney's portrait was "Would you buy cookies from this man?" and where clicking on the conspicuous blank space at the bottom of the last page would make a picture of Boba Fett appear. It looks like the site has finally been taken down, but I was able to Google and Yahoo! my way back to it for a good many years after I graduated. Other than a stray photo or guestbook signature on someone else's site, you'd never know I was around before 2008.

Or so I thought.

On a whim, I did a web search for "Flashman85," my default handle for general geekery online. Don't ask me what possessed me to do this—I'm not even sure myself. The first several results were no surprise—my profiles on Twitch, YouTube, The Backloggery, Sprites INC, and a few other sites where I felt the urge to comment that one time. But then there was a review of Mega Man for the NES written by a Flashman85. Funny, I thought to myself. I've only ever reviewed that game on GameCola, under my real name. Let's see who this other guy is.

"To paraphrase a friend of mine," the review began, "Capcom's idea for Megaman was 'Mario with a gun.' Indeed, few would suspect how popular a franchise the Blue Bomber would become. The original game was similar to other NES games of the time, but it also had laudable properties that would help it to endure into the next century."

That's an odd coincidence, I thought. I also had a friend who described Mega Man as "Mario with a gun." And I'm definitely the only person on the Internet who uses the words "indeed" and "laudable." Who is this guy?

As it turned out, that guy was me.

Now, I've written a lot during my time with a keyboard in front of me. I may not be able to readily call to mind every post and comment I've virtually penned, but show me something I've written and I'll at least be able to recall a few details about it. Staring at this review—dated 2002, well before I really existed on the Internet—I had no recollection whatsoever of it. I didn't even recognize the website it was on. But there was no mistaking that this was my writing.

The shockingly low word count is what initially threw me the most. The whole review weighs in at a downright economical 231 words, which is barely enough for me to develop an introduction these days. However, it would be totally like me to spend almost 50% of the review complaining about Ice Man's stage. "'If you can beat Ice Man's stage, you can beat any Megaman game' is my motto." A little hint of Dave Barry there. I used to read a lot of Dave Barry. There were signs everywhere that this was me, notwithstanding Past Me's insistence on writing "Mega Man" as one word. Silly Past Me.

I looked around the site for other reviews that I had apparently written, and I found that I had covered all six of the NES Mega Man games. MM3 was no surprise: "My only real qualm is that many of the weapons go unused for most of the game." If I hadn't already caught on by then, my gushing praise for MM4 would have been a complete giveaway that this was me of 14 years ago writing all these reviews: "There is almost nothing for me to complain about in this fantastic game. Buy it. Now."

I've reread enough of my old material to know how far I've come as a writer since 2008, but it's surreal to jump back to 2002. There's little elegance to my old writing, but there's character. You can tell exactly how much I care about each aspect of each game—there's no veneer of objectivity and no time wasted describing anything that doesn't significantly impact my enjoyment of the game, no matter how important it might be for the reader to know. Most of the opinions expressed have remained unchanged in the last 14 years, but the way I express those opinions has evolved dramatically.

I still think MM1 is a classic, I still think people are too quick to label MM2 as easy, and I'm still a bit lukewarm about MM6 in the context of the rest of the series. I had forgotten just how wild about MM5 I used to be; my enthusiasm has cooled somewhat, but it's still one of my favorites. I'm less fanatical about MM4 as well; "Pure Excellence" is not a review title I would ever use anymore, even if the game remains my favorite. It's almost unsettling to hear myself describe MM3 as "one of the best Mega Man games ever." Perhaps you've seen my videos?

It's fascinating and almost a little bittersweet to read my own opinions from an era when I could like or dislike something without putting too much thought into it. Clearly, I was already attuned to certain aspects of game design, but I was capable of both zealotry and indifference without having to provide exhaustive support for my feelings. I've become so analytical that I need to understand why I'm having fun, and I clash so much with the mainstream nowadays that I need to be ready to defend my unpopular opinions at the drop of a hat. I'm too much a champion of separating fact from opinion to be able to share my feelings so unequivocally anymore. I envy Past Me for his ability to play something, enjoy it, write a quick blurb about it, and get back to having fun. He can keep his expository writing style (all the criticism I got from teachers about my essays is starting to make sense), but I wouldn't mind if some of that carefree enthusiasm were to come back.

If you'd like to open this time capsule for yourself, I present to you my old reviews of MM1, MM2, MM3, MM4, MM5, and MM6. Watch for the part where I continue complaining about Ice Man in a game where he doesn't even appear. That's so me.

March was another busy month. No sooner had I submitted my entry for the Make a Good Mega Man Level contest on Sprites INC than another contest opened up: designing any number of six-screen level segments for the upcoming Mega Man Endless fangame. Between friends, family, work, and my deadline-driven side projects, I was going almost nonstop by the end of the month. It was exhausting, but it was also a reminder of how I thrive on having a variety of activities to keep me occupied. Let's see what all I have to show for myself.

This Website:

I might not write many posts anymore, but the ones I do write are ones I want to hang on to. The story of my concert experience with Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage is one of my favorite things I've written for this blog, and I think it's the biggest indication that I've finally moved away from the "general bitterness commentary" that weighed down my writing only a year or two ago. Also, I've decided to start linking to my individual Series Opinions articles once they're finished, regardless of whether everything else on the page with them is finished. I've still got a lot of Star Trek and Mega Man to write about (and rewrite about, because opinions are subject to change), but I'm one step closer to having my definitive take on every part of my favorite entertainment franchises all in one place.

- Retrospective: February 2016
- The Ultimate Voyage
- Series Opinions: The Misadventures of Tron Bonne

YouTube:

Due to all the time I spent making Mega Man levels in February and March, I wasn't able to focus on playing Mega Man levels, (meaning my playthrough of Mega Man 8 got delayed)...but I did subject one of my friends to a level I made, so we can call that a compromise. I did keep another one of my recording projects going, though, carrying on with the next installment in what is possibly my favorite first-person shooter series. I like MotS less than its predecessor, but I think I like this playthrough more than the one I did for the original Jedi Knight. So it balances out. Pardon the choppiness of the first video; it gets better.

Flashman85LIVE:
- Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Mysteries of the Sith (Live) - Part 1: The Noisy Asteroid of Ugly Awfulness
- Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Mysteries of the Sith (Live) - Part 2: Wireframed and Imprisoned
- Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Mysteries of the Sith (Live) - Part 3: A Pirate's Death for Me
- Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Mysteries of the Sith (Live) - Part 4: Nothing I Want at the Swamp Meet
- Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Mysteries of the Sith (Live) - Part 5: Taking the Bonus Level for a Bespin
- Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest - "Maze of Death" Blind Playthrough (With Special Guests)

GCDotNet:
- The GameCola Podcast #90: A Not-So-Spooky Halloween

The Backloggery:

Wow. This portion almost isn't worth mentioning. My wife and I played one round of LEGO LotR and were put off enough by all the glitches and gameplay issues that we haven't found the motivation to go back yet, and I played just enough of Nintendo Land with friends that it qualifies as Beaten by my standards. Oh, and I chipped away at X-Men Legends and played a little more of the 3DS Mega Man Legacy Collection, so it's not like I completely abandoned my favorite pastime.

Started:
- LEGO The Lord of the Rings  (Wii)

Beat:
- Nintendo Land  (WiiU)

...And that's just the stuff I finished in March! April oughta be pretty big, and I'm in a great mindset going into the month.

My free time in February was primarily devoted to designing my entry for the Make a Good Mega Man Level contest on the Mega Man fansite Sprites INC. Consequently, I'm a bit behind on the writing and recording I wanted to have done by now—but I'm behind for a good cause, and I'm excited to share my finished level with the general public once the judging is done. In the meantime, here's everything I did manage to accomplish that pertains to my online endeavors:

This Website:

With the release of the 3DS Mega Man Legacy Collection, my name now appears in the credits of an official Mega Man game by Capcom. Naturally, there's a story behind this, and it's one of the most significant stories I've written about in quite a while. In keeping with this website's purpose as a base of operations for my creative endeavors, this seemed like a good time to set up a Games page that catalogs my contributions to professional and fan-made video games. I'm more prolific than you might expect, and there's potential for the list to grow in the years to come. I also kept plugging away at my Mega Man Series Opinions, finishing off my review of Mega Man X3 and going back to tidy up some of the Classic games now that I've started to categorize things a little differently.

- Retrospective: January 2016
- The Legacy of a Challenge
- Games

YouTube:

As mentioned above, I was otherwise occupied for most of the month, so I didn't get to start recording the video footage for my playthrough of Mega Man 8 as originally planned. Still, I've got something to show for myself, including a livestream of random SNES games, and a particularly silly installment of The GameCola Podcats. Meow.

Flashman85LIVE:
- Backloggery Choice #3: Mega Man Soccer, Super Mario RPG, Kirby Super Star, Donkey Kong Country 2

GCDotNet:
- The GameCola Podcast #89: When Jeddy's Away the Cats Will Play

The Backloggery:

LEGO Jurassic World got my wife and me back into co-op gaming on a regular basis, and it was the most fun we've had with a LEGO game since way back on the GameCube with LEGO Star Wars. When we went out to pick up the Mega Man Legacy Collection on release day, a couple bargain-price LEGO games came home with us, allowing for many more stay-at-home date nights. In prepping for my SNES livestream, I noticed I'd never updated Kirby Super Star for the SNES after playing through it as part of Kirby's Dream Collection for the Wii, hence the random Completed status for a game I hadn't been playing. And that's all the boring news I have to share about my video game backlog.

New:
LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean  (Wii)
LEGO The Lord of the Rings  (Wii)
Mega Man Legacy Collection  (3DS)

Beat:
LEGO Jurassic World  (WiiU)
 
Completed:
Kirby Super Star  (SNES)
LEGO Jurassic World  (WiiU)

So much Mega Man! More than usual, even. No wonder I've been in such a good mood lately.

One of my favorite blogging traditions with Exfanding Your Horizons was making up New Year's resolutions with my blogging buddy and then reflecting on them a year later. The blog went on permanent hiatus on the day we'd normally do our writing and reflecting, and I somehow never reinstated the tradition on this blog.

That's because, originally, this blog was little more than a place to get my writing fix until Exfanding came back from hiatus. Something temporary. I wasn't planning on setting down roots here and carrying on with traditions. This was the same thing I said about moving to the moon, and I've been living here since 2011. Somewhere along the line, this blog and my moon base became my home, and it's only recently that I've been treating them as such. I'd been waiting for the day where I'd resume business as usual, but this is business as usual. Time to stop looking to the past like it's the future. Time to look at the present and do something about it if it's not to my liking. What a good time to start making resolutions again.

"Resolutions" isn't the right word, though. Resolutions are promises you feel guilty for breaking. I prefer to set goals; goals are things you feel good about achieving. I've learned to set reasonable goals for myself that are general enough to accomplish, but specific enough to be meaningful. Here's what I have in mind for 2016:

Goal #1: Start and finish a YouTube playthrough of Mega Man 8.
Anyone familiar with the saga of Mega Man 7 knows how much of a stretch this one is. Each Mega Man video series I've done has taken longer than the last, so smart money says I won't accomplish this goal until 2020 at the very earliest. Smart money is inanimate and highly flammable, however, so you shouldn't listen to it. I've streamlined my recording process and am livestreaming on a regular basis, which keeps me in the recording spirit, so I believe I can make this happen if I keep at it.

Goal #2: Make serious headway on the video game my wife and I are planning.
We don't talk about it much because we want to keep the particulars a secret, but my wife and I are working on a video game. It's still in the planning stages, but I'd like to have at least a partially playable beta ready before the end of the year.

Goal #3: Run at least one D&D campaign, then learn a new tabletop RPG system and run another campaign.
Since I started playing in college, Dungeons & Dragons has been an endless source of stories and one of my favorite ways to spend time with people. Moving to the moon has put me out of touch with a regular group of players, but nothing says I can't host the occasional one-shot campaign for friends and family who are willing to hop on a rocketship and drop in for a weekend. I'm also looking to diversify beyond D&D, as my other tabletop RPG experience is quite limited, and there's a copy of the Serenity Roleplaying Game rulebook on my shelf that's been gathering dust for too gorram long.

Goal #4: Read 12 books.
I was an avid reader up until late middle school or early high school, at which point I started associating reading with work, rather than with leisure. I've since warmed back up to reading as a pastime, and I casually follow a number of blogs, but I'd like to get back in the habit of reading as an alternative to the electronic entertainment that dominates my life. One book a month doesn't seem unreasonable, especially if I include graphic novels, which totally count.

Goal #5: Get my Backloggery progress index into positive double digits.
It's only since 2014 that I've been finishing more video games a year than I add to my collection, but just barely. Net progress in 2014 was +5, and 2015 was a measly +2 (technically +3, if you count the game I sold in December but forgot to remove from my list until New Year's Day). Lest you think this is a "play more video games" goal, my intention here is to be more discerning with how I spend my time and money, trimming my collection down to only the games I truly want to be there.

Goal #6: Write like I used to.
There are three meanings here: write regularly, write positively, and write for myself. Writing is cathartic, and I want to look back on a year's worth of posts that I would want to read, even if I hadn't written them. I want to unearth the bright-eyed, happy little kid inside me who's been buried under the layers of anger, frustration, disappointment, and anxiety that have accumulated over the last few years of resisting the present instead of reshaping it. With GameCola on hiatus, it's more important than ever that I make this website feel like home, and writing like I used to may be the best way to do it.


Ta-dah! A half-dozen goals, and those are just the ones I'm writing down (I'll spare you the one about eating less fried dough this time). Ambitious? Yes, but not unreachable. These aren't only goals; they're lifestyle changes, or at least catalysts for such—and after the 2015 I had, I have never been so ready for change. See you back here in a year to assess my success!

Yesterday I finished a blind playthrough of Deponia that I'd been streaming periodically on Twitch over the last few weeks. I had only intended to take the game for a test drive in front of a live audience, but circumstances changed and I ended up doing a full playthrough by popular request. As with most of my livestreaming endeavors, this was a learning experience.

I managed to draw a modest crowd for each stream, with multiple returning viewers, so there was clearly some interest in the playthrough (or else I have a knack for streaming when there's nothing good on TV). Still, compared with the hundreds of views and couple dozen Likes my other livestream videos have received after being ported to YouTube, the metrics on my Deponia videos are a little disheartening. I'm averaging about 70 views per video, and there are no Likes after the first one.

Normally I don't focus much on the numbers—I record for fun, not fame—but these numbers indicate the least engagement I've had on any of my videos in recent memory. So, what is it about this playthrough that's less appealing to my subscribers?

1.) It's not Mega Man. I've had success with Crystalis, Space Quest, and other non-Mega Man games on the GameCola YouTube channel, which has a more eclectic assortment of videos than either of my personal channels. But Mega Man is what people look forward to seeing most when I'm not recording for GameCola. Plus, of all the non-Mega Man games to play, Deponia is not one that people get overly excited to watch, assuming they've heard of it at all.

2.) It's a blind playthrough of a game that doesn't lend itself to blind playthroughs. At least with platformers (or practically any other genre, for that matter), the action doesn't stop when you encounter a challenge you can't readily overcome. You might keep falling down the same pit or losing to the same boss, but there's usually varying degrees of success, and things might play out differently from one attempt to the next. Plus, there's the anticipation that maybe this time you'll succeed. Adventure and puzzle games, on the other hand, tend to play out more or less the same way every time, and what's fun to play may not be fun to watch. Working through a challenge in your head translates visually to waling in circles and clicking on the same few objects until you stumble on the one and only solution.

3.) The best games to play are the ones you love or the ones you hate; strong opinions make for strong commentary. I'm not passionate about Deponia, one way or the other. The story's fine. I like the art style. The music is good. There's some decent humor. The voice acting's not bad. The characters are not as compelling as they could be. The ending makes the game feel incomplete, even knowing that it's part of a trilogy. The only element I feel particularly strongly about is the gameplay, but that's a given for practically any game. Challenge design is wildly inconsistent, and the interface needs more polish. 5/10; probably wouldn't play again, but could be persuaded to. That's hardly enough fuel for 9+ hours of commentary.

4.) The timing of my livestreams was not convenient for a few subscribers who would have otherwise attended. Some folks had family dinner plans or extracurricular obligations, and I was recording far too late in the evening for all but my most insomniac European viewers to participate. The viewers I had were loyal, but there weren't as many people in the chat (or, at least, as many people completely invested in Deponia) to keep the conversation and energy going whenever I started to wane.

5.) Most video series have diminishing returns with each subsequent installment, but my playthrough of Deponia is an especially large investment: each episode on YouTube is 1-3 hours long, and the game's story and puzzles are too complex to be able to skip ahead without missing something. Unless you're along for the whole ride, you might not bother with the series at all, and the first episode is long enough that you can make that decision well before committing to a second video.

All in all, I expect this playthrough of Deponia will be remembered, if at all, as a stepping stone to better livestreaming practices. Hopefully it's been entertaining enough to justify the time spent on it, which is all I ever really ask of a video. If nothing else, I was glad to have some company while I muddled my way through another game in my backlog.