Red Zone (Let's Destroy the World)

The lifetime dream game of Esdeer. Originally "Esdeer" name was generated in a fantasy name generator and had a "Paladin" prefix, but along the character evolution he wasn't serving any authority or a highly abstract "holy" idea, so it faded out of usage.

The game prototyping started way back in 2006 using Adobe Flash by Esdeer himself, and my part with GameMaker started in 2007. I was only programming and Esdeer was drawing, making music, the plot, and everything else.

Never finished past the handful of prototypes because of no level design and inconsistent ideas about how the the gameplay should work, while obsessing over little shiny details like special effects particles, dialogues and plot twists. All despite having tons of hand-made sprites, music and plot.

Previously the project was (un)known as:

- "Ярость" aka "Rage" in 2006, masked armored hero that avenges the death of his parents, no technology, only magic. The idea was that helmet covered his face so that the player could easier associate themselves with the hero. At some point later Esdeer decided that the initial concept of a masked hero would now be a rogue "program", another boss of the game, perhaps a hidden one, but the plot was never finished.

- "Red [Z]one" in 2007-2010, non-masked hero uses technology which others call magic, wants to try to become a hero but ends up discovering that the world is mostly a technological illusion like The Matrix.

- 「この世界を破壊しましょう」 (Kono Sekai O Hakai Shimashou) aka "Let's Destroy [The] World" since 2011. Esdeer was enraged (pun intended) with too many "Red Zone" names he stumbled upon:  Sega Megadrive game, Beatmania IIDX track name, and even a cell phone network subscription plan name. The original meaning of "Red Zone" was the name of the one of the Zones where humans were isolated to repopulate the seemingly post-apocalyptic world, but this was never clear in his concepts. If I remember correctly, there were supposed to be Green and Blue Zones, but Esdeer never mentioned any events or characters in those. In 2011 I made a dialog system that supported 4 characters with some procedural animation, in a Visual Novel style, but Esdeer didn't make any use of it and then just forgot it existed.

- "true hea[R]t", Rezista's small side-story with a self-made manga in 2012. Prototype version was named "last wor[L]d".

- "Now You Have No One" 4-character tactical team prototype in 2013, see https://xitilon.itch.io/now-you-have-no-one

He also made a couple of his own prototypes in Scirra/Construct, but they were even more basic than mine.

In 2014-2015 we moved on to create Castle of no Escape, then Castle of no Escape 2 with a bigger team in 2015-2016, then failed to make Castle of no Escape 3 throughout 2017-2022: https://xitilon.itch.io/castle-of-no-escape-3-canceled

Early ConE1 prototype was using LDTW's weapons and armor, but ConE was too much gameplay-driven to support the complex story that Esdeer wanted to tell.

Esdeer continued to conceptualize his world in 2017-2022, introducing new side story characters and even thought about the possible events of a sequel, but the game never got past its prototyping phase. He realized it's too time-consuming to make all the pixel art animations in a full Mega Man X4 like PS1 style like he wanted to, so he tried to make 8-bit sprites and tiles. It's how the project looked in the end of his time.

On February 18th, 2022, Esdeer passed away from complications connected to alcohol abuse.

This page preserves some of his dreams and hopes of 2006-2022. It's only a fraction of them, but it already took more than a year to sort in my nowadays rarely available free time. Maybe someday I'll structure it better.