Four Island

Many people ask me repeatedly, "what's KSA?" Then I ask them how on earth they know that name, and they reply that I talk about it all the time. Then I feel weird for forgetting that. For some reason, I've always kept pretty much everything about KSA completely secret. But now, I'm going release that information and more.

KSA stands for Kirby Star's Adventures, and it was the first RPG I had ever made. What made it stand out from the rest of my old games was it's plot, which I fell in love with. The game reached lore status in my book and I was happy that I had managed to make such a good game.

Then there came that one fateful day in 2008. I was sitting in front of my old, dying computer. I had booted into a Linux OS from a floppy disk in an attempt to save precious documents from my doomed computer. As the hard drive started to crash, I frantically copied folders from the computer to my memory stick. Halfway through each transaction, the hard drive would spit out an IO error and stop copying. After this happening four times, the fragile hard drive uttered a final wheeze and crumbled into nothingness. My old computer, with so many important things on it, was dead.

When I returned to my normal computer later that day and checked what I had managed to save, I found two VB.NET games I had made, a copy of RM2K and a folder called "tehadks". I had interpreted that to mean "Teh Adventures of Kirby Star," and I was overjoyed that I had managed to save KSA from my dying computer. When I opened the project in RM2K, however, it became apparent that I hadn't. The Adventures of Kirby Star, while having a similar name to Kirby Star's Adventures, was a different (and not so legendary) RPG I had made back in the old day. I was defeated, my game lost to the void of electrons.

A few months ago, I was looking around in my home folder after my boot manager's configuration files got messed up and I was determining which files to save when I reinstalled the operating system. I came across the folder "pc2lap", astonishingly contained those four folders: "arden", "ARDEN UN", "progfil" and "tehadks". The sight of Teh Adventures of Kirby Star made me really miss KSA, so I decided that I would do everything I could to recreate it. Thus, the KSA Restoration Project was created. I wrote down everything I could remember from the game and then got my brother to do the same as he was a frequent player of the game. However, I wasn't yet motivated enough to do anything with that data.

Two months later, I came across the mind-dump and remembered KSA for the third time. This time, however, I was driven to recreate the game because of my fond memories of it. I did end up completing most of it, substituting forgotten explanations for humor (Kirby: ....well, Starla didn't tell me exactly what to do here so I guess we'll just do some random errands for you. Witch: Good, because Starla never told me how I got you to do said errands for me) but it just didn't feel right tarnishing the game's memory with something that might not have been as good as the original. Because of this, I stopped work on the project again.

However, all was not lost. Some of you may have seen my Facebook status update last week. If not, here it is:

Starla Insigna is freaking out with excitement because she just found a folder called KSA on her computer that could contain the real original KSA. I'm going over to Windows to check it out :)"

Starla Insigna

I had found "pc2lap" again and decided to do some sifting. The Arden games didn't turn up anything (other than the fact that my old VB.NET games' code was.... scary), but "progfil" (which I assume to be DOS' shortening of Program Files) did turn up something rather interesting. The only folder within Program Files that had started to copy over to my memory stick was one called ASCII, which is the company that made RM2K. I found an empty folder called "RTP" and one called "Project", which I had previously assumed to contain the RM2K example game, Don Miguel's Adventure. However, when I looked inside the folder, I was shocked and amazed to instead find a folder called KSA. I freaked out and restarted into Windows to see if it was, truly was, KSA.

The state of the project was similar to that of "tehadks", while all of the maps were intact as well as some of the resources, the database was gone. This meant that the game couldn't be played, though I still could open the game in RM2K and look through the maps. They were all there, completely intact, and I was so happy. All of the terrain, the characters, the conversations, the events, it was all there. The complete plot of KSA, as well as the original maps, were all at my disposal.

Because the original was unplayable, I decided that I would continue working on the remake. I wouldn't have to feel bad about ruining the memory because I now had the complete transcript of the original happenings. I even had the bright idea of letting you choose at the beginning of the game whether you would like to see the original dialogue or the humorous version. KSA will (hopefully) be fun when it is finished. So yippy yay yap, I can't wait to finish it and let you readers tell me what you think.