Note that this is a rather lengthy and wordy post detailing the background of the game's conception and where it's coming from. You can enjoy the game without reading this. :)


I know I've said many times over than I'd have loved to play a Battle Network MMORPG. Since Capcom never seemed like they'd grant me that wish, I decided to take the matter into my own hands. Where did THAT come from, though? Read on for the details...


Some years ago, there were a few mostly unrelated elements that I wanted to work on, in no specific order:
- Have my own PET-like device
- Have my own fan-character / NetNavi
- Add something more interactive to the website
- Add a RPG game to the board

Then, on a cold autumn day in 2007, Wind made the following post (the original copy has since been lost):

A few days after Wind's post, it all clicked together: create a Battle Network-themed game tied to the message board. On the following morning, I took a notepad and started putting on paper all of my ideas: game concepts, layout sketches, database structures, possible attack modes... everything that came to mind. A few weeks later, I started coding. It took a lot of time, some people dropped off, I took a few breaks from the project, grand plans were made and than downscaled, Capcom almost killed the series and fan interest... but here we are at last.


I was very ambitious with this design, and so were those I hired to help. Things got delayed, reorganized, and I decided to release some components of the whole design earlier than everything else so I could add features to the board and get some bugs ironed out. Among these:

• Remember 2011's April's Fools Day gag, the Stream disguised as a Facebook-lookalike? Which is now part of the board? That was the initial concept for a "game timeline" for the Cyber Grid players to track how others progressed. That's still how I want it to be. Right now, it tracks board profile changes and Minecraft achievements, but it'll be expanded in the future to show the progress of Cyber Grid players.
  
• The achievements system, from the same year? Designed for Cyber Grid, reused on April's Fools Day to help me debug the system without raising suspicion.
  
• The Pokémon minigame, where you had to time pressing a button on your keyboard to win? That's an adaption of "react"-type attacks on Cyber Grid.
  
• Remember 2012's April gag, with the item hunt? I used that opportunity to get some more game code debugged with a larger group of people.
  
• Some of you have seen my fan EXE character, Unity.EXE. One of my reasons to design her was for this game.

As I indicated before on the launch announcement, I had a few people to help me. After all, creating and designing a game, even while reusing some components, is a rather large task. I originally called on The Helldragon and J_Hibiki to co-design this with me, as they both seemed to have an affinity for the series and it's characters. That worked for a while, but life happened and they chose to take their own paths. Fair enough. Not wanting to continue alone, I went up to Arkane to continue refining some elements and enter some of the game's data. The double cancellation of Mega Man Universe and Legends 3 in 2011 put a damper on a lot of us. Arkane dropped off the radar, and I didn't do much with this project for a while...

However, it was clear to me that I didn't want to see it die. I thought it's base design was solid, and that it'd be a nice addition to the Mega Man PC Website and the forums. Besides, too much work had gone on this only to drop it. As such, I took a decision last December: lock down the current design, polish what was mostly complete, remove undeveloped features, and push it on April's Fools Day. Forcing a deadline meant that at least something would be released, and hopefully feedback from the players would make it easier to move forward. That's when I called on Sb20 to look at this, test a bit everything, and give his unique point of view. And that's where we are now.

Thanks to all four of you who were interested enough in the concept to spend time working on it!


It's good (and a relief!) to finally have something out in the open after all these years. If you look at Unity.EXE's profile, you'll see her "Created on" date of February 23, 2008. That's when I registered the first RPG account on my test system. That's how long it's been. And I can finally share it with you. Yay. Let's get this thing really going, now!