FFvii Fortress is my baby, it’s the RPG that I’m most associated with and that I’ve spent the most time actually working on and running. The original Fortress opened back in 2003, though this layout is from the final release which was circa 2006 or so. Over a span of three years most of my RPG time and attention when to Fortress and through the evolution of the site it shows. The original Fortress was plain, the content pretty bad those the systems were in place early on. After a couple successive re-makes I finally found myself with the talent I needed to do it right, to make it look and ‘feel’ the way I wanted it to from the start and it shows in pages like this one. I selected the location template as the page to show, while not perfect (honestly I should have done a little more designing in the quest area but you have to remember MSN Groups was limited to 16kb page size so I couldn’t do much more). The layout itself is pretty standard for me at the time, clean, not flashy in any way. However, what always stood out with Fortress is the time I spent working on the in-page content design, as detailed here with the actual location image and sub-location information. I’m still really proud of these pages and hopefully some day soon I can have the whole site archived here (as well as the previous version so you can see the evolution for v2 to v3)

This was kind of an interesting layout for me, for one it was for a friends website but I really put a lot of effort into making in something different for MSN Groups. At the time the idea of having a navigation and content areas not be even was something you didn’t see on MSN Groups because of the limited HTML allowed so when we showed this one off it was a big hit. In the end the RPG never actually got finished, which is a let down but I was really happy to do the layout for Serno and it’s one that I always enjoyed, I wish I still had a coded version of it someplace so it could be seen with content, but alas I only have the original working image that was used to slice from. As a side note many of the ideas here ended up making their way to my own Kingdom Hearts RPG that I started work on when Serno stopped working on Memoria Chains. This layout was made entirely in Adobe Photoshop 7.

My long in development, probably never to be completed Final Fantasy VIII RPG known simply as Annihilation. This layout had a LONG journey to get to this point, it actually started as a much smaller MSN Groups layout for my DBZ RPG, Renewed Faith. It never got used for RF because reformatting all the content was not a task we wanted to take. After that I had reworked it for a follow up to my Chrono Trigger RPG, but again I didn’t end up going there. Finally it came to use for FF8A. I was fast at work on the layout and RPG on MSN Groups before it closed and the project went into hiatus again finally to be fully revived on Dystopia Productions. What you are viewing here was the probably 60% complete player profile page, it was mostly working as it should but I was unable to finish the mechanics to do everything before I abandoned the project. This is the building blocks for what will be the Chimera Engine.

When Dragon Quest VIII came out on the PS2 I was blown away with how great the game really was and it wasn’t long before I decided that I wanted to bring that atmosphere and overall feeling to a forum based RPG. This came about at the end of the MSN Groups era and I decided that I wanted to make the most detailed RPG that I could make, something that would blow every other RPG out of the water. Although this project ended up stalling when MSN Groups was announced to be closing and I only ever finished eight full pages of content I to this day believe each of those pages, including this one, are among my very best ever. Hopefully one day I’ll manage to make my way back to Dragon Quest VIII and finish the project for everyone to enjoy.

Aside from FFvii Fortress I was probably most known for my Trigun RPG known as Project Seeds. The RPG originally opened during the peek of the golden age of MSN Groups RPGs, 2003.  While it enjoyed a good run then it eventually went into the vault only to be brought back again in 2007. Two layouts came before this one during that reconstruction but neither of them ever saw the light of day. Finally I decided on a stripped down version and this is what I came up with. I have to give a big thanks to Keith Moore (Saiyen) for the vector used in the banner. I had originally used the same image from the Trigun artbook however it’s quality was less than great and Saiyen was kind enough to devote his time while I focused my work on the content.

One of the projects that I hope to get working on once the Chimera Engine is finished is a Metal Gear Solid RPG. It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time since I’m a huge fan of the MGS Games. About six months ago I decided that I was going to do a MGS RPG and started designing a layout to fit the site, I finished the basic design and knew pretty much what I wanted the RPG to look like and play like but I didn’t really have the drive to get down to working on it. Below you will find the layout which will eventually be used for Metal Gear Solid: Operation Aphelion. I’m pretty pleased with it, as it’s very minimalistic so it will allow the content to be the star, which is always my goal when I build a RPG.

his layout has come several months in the making. In the beginning it was a joint design between myself and Saiyen, who out of the final version did contribute the logo and the top navigation bar though most of the rest was of my design. When that project didn’t pan out I shelved the idea for awhile before coming back to it and doing some more design work to basically finish the conceptual design.
 
Update: Alright now that I’m starting to get this post theme together and getting the comments section up and whatnot I have gone back and actually included the layout to the post. Eventually I will have all of these done automatically where it connects to the section of the site that will serve as my portfolio, until then though I will just add them manually.