Oh. Spork is a game I'm putting my real effort and feelings into making. It started as an idea in early 2015 a short time after I found Reborn. At that time after I wrote down a lot I kind of set it aside because I thought "There's no way I'll ever actually be able to do this". But then I saw that other people were inspired from Reborn to make their own fangames, so I downloaded RPG Maker and Essentials in late May that year after fully planning out the story, features, etc. I didn't think I'd get very far, but I decided to try anyway. Since at this point it was still just a casual thing and I was still doubting whether I'd actually be able to make something, there were long periods of time where I didn't work on it, resulting in the first episode of Spork releasing in July 2016 instead of the originally planned October-November 2015. I was still happy to have gotten to the point of releasing an episode.
Although it's not really unexpected for a first release from someone who has no experience with anything involving game-making, the first upload of ep 1 was a mess. ~90% of posts here when I first released Spork were of bug reports, and every time I thought I fixed all the ones I was capable of fixing a new wave of bugs was discovered.
Most of the maps were also a lot bigger than they needed to be, and trees + other natural objects were too uniform. Although I corrected a lot of the early mapping mistakes I still think my mapping could use more improvement, and I'll hopefully get better the more I work on the game. Map size has actually been the biggest challenge for the Sea Star Society, partially because seven of the maps for it are connected and my brain seems to use one of the sections in particular as a sort of default for how the other sections should be, when the sizes should really depend on what the section is.
Spriting is something I can't really do at all, and if Palletite hadn't approached me offering assistance, Spork's sprites would most likely still be the recolors they were from the first four uploads of ep 1. Art is something I've never been able to do well, on paper or on a computer. Even staying in the lines is a challenge since my hands can't seem to stay still. I'm eternally thankful for Palletite's help.
I feel like I didn't intend to write a whole history of Spork when I started this post, but it was still fun to think about and type.