My Lessons From Rebirth: The Rise of a Hero, and why there will not be a re-release.

Last month, I came in contact again with the community at Mundo Maker. It was good reconnecting with one of the biggest Hispanic RPG Maker Communities on the internet.

One of the topics where I had the opportunity to talk about was on a re-release of Rebirth The Rise of a Hero. I got very excited to work on the IP again and fix the massive amount of bugs that the original game had. I was eager, motivated to complete my childhood dreams, I booted up my RPG Maker XP editor, did some playtesting on the game and this is where the real story of my game truly begins.

Game crashed at the first 4 minutes of gameplay

Yes, you've heard it right, after finishing the tutorial one vfx in the scene where Boisha first appears was using a script that took realtime snapshots in order to generate frames, and this library was written in C+ + by the community with no source code available anymore to replace. This crash happens at random, it means some people have been able to get past the tutorial and other people have not.

Copyright

When I originally buit the game I was a 13 years old kid dreaming big about selling a game with no knowledge into how to make a game and it shows, the RPG community was a crucia part of why this game exists in the first place, there was so much stuff which I couldn't perform myself and I just delegated and trusted to the community: from pixel art tilesets to illustrations, to sound effects, some of the content which I used unfortunately contained blacklisted resources which I was unaware of their existence at the moment of the game creation, creative commons was something I was unware of, I ended up stealing resources from coyrighted brands all over the place. Rebirth is what I describe a poisoned tea: you can't tell if the tea has been poisoned until you pass away from its effects.

Rebirth was a game deeply poisoned with copyrighted art, sound effects, voice acting, art from other encrypted games from the RPG Maker community, this issue falls into a gigantic grey zone, it's not about "good artists copy, great artists steal" anymore, it's about integrity.

It's not okay to steal someone's else's intellectual property and it will never will. Henceforth I am taking even a hard posture on the role of AI in game creation, not because it is not a helpful tool, but because there's many human beings out there who daily produce immense value to our culture and society and they are not even being paid a coffee as a thanks for their contribution.