stupidrpg is an important milestone in my creative existence because its the prototype for the process of creation that i would like to
explore moving forward. which is basically that i get fixated on a few pieces of unrelated media, which in this case was a few rpgs and
some movies, and just kind of blend them together in my brain and excrete them into the world somehow. it's also my first release game
that was not made in 24 hours or a weekend or something, taking 6 days (the jam was for 7 days but i got busy in the middle).
i pretty much lifted deltarune's mp system as much as i could in rpgmaker2003, but i think it adds an interesting dimension to the combat
which could be explored a bit more. i still feel the temptation to boot this one up again and see how i can exploit the hastily-constructed
systems i put in place. my biggest regret is that i never sat down and actually wrote a plot, the whole game was made from beginning to end
so at any point you have as much of an idea what's going to happen next as i did while making it, so it's almost like a dream-sequency
stream of consciousness style of rambling storytelling like you'd expect from a child, "once upon a time there was a guy and his pirate ship exploded
and he landed on an island and was adopted by an evil wizard" etc. im glad i got to experiment with some rpg tropes i think are cool,
like having the protagonist suddenly switch and the final boss being the hero. but the listlessness of the story kind of naturally lended
itself to the ending, where everything just kind of stops like someone lifted the needle off the record, which is how that coen brothers
film i was watching while making the game ended. this game also has a mini version of a combat system i was experimenting with a while
back, wherein the player has absolutely no offensive capabilities and has to use consumable items in order to defeat enemies, like throwing
rocks at them or spoiled fruit to give them poisoned statuses or something. this was the original idea for the game as a whole but rpgmaker2003
has limited support for that kind of thing. i kind of which i hadnt gone with 2003 because i cannot for the life of me get a bmp to look how
i want it to and also it required players to actually download an installer and install a game like some kind of single-celled primitive
lifeform, but later versions of rpgmaker are extremely bloated and a 2003 game even with the rtp comes out to only a handful of megabytes.
in spite of my regrets with this title i'm still proud of it, its definitely the most expansive game ive made to date, and i think it
is decent enough fertilizer for my next 'thing' to grow out of.

i think it's important to give yourself gifts. for my birthday in 2025, my gift to myself was a videogame.
hand-made gifts are always a solid option when you have no money. this one is kind of interesting in that i don't remember much about
its development, what it was inspired by, or what i was thinking while making it. i do know that i watched about half of the live-action
speed racer film while making it. it taught me the very important lesson that making enemy ai is really hard, and that anyone who ventures
to make a videogame and does not already possess a decade of experience / some advanced degree in math shouldn't even attempt to do such a
thing unless it's something along the lines of 'draw a line to the player hitbox and move toward it at x velocity'.
this is my only game to not really have much in the way of a story. who is shooty mcguy? the ending seems to suggest that he or she is a
hired mercenary of some sort. their target seems to be the boss at the end, which seems to be implied to be a robot, whose muscle is an
army of smaller, identical robots. is shooty mcguy a robot themselves? i really don't know. in the below entry for fish floppas i mention
the two featured characters, reginald red and barnabus blue, being featured in a propaganda poster in the game. it doesn't actually seem to
be in the game itself, but you can see the poster in the background of the the game's thumbnail on itch.io. i might have that image somewhere
on my hard drive still. i'd like to get a print of it and put it up on my wall. i like the tagline i gave this game: "shooty mcguy does it again"
i think that single line adds more depth to that character than anything in the game itself.

I like the lack of consequence that comes from short jams. Fish Floppas was made in a state of euphoria after having recently returned
from a trip to japan with the feeling that i was really going to do it this time. i like the unified energy that accompanies games made in
x < 24 hours. if youre working on something longer than that the creative spirit that puppets your hands dies when you fall asleep and is
reborn into an identical-but-is-it-really form ship of theseus style. i still think the big fish joke on the title screen is funny. i dont
remember if i selected that film in particular was because it just popped into my head or because the game actually has fish characters in
it (i hadnt seen big fish at the time and likely never will). i still get packages showing up to my doorstep from time to time. ive wanted
to have the fish characters reappear in a later title, like fish floppas is actually the process in which representatives are elected in this
world, and i didnt know if it was a world of fish or a world of humans governed by fish that slap each other until one of them goes limp.
propaganda for both officials was a part of a game i made a few months later but never released because there was problems with the html5
exporting and i only had a couple hours left in the jam. lets see what else..... in true video game fashion you can press buttons on your
keyboard to make things happen, like increase the patented "flop force" or spawn extra fish or something. in another universe fish floppas
has a life as kind of a digital equivalent to a fidget toy. sometimes i still boot it up just to click around.