About me

HI! I'M A BIG INTERNET NERD WHO WATCHES DIRTY ANIME MOVIES AND HANGS OUT ON TEH INTRANET FORUMS ALL DAY! I'M SOOOOOOO AWESOME!

... Now that I have your attention.

For those of you that don't know me, my name is Rodpop. If you're first question in your mind is "A/S/L?", then I'll go ahead and tell you. I'm 17, I am of the male species, and I am located in the United States of America. If you want me to be specific then get out of my site, you stalker.

Some of my hobbies (besides RPG Maker, which I'll get to in a minute) include Cross Country running (as in racing 5 Kilometers. 3.1 miles, not running ocean to ocean), listening to music (Queen's my favorite band), Making all sorts of humorous and creative things (I do stick figure comics!), and finding funny things on the wonderful world of the internet. I'd like to say I'm a pretty lovable guy, but that's terribly egotistical. I try to be as nice as I can be, but if u r 2 laze 2 spel & tipe curectly then I might whip out a mighty wrath. You've been warned.

I've been on the RPG Maker scene for over three years now, thanks to a friend of mine showing me this cool program like the Play Station RPG Maker I has used, except "you can actually see your guys in fights!" Back when I first started out, I was probably one of the worst n00blettes ever. I'm so glad I never released my very first project, since it was terrible. I mean it. The battles took forever and the storyline made no sense. The mapping was horrendous too. The first map, which was supposed to be a field, was an L shaped piece of the RTP grass tile surrounded by water. It was also in the top left corner of the map... It pains me just thinking about it.

Regretfully, I did release my second game I worked on. It was called Legend of the Dream hero, and while it was probably a million times better than my first attempt at a game, that's not saying too much. I guess I have to give myself a little bit of credit though, since it did feature an edited DBS and actual non linear sidequests, but it was pretty terrible. Since I just so happen to still have this game, peep some screenshots and see how far I've come.

Luckily for me, I only released the game to the GameFAQs RPG Maker 2003 boards, which were booming with new RPG Makers at the time. They loved it, so I managed to not be scared out of the community forever. I ended up making about 150 maps for that game before I decided to quit, and it actually took a couple hours to beat everything I had put together.

After that project, I worked on a lot of things on and off. I started work on a game that I had called Silver Star Saga, which I made with the intention of being the best RPG Maker game ever. Bad idea on my part. I tried making lots of custom menus and special features, but it wasn't pretty; every letter of every word was an event. I definitely didn't have enough experience to make what I had wanted, and that only made me more frustrated. It saddens me to think that, at one point, I got caught up in an idea as egotistical as "I am the best". Besides, my map making still sucked pretty bad, in addition to the fact that every playable character was a sprite from Final Fantasy 6.

I took about a week off from RPG Maker at that point, vowing to never even touch the program ever again. Oh the irony. It was the beginning of summer, and my time with RPG Maker amounted to about 3/4s of a year. I decided to screw making something awesome and trying to please the community, and I started on a genre of game that I am somewhat known for now - movies. The "game" was called RTP Story, and it followed various adventures of Alex and his RTP friends. I was getting a little better with RPG Maker at this point, so it wasn't a terrible movie in my opinion (if one can judge their own games anyway). I learned some valuable lessons on how to properly make a project that you simply watch and enjoy, so to say I wish I never started it would be a lie. I ended up releasing a demo of the game which you could probably still find if you looked hard enough. I wouldn't recommend it though... even if it's not terrible, it's not exactly a work of art..

It was around this time that I joined my first RPG Maker production group too. If I remember correctly, it was called Knightmare Productions, home of RPG Zone Zer0. It was a fun group to be in, but the game we were producing (called Dragoon Dynasty... don't you love all the puns?) never picked up at all. There was a plotline developed, but that was about it. I think the game mainly stopped simply because everyone mysteriously disappeared. Seto, Shotgun Messiah, Darklink... if any of you guys are reading this, it'd be cool to hear from you. It's been... what, two years?

My next big thing was Object Collect. Probably my first "good" game, it was a sequel to a stupid game I literally made in an hour (that's why it had the subtitle "The One Hour Game 2"). Read up about it on the site. I had a positive reaction from the community. I remember off the top of my head that one guy gave it a 9/10, and someone wanted me to join some other site and advertise the game there. Cool stuff. ;)

In the few months that followed, which at this point I had a little more than a year's worth of RPG Maker experience, I entered and won the First Worst Game Ever contest, and I also made Key Collector. You can read up about those things elsewhere.

In the final chapter of what I'll consider my history, I spotted this guy named REDDAP who had a topic along the lines of "I'm thinking about making a game based on this community" on GameFAQs. Despite what REDDAP claims, I'm pretty positive I was the first person to sign up for this community game, having no idea what it would be or end up becoming. I saw it slowly evolve (despite a lot of nay-sayers who said that a small board could never have a good community game), and I realized that the character I originally posted lacked a lot of depth. I took four days to compose a short movie which I was sure was going to pass off as a cheesy love story, but little did I know. The title of this movie? In My Heart She Remains.

Before releasing that movie, I thought that my plot making skills were null. After seeing the reaction it got from the community, I became confident in my plot writing skills and started making games with complex plotlines and the like.