About

Heya!

I'm known online as Meringue Rouge, but I used to go by "ingenoire" back then. Welcome to my website.

I'm a weeb, and I like anime women. No, I am not a cute girl IRL, and I'm perfectly happy being a man IRL. I do wish I had a better voice though (stuck on the whiny nerd voice setting), otherwise I could have made it big in the YouTube scene. Maybe.

I'm originally from Britain, but I'm basically more french now from living in France for so, so long. I was barely past 10 years old in 2003 before moving to France for good, and my GameCube and a copy of Smash Bros Melee and Sonic Adventure 2: Battle were still my recent prized jewels at the time.

Some personal history online

You might know me mainly from my PSO2 Global days (2020 - 2023), as I used to make Youtube videos for that game. But before then, I was mainly trying to make a game, Hegemone Pass. Development started in 2015 during very troubled times, and a lot of stuff went wrong. Eventually, a failed Kickstarter attempt led to one year of cluelessly trying to scramble together a "fix" for the game's mechanics, trying to reinvent the wheel in every way, shape and form... but no dice. And when the pandemic hit, I kinda just threw in the towel on game dev as a whole.

Then came Phantasy Star Online 2, and that took over my daily routine during the pandemic. Totally addicted to that game, I think I was clocking in hours on end daily at a certain point, and without a job it didn't help. There were so many cool things about the game that were glossed over because of the increased cadence that I couldn't just NOT talk about it, hence why the Youtube channel got made (well, used for more than just a clip dump of a Heroes of the Storm funny moment I had). The only reason I ever got a "meaningful" audience (not a big one, even in the PSO2 sphere, but more than enough to not be buried algorithmically) was that I posted the first few videos on the PSO2 subreddit, and only stopping when I had some personal momentum going (and making a very dumb video where I somehow confused numbers for some deep lore, lol).

However, the New Genesis update, while exciting at first... yeah, it wasn't doing it for me. I mostly was going on in the hope that the ship would turn around, but the "Ultra Evolution" update tease leading into a big nothingburger (except for Creative Spaces, genuinely cool but SUCKS for any serious automation / programming / mini-games and really only leads to Nightclubs, RP spaces, or beautiful scenery with not much to do in them) kinda broke me. Eventually, I quit the game late 2023, as I was frustrated with my IRL job and was deperate to move somewhere else. So I grinded hardcore LinkedIn (ew) and other job hunt websites, enough of playing games that didn't treat you well: self-improve yourself!

Eventually, I was using so many random short bursts of days off, from my accumulated supply of days off from work (I barely took days off generally), that I ended up quitting the job by myself, mainly to give the boss a return to certainty of work (also to give a person who previously had my position a spot back, unintentionally, but I guess it worked out in the end). This was in June 2024.

However, prior to quitting, I had picked up an amazing piece of game development software on a whim, RPG Developer Bakin. What I thought would have been a way to cheaply make RPG Maker-styled games (I was ready to just throw in default sprites!), turned out to be a personal revival of my game dev spirit. Especially when I started dabbling in VRoid models. And to top it off, the advent of AI Coding helped me speed up development a TON. Like, you don't realize the time gains you get from building a Blender add-on to automate a set of steps you would do manually, debugging a damage formula with an ungodly amount of parenthesis that's forced to be in a single line, or just making scripts to implement QoL features that are industry standards.

It first started with game jams. And even then, my first game jam entry, Isekai Evictors, was doing some pretty tough logic (very broken logic, but still) in it's battle system, without any code. I felt like I could do anything, and that was back when the battle system and equipment system of Bakin still had a lot to improve!

Ecrazeus was then the next game jam entry I made, which was originally supposed to be a walking and talking game with some choices affecting stats. However, prior to that, I was trying to make an action game for a magical girl game jam, but I didn't feel satisfied with it. But while making Ecrazeus, I was making a pretty competent fully 3D control system, and by adding a jump to the mix, I kinda wanted to make it an action game. And that's what it became. Very buggy and very laggy towards the end, even after recompiling the game with a major update to Bakin's performance.

I was getting pretty good with the engine, and somehow got another game jam done for Christmas in only 3 days! Selling Summer on Christmas Eve was basically a different take on what Ecrazeus was supposed to be, a talk and gain stats things, but it was more focused on hangling and trying to get customers in the door of your shop (to fit with the theme of the jam).

2025 was the year I was seriously trying to make a "real" game. I experimented late in 2024 with a full Ecrazeus sequel with a story mode, and even a fully fledged AI companion system that could attack nearby foes, but I scrapped it in a month, it didn't feel right. Then, I tried to make a "real" RPG (finally, an actual RPG for the RPG focused engine!), and even started a devlog. However, when trying to make the third devlog... I just lost the will to make it. It didn't feel right anymore. I then tried molding it into a different story and setting, and different mechanics, but then, a small update to Bakin changed the course of my works.

In August (I think) 2025, Bakin released an update that would bring in localization to exported games, meaning each game could support multiple languages, without having to make seperate versions of the game. To showcase and try out this feature, I wanted to bring more attention to Ecrazeus, since it was in English only, but it was getting attention from the free project files I released over on the Steam Workshop, and a big part of the community comes from Japan. So, a Japanese translation!

However, when trying to test it out, I kept feeling like I could do a bit more: fix a bug with the collision of the power-ups, fix a bug with falling... actually, why not do a small "definitive" version of the game? Oh, maybe I'll throw in an extra character, a devil? Oh wait, why not do like a "dark side" story to the game? And my god, nobody seemed to like having a death timer for each room, what if I changed that? Eventually, this cumulated into making an entirely new game. Initially titled "Royal Ecrazeus", this would become Ecrazeus Castle.

Most of the development happened while I was out of a job, so I was able to fully focus on the game. But with the game pretty much complete now, and I've gotten a job recently, life's looking good right now. Kinda. Well, let's hope the game reaches a lot of players! I'm excited to jump onto my next project (after fixing the bugs)...