Entry 3

Back to Entry Selection.

Been another while, hasn't it? - June 29th, 2026.

Gonna be honest, I was not planning on writing a Dev Log entry like this, but I feel like people have the right to know what's going on with SELFLESS.

As things stand, the project is in pieces and I'm still trying to figure out where I want this game to go.
Firstly, I know I said I'd develop this game in RPG Maker XP, but now I'm starting to wonder if a different engine would be better suited.
I've made a lot of technological advancements with both RPG Maker XP and VX Ace, but more recently I've been tinkering around with RPG Maker 2003.
I started attempting to build what I had in XP over to 2003, and to be completely honest? This game feels way better suited for 2003 than XP.
The graphics look way better in 2003, and they should be a lot easier to make considering I don't have to scale anything up by 2 pixels. Everything is 1x1 here.
I also decided to revert my decision in the last entry ever so slightly. I brightened up the tileset but it's still just contrasted enough to not clash with event graphics.
Here's a screenshot comparison between the XP build and the 2003 build.

Obviously certain graphics like the bed and the TV are crunched, but I prefer that over having inconsistent pixel sizes for everything.
The UI and other elements also complement this look for the game. 

So I think going forward, the XP version will stay in the vault (it might get released way later down the line, who knows), but the 2003 version is what the rest of the game will be built on. Moving everything over to 2003 also gave me some time to reflect on the stuff I already put into the XP version and how I could rewrite things to be more up to my current standards, so stuff near the beginning has most certainly been rewritten to differ from the XP build. Some of the music and other aspects will stay the same in the 2003 build though. I have gotten better music-wise and I delved into sound effect creation.
I made new menu sounds for the game, which you can hear in this short demo video.

For all you trivia-heads out there wondering what those menu sounds are, those sounds were produced by gently flinging around a belt.
The little latch on the belt hitting against the solid material is what created those sounds, and I have all of them uncompressed.

The 2003 version will attempt to go for this look and the sounds will be just as crunchy as that, so hopefully you guys like how that's going.

Still though, I'm struggling to figure out how I want the story of the game to go.
I have certain beats I want to hit in my head, but how to get to those points and make a decent coherent story out of it is the hard part.
Maybe one of these days I'll find someone that can help me with writing the story to where I have an idea of how to continue development.