The picture above is the reason why I am writing this post. But before I talk about the picture above, I’ll start by telling you a wonderful little journey I had before I published OldStory recently.
It all started 3 weeks ago. I received an e-mail that said I had a private message on my Youtube account. It was unusual because I never thought I’d ever receive any messages. The last time I used my Youtube account was months ago, to upload a trailer and gameplay footage of OldStory.
I checked out the message, and it was from a random guy who asked if my game had been completed as he looked forward to trying it as he was an old player and like me, wanted to relive the experience of playing MapleStory.
His last sentence made me really sad because I had abandoned OldStory long ago. After attempting to publish it on NewGrounds sometime in February, it was removed shortly after. I suspected it was due to copyrights, but after confronting them that there were other similar flash game simulators on their portal, they did not get back to me, and I lost the will to chase them about it. I left OldStory in the dust after that nasty experience.
So when I read that Youtube message, I felt sad that OldStory had gone to waste just like that. Two of my friends really enjoyed it, and I hoped that other people would enjoy it too. So after mustering up lots of courage and willpower, I headed to an alternate flash game portal, Kongregate.
I nervously uploaded my game on Aug 5. It was the moment I had been waiting for for so long. I had lost quite a bit of hype because so much time had passed since I had last seen ‘OldStory’, but I was still eagerly awaiting what comments I would get from players.
It’s kind of interesting how it all turned out. I never was the type to make a Youtube account to upload videos or even make a wordpress. But in the end, it was stepping outside this little comfort zone that made this a wonderful experience. I never thought that a random youtube message from a random guy would actually change the fate of OldStory, a game project which I had long forgotten about.
That’s the power of the internet, that you can be influenced by someone miles away.
You can play the game by clicking here.
I wanted to write a post when the above happened, but couldn’t get the time to. Ultimately, it was when I received another wonderful private message on Kongregate did I actually feel like I had to write something, and the contents of that message is the picture at the beginning of this post.
It was the best comment I had ever received. In the past few days, I was quite demotivated because the game had received a much lower rating than I had anticipated. The players seem to come from the extreme ends. There are those who really enjoy the game, but at the same time I get equal amount of messages from players who didn’t enjoy it.
It is comments like the one above that give me the encouragement to make games and make my day. I never expected anyone to actually reach 100 new Game Pluses, because that takes a significant amount of time invested, so based on that, I was glad that there was someone who really enjoyed the game and I am grateful that he took the time to write such a heartwarming message.
YYZ 