Infinity: The Last GBC RPG

[MRY]

After a 15-year hiatus, the programmers of Infinity, the first commercial project I ever worked on, decided to finish the game and release it for free.



You can get a demo of the first 2.5 hours or so (in my opinion, the weakest part of the game) here: http://affinix.com/downloads.html The full release will probably take a couple more weeks goodness knows how long.

You can read some thoughts I have about the story, which I wrote when I was around 19/20, beneath the spoiler tag (text taken from the WWS Facebook page).

Spoiler

Unfortunately, the first 2.5 hours of the game (which is what's covered) is far and away the least interesting part of the game -- as the party size grows, combat becomes much more complicated; as the number of skills/spells increases, combat becomes much more dynamic; and generally as the story goes on, it gets somewhat better.

The writing is . . . interesting? At least to me. As a matter of history, I wrote the basic story at 19 and the actual script at 20. I think a fair description of it is a late teenager cobbling together his memories of the jRPGs he played as a young teenager, and filtering that pastiche through the kind of angsty self-seriousness that sheltered late teenagers take for adulthood. Basically, the start of the game consists of a flashback to ~Maxim and ~Selan from Lufia, followed by ~Cecil from Final Fantasy II walking to ~Tintagel from Dragon Warrior, where he meets ~Kefka from Final Fantasy III in a dungeon, up to strange experiments. Overshadowing this is a fear of ~Dark Force from Phantasy Star returning to the world. So ~Cecil sets off to a kingdom named after Alutha (surely ~Arutha from Betrayal at Krondor?), wandering through every cliche jRPG dungeon (mountain pass, fire cave, forest, sewer, icy cave, etc., etc.). During the preview build, every character declaims in not very witty angry witticisms -- a la Destiny of an Emperor -- and generally mopes about.

My recollection is that in the post-demo areas, the story, while still essentially still consisting of ~cliches, moves in a more interesting direction and as the characters get to know each other, they probably move from angry ~witticisms to friendly ~witticisms.

Anyway, for people who grew up on the same games I did, I suspect it will be an interesting experience in vicarious nostalgia.

The graphics and music are nothing short of astonishing for an 8-bit game, and the gameplay is quite fun (in my opinion). Unlike the story, they can be enjoyed without an ironic detachment or nostalgic blinders.

-EDIT-
Somewhat inexplicably, I've been advised that the hobbyist community would like to know that the coders are no longer working to finish it and release it for free and that this post has been dissuading others in some way. So, anyway, as far as I know, the original coders are no loner planning to finish this...

 

[Crooked Bee]

I enjoyed it. Some of the writing felt different enough, although a lot of it was very cliched too (and a tad too rant-y). The golem subplot was amusing, if abrupt (so far). The combat/gem system seemed pretty simplistic, but it does seem to have the potential to get a bit more complex later.

Looking forward to the full release.

 

[MRY]

A "tad"? :D :understatement: The golem plot is central, but probably not that amusing. I do think the combat system gets better.

 

[Infinitron]

Hey MRY http://www.pcgamer.com/infinity-game-boy-game-pc/

After 15 years, a cancelled Game Boy RPG finds life on PC
Infinity was never released, but thanks to emulation it can now be enjoyed.

Every year, countless games are cancelled and forever go into the dark abyss known as vaporware. But every once in awhile, one claws its way back out of development hell, and into the world of the living.

That's exactly what’s happened with Infinity, an RPG for the Game Boy Color that was cancelled back in 2002 and has now resurfaced as a freely available ROM along with source code thanks to its developers. I've played an hour of it, and it's not hard to see that Infinity could've been one of the greatest RPGs on the Game Boy—making the fact that it was never published sting just a little bit more.

Fifteen years is a long time, but I'm happy that Justin Karneges and Mathew Valente, two of the developers, decided to not let sleeping dogs lie. Earlier this week, they posted to several subreddits sharing the ROM and source code, inviting anyone to play their RPG that never escaped publishing hell. Even if you're not interested in the game itself, their comments are worth a read for the rare insight of what it's like being a young indie developer trying to catch the eye of big publishers.

"In 2001 we tried to get [Infinity] published but there were no takers (neither third-parties nor Nintendo themselves). Main feedback was that the Game Boy Advance was coming out soon and RPGs don't sell very well anyway," writes Karneges in a Reddit thread. In the years that followed, the team tried to attract others without much luck. With the Game Boy Color entering its twilight years, too much attention was on the Game Boy Advance. At one point, Karneges even went to meet with Square Electronic Arts (back when the two worked together) and found only an "abandoned and empty office, save for a phone sitting on the floor." Thinking he must be in the wrong place, he tried calling them and the phone on the floor rang. "It just didn't make any sense," Karneges told me later over Skype, explaining that he must've walked in the day after Square EA had folded its offices in Costa Mesa, California.

In the years after, Infinity was all but abandoned, with the developers moving on with their lives until, after some recent conversations, they decided to release what they had online and go from there. "Our thought was we sat on this forever, let's not sit on it for another 15 years," Karneges said.

If you play it right now, the ROM ends prematurely about one quarter through the game, though the developers have estimated that Infinity is "around 90% complete." Valente said that the game was developed somewhat haphazardly, so only the first quarter is playable without encountering serious bugs or broken sections. The source code is being made available for any enterprising programmers curious at what the internal clockwork of a Game Boy game might look like. Doing anything with that source code might be a challenge, however, as Karneges admits it's not in the best of shape.

From the what I've played of Infinity, I really hope that the full game ends up being completed because it's easy to see how great it would've been for its time. Unlike the few RPGs that were released on the Game Boy Color, Infinity’s characters are surprisingly fleshed out, and its tone i pretty mature—what with the lead character losing his wife in the intro and all. The overarching story seems fittingly cliche for the era, but the writing is actually pretty good. That's not surprising when you realize that the story writer, Mark Yohalem, is now working on Torment: Tides of Numenera. But what has me more convinced Infinity stood a good chance of at least being a cult classic is the combat system. Instead of typical turn-based combat, your party takes turns moving around a grid and attacking, adding a surprising layer of depth and positioning in an era when RPGs were pretty simple.

If you're keen on trying it yourself, you can download the ROM from their official website. You'll need a Game Boy Color emulator, and the devs suggest using either RetroArch or OpenEmu with the Gambatte core. I tried playing it using Visual Boy Advanced and had graphical issues, but it's a simpler process getting it running.

For now, the future seems uncertain, but positive. Karneges told me that the feedback has so far been more positive than they were ever expecting, so much so that they've decided to do an AMA on Reddit. As for the future, they may consider a Kickstarter fundraiser to help them finish Infinity and properly release it, but with the source code floating around it's possible someone might beat them to it. While Infinity will never see a proper release on its intended platform, the optimist in me hopes that its new emulated home on PC will do just as well.

 

[Mustawd]

Posting in a released-before-Grimoire thread.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.wormwoodstudios.com/2016/08/divide-by-zero.html

Divide By Zero



When I was 19, I was unexpectedly hired to write the story to a GameBoy Color RPG, entitled Infinity. This was my first paid work as a writer, and actually my biggest paycheck for many years. More importantly than that, though, writing a jRPG story was something I had dreamed of -- and attempted -- for many years. As a little kid, I'd playedDragon Warrior with my older brother (the last RPG he ever played, the first of many for me), and after playing Shining in the Darkness, I became committed to the idea of making one myself.

I attempted to make an RPG in many different programming languages (BASIC on an Apple II/c, BASIC on a Macintosh IIsi, LogoWriter on that same Macintosh, QuickBASIC on a PC, and TurboPascal on a PC) and then a series of kinds of game-making software (ZZT, MegaZeux, Unlimited Adventures, Verge, and RPG Maker 95). This doomed endeavor -- and in a sense, it really was a single endeavor -- was probably most fueled byFinal Fantasy II, a game I played at a friend's house and dreamed of mimicking. It consumed most of my creative energy and much of my free time from about 1992 until 1999. Over the years, I collaborated with many people on the Internet, and dragged them into the black hole of wasted time.

One of those collaborators was Eric Haché, the indisputable king of jRPG-style music in that era. I solemnly believed that if I could get Eric on the project -- a game calledShadow Incarnate -- we couldn't fail.



Well, we failed.

After that, I became decided to stop importuning other people and wasting their time, and set out in RPG Maker to create a throwback homage to Final Fantasy II, a game calledRedemption. About three months into making it, I got an email from Eric out of the blue: he was doing the music for a GameBoy RPG, but the writer had flaked. Would I be interested in working on it?

The day I saw Infinity running on a real life, actual GameBoy, I nearly swooned.




That the game should be a technical marvel is no surprise because its coders, Justin Karneges and Hideaki Omuro, were basically superhuman savant programmers. Justin, for example, had managed to make a full-featured RPG (Joltima) on the TI-83 graphing calculator, something that in a sense vindicated my Quixotic effort to make a jRPG in, e.g., LogoWriter.




Getting to work on Infinity was beyond the biggest dream I'd had -- namely, to mimic a console RPG, but not actually to make one. The problem was, there was a tiny window of time to write the story, so I dusted off Redemption, and got writing: 25,000 words in three days.

Nineteen at the time, I imagined myself to be writing a mature homage to the games I grew up on. With the distance of 17 more years, I realize how mistaken I was -- it is a decidedly adolescent appropriation of those games. The story begins with a flashback to a heroes many generations ago and their tragic conclusion (just like Lufia and the Fortress of Doom), before turning to a fallen knight who has more than a little Cecil fromFFII in him visiting a castle that is plainly Tintagel from Dragon Warrior. There he meets a king who is equal parts taken from the the king of Baron in FFII and the king in Faxanadu, before encountering a villain who is plainly Kefka from Final Fantasy III and having a send-off that is plainly the bridge scene from FFII. He sets off through a series of environmental dungeons facing environmental enemies strikingly reminiscent of Secret of Mana, while visiting a desert town straight from The Magic of Scheherezade and then a post-apocalyptic (not in the modern sense) refugee town that is just like the future city inChrono Trigger (right down to an elder who riffs off the "Heal-thy" line). Along the way, all the characters spout emphatic one-liners that are somewhere between Destiny of an Emperor and River City Ransom. All of this adventuring takes place against a backdrop of a resurgent supernatural evil that is mostly Dark Force from Phantasy Star with a dash of Lavos from Chrono Trigger.

Anyway, this game got very, very close to completion, but a series of insane and insanely frustrating factors conspired to doom it. For example, Squaresoft's American branch expressed interest in seeing it, but shuttered its offices before the project lead (Justin) could arrive: when he showed up, he found empty office space with a Parasite Eve poster on the wall and a single telephone on the floor. He called the contact number he was given and the phone rang. Later, Crave Entertainment entertained publishing it, but while they mulled it over, the GameBoy Advace was announced and Golden Sun with it, and the technical marvel that was Infinity was now the most advanced Cro-Magnon scratching his beard at a newfangled Neanderthal.

So it goes. The project faded away. We all went onto other things. Years passed. More years passed. All the while, the game's sound engineer, Matthew Valente, kept the spark alive by teasing tidbits about Infinity on YouTube and elsewhere.

Finally, in 2016 -- a good 17 years after the project began and 15 years after it stopped -- Justin and Hideaki dusted off the code, and persuaded the game's visionary financier Matt Rossi to let a build and the code be publicly released.

So here it is. A time capsule. A living Cro-Magnon. A homage, pastiche, bricolage, fiasco of a story. Go grab it here.

MRY I guess we know who the living Neanderthal is.

 

[Darth Roxor]

so MRY is a weeaboo

good to know

 

[MRY]

so MRY is a weeaboo

good to know

There's a simple litmus test, which is whether people say that PST is their favorite RPG.

That said, I did play computer RPGs in parallel with the jRPGs, albeit with somewhat less frequency and starting somewhat later.