Hey everyone, I'm here to finally release the demo,
This version is now what I consider the "gold demo", as in "the game has gone gold".
Our game is now titled
Before Crisis: Cissnei.
Here's a sharable trailer for our game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PQhBEjjDGYIt's 1:30 long. The trailer is not full of any huge major spoilers, but some people may wish to not see the trailer in case they want absolutely nothing spoiled. The trailer shows some combat, menus, a few moments from some cutscenes. And expect some music from Devil May Cry.
There's a lot of things I want to go over so here's some organized sections for easier reading.
WHY DID THIS TAKE SO LONG?First off, I want to talk a little bit about my background and the creation of this. I've been working on this for about 3/4 of a year (although I made some sprites before that), and when I first started, I had little experience with RPG Maker, so I've had to learn a lot from scratch. I've probably put around 200-250 hours over the past several months. I'm a hermit myself so this pandemic had little effect on my ability to contribute.
My last post in this topic was in February this year so it's been a while. I decided not to post in this topic since because I didn't want to disappoint anyone, since I noticed a pattern of me constantly not being able to keep up with the deadlines I wanted to, and I didn't want to cause a cycle of hype and disappointment. However, it was ultimately for the better: good things take time and I did not want to rush it myself. I also wanted to spend a lot of time polishing the game.
It took us this longer than we hoped to release this, although they are many reasons why:
-Both me and Obesebear were learning the hoops of RPG Maker. Sometimes plugins broke something or we had to spend time fixing some stuff. Both of us are way more talented at RPG Maker now and any future development on the game would not take as long because the initial hard hurdles are over.
-Me taking a long time to join the Discord and get more involved (I thought being part of the Qhimm forum would be enough, but it turns out being part of active discussions is far more important than I realized). Additionally, I was busy doing a lot of work on the Crisis Core Upscale Project so I wanted to finish that up a bit.
-We had to move everything from 4:3 to 16:9, and re-do the backgrounds and positions of characters.
-We had to re-loop the music of the original tracks, as we decided to no longer use MIDIs.
-We had to change all the background windows to a translucent version.
-The release of Ever Crisis in February severely disheartened me and Obesebear's motivation to work on this project.
-I went on vacation and due to an unfortunate situation, I was lost a week more than I wanted to.
-We decided we wanted to include partial voice acting, so with the help of Tsunamods, we were able to find some good actors to bring the cast to life.
-I wanted to add the Shinra Building, so I created the entire level myself.
-We implemented a new script.
-I had to spend time studying some of the OG FF7 (such as how menus look) and ripping sound effects
ABOUT THE CURRENT DEMONow that that's out of the way, here's some basic information about our game, dubbed 0.1a for now. If I had to give a rough estimate as to how long it is, it could be between 1 hr 20 mins up to even 4 hours. Why the big gap in playtime, you ask? Well, some players may breeze through the combat while others may need to spend time retrying.
Some things in our version were not actually part of Before Crisis, but for understandable reasons.
This demo is not a 1:1 recreation of Before Crisis' chapter 1, and it never will be. However, don't be alarmed because but we aimed to be faithful where it counts, so people can still play our version and not be left out on anything, especially story-wise. Think of it as more of a vanilla KH2 vs KH2: Final Mix experience. For example, there is a boss battle and a secret optional location not available in the original. This is because we wanted our chapter one to be a banger with more exploration.
One major change is that Cissnei was not actually playable until chapter until Chapter 18 in Before Crisis, as she was more of an unlockable "bonus" in the game. In our version, Cissnei is our protagonist because we felt it was the best choice and Crisis Core wants us to empathize with her. I agree that it would be better to be Cissnei, as opposed to one of the other random Turks who have little backstory and are ignored by the rest of the Compilation of FF7. Cissnei is intended to be written into our script in a natural manner. At the very least, our version is a nice little "prequel" to Crisis Core and a taste of Before Crisis for people who know very little about it. I also hope it will help people empathize with Cissnei before her appearance in Crisis Core.
I did the entire combat system myself, balancing enemies. I decided to go with turn-based instead of ATB because turn-based is easier to program for and balance. An ATB version someday in the future is not out of the question, but it is far from being my priority.
SOME THINGS I'M NOT TOTALLY SATISFIED WITHThere are some things I didn't get to put in this version which I would like to later. For example, I think some of the sprite work could be improved (I'm not too happy with Cissnei's walking animation), and I would like to add some more dialog choices. At one point, two characters turn semi translucent because I didn't want to delay this demo any longer, but I do plan to add KOed sprites in later. Some things I wanted to implement was a way to make the TP (aka Limit in our game) bar to flash colors when full, but I could not find a way. Another thing people may notice is that footsteps may be inconsistent or not appear in certain areas. This should be addressed in the future.
HELP, ADVICE WITH THE DEMO, AND OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION. READ THIS!- F4 is fullscreen, F5 is force reload to title screen
- Shift (to run), Z (confirm)/X (cancel/menu) are used if you are playing on keyboard.
- This demo is controller compatible, but you may need to press cancel or some other button in order to "activate" your controller first. Try spamming all buttons on your controller to get it active. It's a weird RPG Maker thing.
- Be sure to extract the "www" folder inside the .rar as well or saving won't work.
- You need to examine the first save point in order to use it, walking over it won't work. Please test to see if the first save points works. It's not a super long demo anyway and you can retry battles if you die.
- The "ALL" Materia does not work exactly like FF7 automatically. You need to press a button (such as Shift on PC) while targeting enemies. As in FF7, the All Materia needs to be in a paired slot.
- If you hold Z during cutscenes, it will fast-forward them.
- Please do not spoil the puzzles (e.g. posting number codes) in this thread. It ruins the fun.
- Please read the instructions and tutorials very carefully as you play. If you skim, you'll probably end up confused somewhere.
- You can get through the combat more easily if you notice general patterns to the enemies and strategize. My advice is to be conservative with healing items, and focus on defeating one enemy at a time because flip-flopping will give them more turns.
THE FUTURE OF THIS DEMO AND BEFORE CRISIS: CISSNEIUnfortunately, at this time, we simply don't know what the future is for our project. This is because a lot of it is based on the success of this demo, reception and popularity. Ideally, I would like to finish the game (all 25ish chapters) and it's something I could very well work on for several more years. Although I'd summarize some boringish filler chapters, I'd keep the chapters which I feel are worth preserving. Here are the chapters which I would summarize and the ones which I could ensure are remade (if the game is finished in the future, then I would like to later make the chapters I summarized to be playable):
2 - Summary. The layout is rather boring and President Shinra is meh.
3 - Playable, because it introduces Elfe.
4 - Summary, meh Azul storyline
5 - Summary, linear layout despite Cloud, no major plot significance
6 - Summary, Rude/Chelsea storyine isn't significant to main plot
7 - Summary - Sebastian/Essai are meh
8 - Playable, with Zack as an ally
9 - Summary, linear layout, Heidegger is meh
10 - Playable, has interesting Shinra Building layout
11 - Playable, with Aerith as ally
12 - Summary, it's linear and just going over the Nibelheim Incident
13 - Playable, important plot details, interesting Shinra Mansion layout
14 - IDK, layout of Wutai is interesting so maybe a mix of summary and playable
15 - Summary, linear, meh Cid story
16 - Playable, with Barret as ally, interesting dungeon
17 - Playable, important storyline
18 - Summary, Cosmo Canyon boring
19 - Playable
20 - Summary
21 - Summary
22 - Summary
23 - Playable, final dungeon
24 - Playable, final dungeon
Depending on how things go, we may stop after a few updates, or we may finish it to the end. One of the major reasons is, of course, the elephant in the room: Ever Crisis. Why work on a remake if Square already said they are remaking it? None of us expected this and it caught us off-guard. We have no idea how faithful their remake will be to the original. This is why we don't have plans to put the project on full blast (i.e. making every chapter playable) to the end. However, we have created a version of the game that is still a great "base" for the future at the very least. If Ever Crisis happens to miss anything important or change too much (such as removing some important flashback important to a character's backstory), our version could be a complement to it.
DONATIONSOur version is free and will always be free, and we made this as a passion project with little budget. Perhaps even a shoestring budget. Obesebear is accepting donations and the more funds he receives, the more he will feel motivated to fully work on the game. Creating this demo was time-consuming, and creating the rest of the game with only two main programmers will also be. So if you enjoyed our demo and wish for the game to have a bright and complete future, please donate here:
https://www.paypal.com/donate/?business=5VY9FTRUS4LES&no_recurring=1¤cy_code=USDPeople can feel free to donate to me as well, but I prefer only Steam wallet codes via forum or Discord PMs (I buy games occasionally, but the money I save from games helps my life out in other ways, so it's just another way to donate).
ABOUT LEGALITYSome people may be wondering about the legality of this project. This is legal because people have been creating fan games using official assets for ages. However, this also means Square has the right to send a C and D at any time, but it is unlikely they care, and it would be an insult to the FF7 fans, and people who have been working to archive Before Crisis. Additionally, our version is free and it is usually when people put their fan games behind a paywall when companies start to take action (meanwhile, we are simply accepting optional donations). Richter already remade his own version of Before Crisis and has had no difficulties with Square, so we are not worried.
RPG MAKER HELP, POSSIBLE TRANSLATIONS, AND RECRUITMENTThere is a community of creative, passionate RPG Maker devs out there and making certain aspects of our game was a confusing process at times, such as implementing our phone menu, making sure custom animations appear, etc. We have decided to hide the game's source code in order to respect the authors of the paid plugins we bought. However, if anyone is working on an RPG Maker game and is wondering how we did X or Y in our demo, they can send me a message on our server and I will be happy to help out and can provide screenshots of the relevant code so other devs can improve their game.
If anyone would like to offer to volunteer to work on Before Crisis: Cissnei in any way shape or form, even in spite of its uncertain future, feel free to post a message in our Discord.
If anyone would like to translate our demo into another language, feel free to ask. I made some mock-ups for fun of what our game would look like in Japanese:
If someone encounters any major bugs, or has suggestions about anything, please let us know on our Discord.
CREDITS
I would also like to thank Naoya, who has been nice to talk to, and their efforts in trying to archive the original Before Crisis.
We also thank Richterwilker, who created a previous Before Crisis remake and inspired us to create our own. It is important that everyone knows that we are not trying to "one-up" Richter or take his thunder away from his version, we have respect for his work and don't want to hear any stupid false accusations that it's our intent.
DOWNLOADhttps://www.mediafire.com/file/qj616bjd7czmmua/BC_Demo_0.1a.rar/fileHere is the download, it is 400mb.
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