I've been thinking of a sequel to the award winning Don't Move for a while now. It may never happen, or it might be up at any given time. I figured it would only be reasonable to have a little chat, aka a retrospective, about this title. I'll look back on the game and tell everything I know about it, and maybe chat about it too. Let's talk about....Don't Move!


And oh boy, what a game to look back on.

It was late 2007. The Absolute Garbage Contest the Second was on. Being in a usual state of unknowing what to do and not working on anything much, I decided to give the contest a shot. After all, I missed the first contest, so I figured I would make something this time. At the very worst I could get a silly review from Valk, so why not?

I tried to brainstorm a good, crappy game idea. Then I thought, "Why not make a game where the player can't do anything? That would be a crappy game!". So I booted up RPG Maker, and by :36 I had a complete garbage game. A simple game where you aren't allowed to move. What make it somewhat humorous is that other people and objects could walk, but not the player. So I wrapped it up and sent it in. I also wanted to do two more projects, but was rather lazy and just sent the one.

And come review time, I was glad to finally see a review pop up for my game, and the first one, no doubt! I was pretty excited. I figured it would have gone something like this, "You are not allowed to move. Other people in the game can. Thanks for wasting 3 minutes of my time, 1ce!"

I read the first line, "It does not work." I did a double take.

The rest is history.

The whole time I was hoping to hear Valk say SOMETHING about the game itself. But no, he went on and on about how the game refused to work. Every sentence was more surprising than the last. I couldn't believe it. I booted up the game file myself and, sure enough, it didn't work.

I became the contest winner for the contest. Completely by accident.

So, one big question mark for the game since it's contest debut....WHY didn't it work?

For a long time, I had figured I had corrupted the data. I had an earlier incident with another RPGMaker 1 game that did this, Lantis's Secret of Everyone. When hefirst sent it to me, I had to transfer the game on a floppy disk to the computer that had the dexdrive. Since the floppy was faulty, it caused a glitch where the scenario wouldn't load. After replacing the floppy, the problem went away. So my original thought was that since I had used a floppy for the game, it must have corrupted the file, and that's why it didn;t work.

The real answer was much simpler than that, though.

It was only till a few days ago that I believed the above to be true. Two days ago I opened up Don't Move! to check out the game, and I figured out why it never loaded the scenario.

The scenario name never matched the system data.

In RPG Maker 1, you type in a scenario name to match the system name, and that's how it knows what scenario to load up, which is useful is you're switching cards.

The scenario data said Don't Move. The system card was blank.



So, the whole thing has turned out to be one of (if not the) biggest flukes in RPG Maker history. One huge oversight got me to win the contest. I'm still a little stunned by it all. How could I have overlooked something like that? I certainly wanted to make my mark on the RPG Maker community, and I think I certainly have, though not in the ways I'd intended.

On a final note, what do I have to say to my competitors who lost to a fluke? Well.....better luck next time!

Wish that had worked with me and EVIL. The castle at the start, you could only enter at a certain time. Unfortunately, I didn't know that by setting the time of the town to some other specific point, I made it so time doesn't flow, thus ensuring the castle never opened, thus never allowing you to beat the game. I didn't win, though.

Someday I want to fix it and enable players to get to the REAL torture.