I’ve already started working on an idea with a friend of mine. This has been my hobby for so long – what will I do next? I think I’ve made a weird and interesting game, and now that it’s finally being released I’m filled with a surreal mixture of relief, satisfaction, and fear. People liked what I was doing, and I liked what I was doing. The answer is that I was just too invested in the characters and the world that I’d created.

There was no chance of making any money, for one, and a high possibility of the same kind of copyright strike that affected games like Pokémon Prism and Pokémon Uranium.

Sometimes I considered quitting development altogether. My passion for Pokémon has faded since I was a teenager, and sometimes I didn’t touch the game for months. As the (forever patient) community that supported me during development can confirm, there was a lot of downtime between updates, and not always for a good reason. I’m writing this not to puff myself up, but to balance the fact that working on the game wasn’t always easy. Looking back at where I started, I’m impressed in the growth in my abilities and ambitions as a developer. I used each “chapter” as a playground for experimentation, to improve and subvert the game’s formula, and I’m proud of a lot of what I accomplished – this final instalment very much included. I had plenty of inspiration – Pokémon Colosseum, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and its Glitz Pit, even fellow fan-game Super Pokémon Eevee Edition, which pointed me towards using Final Fantasy XI as the foundation for the game’s soundtrack – but I surprised even myself with the directions the game went. It was a jumping off point for a plot involving a shadowy Cult, government conspiracies, time travel, and the spectacle of live television. The game looked a bit different back then – the main character didn’t talk, for a start – but the basic idea was there: young man enters tournament with his brother, has adventures with the brother, then has to fight the brother, reigniting their bitter rivalry. It must have been at least ten years ago, since I first posted on the Progressing Games section of the PokéCommunity forums way back in June 2011. I can’t remember when I first started working on Legends of the Arena. Or you can head over to the subreddit HERE. If you want to join in any discussion, then you can join the Discord server HERE. Hi everyone! Welcome to the final update of Pokémon: Legends of the Arena.

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