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• What is The Sword and the Fish Game?

  The story of The Sword and the Fish's inception is almost as miraculous as the story itself - only instead of magic there's hours of work. Here I tell my story of how the game went from being the fever-dream of a madman to the reality of a madman.

  The Sword and the Fish was begun in 2000 when I got a hold of RM2000 off a friend and my brother Tyler and I began a silly story about a hick from a small cult town. I have a tendency not to quit on working ideas, and SatF never ceased to work. Thus, over 7 years I continued to work on the story as it grew and grew to become the game it is now. The end result is a 1600 map colossus that wrote itself after halfway.

  

  Tyler soon dropped out of production and became chief beta tester due to time constraints. I took the ball and ran with it. Our objective at the start was to never know where it was going. We tried not to think too far ahead in case we became prone to rushing events to get through plot. After chapters 1 and 2, I settled into a rhythm of predicting things a few towns in advance - then around Willowglade I figured out the rest of the game. I think it's a testiment to the content's quality that it expanded so drastically, but it could also be a testiment to my insanity.

  At the start we experimented a lot with .wavs of us dicking about and/or mp3s of modern bands. Most of the guitar noises early on are us testing RM2000's boundaries. This later culminated in both Chet & the Lemons and the infamous Ballad of Clifford (recorded near the end of production). After a while specialty gags got tedious and in retrospect the game's size was inflated. But the band plot came and went, leaving musical gimmicks behind anyways. I can't nor wouldn't cut them out if I could, but some gamers find the file too big to download. I just say leave your PC on overnight.

  

  Most of the years were spent beta testing. Testing maps for difficulty is hard when you know everything about the game : my heroes have a lot of the best items, I know what to get and where to go, I know what every item does. I plugged away off and on, never working more than two months at a time without a break, but never breaking for more than two months. I couldn't wait to write the ending and end credits, and it helped motivate when I was at a spot that was redundancy heavy.

  Somewhere in the middle I went to see my brother in Ottawa. He was midway through beta testing a section, as usual. Over that weekend we recalled that he'd written a pile of wicked midi songs on his ghetto keyboard back in 1990. We found the black and white Mackintosh (being used as a nightstand) and hooked it up to his PC. All the songs were still there, and being dated were perfect RPG soundtrack songs. He even had a long symphony he'd written for a school project. From that came "The Sword and the Fish" theme, and from the rest the midi soundtrack was born.

  

  The game really took off once I found online RPG maker communities which sported new chipsets, facesets, and charsets. I had no idea such a community existed as this was just a side-project of mine. This new resource base helped the game's graphics improve and allowed for more characters to retain originality. It also taught me a few coding techniques that kept the game from being as basic as can be - including code for a world map and making more than three vehicles. It clued me in that maybe more than just my friends might want to play the game.

  Well before I worked on the 'free' world where you can fly wherever and hunt demons, I cut right to the chase and wrote the ending. It was easily the most fun part to do of the entire game. It felt very satisfying to have the protagonists and antagonists come to a conclusion, and a lot of end guy cliches were still ripe for plucking. After the last battle script and ending were written, I went back and filled in the 7 demons and lots of other tiny gags and tricks in the places you've already been. It was finally done - all the time spent over the previous 7 years had paid off with a finished product.

  

  The game has been downloaded over 2,500 times - I'm hoping people can continue to enjoy it. The comic also found on this site is the natural progression to a more accessible medium. It is a re-invention of The Sword and the Fish in a more direct story form. While all characters and many events are the same, I hope that it's plain to see the re-imagining is simply better. I know the characters inside out now, and instead of starting the story with intention to be random, I can formulate a wickedly weaving plot instead. This site will track the progress of both comic completion and game aftermath. How realistic are these goals? Well, back in 2000 I never would have expected to complete such a fun game by 2007 either, so in 2014 who knows where it'll be.
  
  Delicious!
  -Joel-