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Belief - What Is It?

5 years ago3,041 words

I'm working on getting to the point with Belief where I can show a video of the gameplay. I'm not at that point yet, but here's what I've done so far. I'm wondering whether it might be best to make it a standalone game (rather than three chapters) at first, without connections to MARDEK, to see whether people are receptive to that before locking myself into something I might not finish, but there are still a lot of decisions to be made.

I know it might seem I'm going over the same stuff again and again in these blogs, and posting too often, but I'm still not sure what I should be doing with my time, and it helps to work things out by talking about them. And it's not like I have colleagues (or even friends) to discuss with!

What I should be doing is publishing/promoting Sindrel Song, though I feel I need to 'resolve' this whole MARDEK/Belief thing first, so I've not done anything with that in a while, unfortunately.

It's not that I'm deaf to people who want me to do a faithful MARDEK remaster, or a MARDEK IV. I really, genuinely wish that I were capable of fulfilling those desires. But I wish people understood the ridiculous amount of time and work involved, and how stifling it is to think of going backwards developmentally and lingering there for who-knows-how-long. If I could do it in a month, or even six, I would... but even then, I can't imagine wanting to change nothing. So my mind keeps going back and forth. "Should I just bite the bullet and give people what they want?", I think, then give some serious consideration to the specific tasks that'd be involved, think "oh god", and realise it's just not feasible. But I don't want to let people down, so I end up mentally going back there again the next day.

I do wonder how many "people" that is, though. It's such a biased sample giving the feedback on this blog, and none of us can speak for everyone. I can't imagine there are many at all who really want MARDEK exactly as it was!!! (or even remember it), but of course the people who do want that are commenting and the majority of people who'd be receptive to whatever new thing I made aren't even aware of me yet. As I've said before. But hearing from even one disappointed or annoyed person puts me in a slump because I just want to make something that people can enjoy, and I hate to cause negative feelings. It really gets to me.

If it were just MARDEK 1 and 2, and once I'd made them, it was done and I knew people would like them (and I'd get money), I could do that, I think. It's just the monstrosity that is MARDEK 3 that makes it so daunting, and I imagine people wouldn't accept a stripped-down version (that seems to be the main issue with the Sonny thing). Then there's the promise of continuing on from there and either making the five promised chapters, which would be too overwhelming for everyone, or I'd have to resolve all the poorly-planned plot threads in one rushed conclusion, which would definitely lead some people to complain about "not getting the five chapters you promised!" because of course it would...

I spend so much of my time being tortured by feelings of being trapped by past mistakes (there have been so many), and this feels like one of them. I don't regret making MARDEK if it brought people pleasure or inspired them, but I do regret intending to make eight chapters, or making the third so large. I was just a stupid teenager, and I didn't know how much work it'd involve either. I just liked the idea, and thought that liking the idea enough would be enough for it to become a reality. Sadly it's not.

I don't want to let anyone down, but it was the distant past... I wish we could move on. I wish I could, but I have this feeling of incompleteness in my heart more than anyone, which I suppose is why I keep trying to return to revisions of MARDEK's story. "Maybe I'll be able to finish it in this incarnation and then I'll be free of it at last!"



I've been mentioning another project called Belief, which I originally envisioned as a more novel RPG with 'social combat', with a story inspired by MARDEK's. Both the concept of non-violent combat and reusing any aspects of MARDEK's story have been met with opposition, and I don't know what's best.

I do feel that the 'combat' has value, but you need to actually play it to see that for yourself, so I'm going to stubbornly stick with that at least until I've got a demo working. It also has some issues though which I'd be happy to work through with discussion in later posts (specific things like "maybe you should be able to equip four skills", rather than conceptual fundamentals like "just make it violent" or "don't make it turn-based").

My original plan was for Belief to be three chapters, and I had a rough idea of the general settings of those chapters, but hadn't elaborated on the details. While it wasn't exactly a direct adaptation or remake of MARDEK, it drew on aspects of it, like the "Governance de Magi", which I reimagined as the far-more-interesting (to me) "Magisterium", as described in ∞ a previous post ∞.

I'm wondering though whether it might be better to just make one single stand-alone story, disconnected from MARDEK entirely.

It'll be a bit of a gamble anyway, and what if people don't even like it? There's no sense in locking myself into a longer series that wouldn't be appreciated, or ending up with another unfinished series out there (that's the last thing I want).

I'm not sure what a new standalone story could be about though. The game's (tentatively) called Belief because it drew on the "Rohoph lives in the protagonist's head" thing, but made it more interesting and lore-related. Alora Fane has lost its gods, and the Lucen have decided to replace them, but for 'Rohoph' to do that, he needs to convince people to believe in him, and that's why you go around trying to convince/convert people. It all fits together nicely, and there are some really intriguing things with the 'devil-like Jesus' concept, and it'd be a shame to throw it away.

One possibility is to make a shorter standalone thing that could serve as an implicit prequel to that. If it's well-received, I could use the engine to build the other three chapters as planned. If not, I can move onto something else and nothing's left hanging. The protagonist could be someone who perhaps could become an ally or legendary figure in those three chapters. I'm not sure what'd be worth going around 'converting' people for though.

Unless those three chapters would involve Blight as 'Jesus', and this could be more like the old testament, set in Alora Fane's distant past, where the gods are actually still around or have just disappeared? Hmm, I don't know. I've not done much brainstorming yet. It takes time.

(Maybe you play as an Elarnan scientist who's trying to convince people to support the development of your new invention, which ends up causing the Cataclysm??)



I get the feeling it's not exactly clear yet exactly what Belief is, what it plays like, so I've been trying to get to the point where I can show off a video of the gameplay. I've actually got quite close to that point already! Here's what I've made so far in the past few days:

Character models

I've made these male and female base models, with the intention of deriving other characters from them:





They're similar in style to what I had in Taming Dreams, with roughly similar proportions (which I find surprising, since I didn't aim to do that explicitly):



They're 'shadeless', meaning they aren't affected by lighting. I experimented with both 'normal' shading and cel shading, but I prefer this the most, and it's the style I tend to draw and make in anyway. Sindrel Song's models were shadeless too. Maybe I'll return to that and do something more interesting with the shaders as I continue developing though.

Overall, I'm quite happy with how these turned out. The faces are somewhat strange in that they're more 'realistic' than the inhuman feature reduction of anime or the exaggeration of cartoons, so that combined with the proportions maybe looks a bit odd? But they do seem to fit with my general art style, and the large heads and expressive features are great for the expression-focused gameplay.

Field

I've made a simple map editor that allows me to build areas out of chunks several metres wide:



A while back, I experimented with a system which allowed me to build maps out of much smaller tiles, similar to MARDEK, but this is another method that several games use and I wanted to give it a go. I'm still not sure what's best; I'm still experimenting. Ideally I want a way that makes building and editing areas relatively painless, and gives a kind of retro feeling as well.

Obviously the rooms in the example are barren and there are a lot of narrow corridors. I'd eventually add props (like I did in Sindrel Song), and most areas would probably be external so wouldn't have these enclosed spaces.



I like this mostly top-down but still 3D view.

(Handling interior areas like this with a rotatable camera is a pain, though; what do I do with the walls that obscure the paths? I've seen a few different solutions to this problem, but none of them are trivial to add.)

Originally, I wondered whether to have dialogue portraits, and I did implement it, but annoyingly only have this screenshot of an ugly early version of what I had:



It seemed a bit redundant though, since the models are already right there. So instead I have it just zoom in on them:



Positioning the text directly below the face seems to draw the eyes to it naturally, in a way that having the text in a speech bubble above the head or in a separate box at the bottom of the screen wouldn't, as I've found from experimentation with a few different projects over the past couple of years.

(Also, the girl's second expression in that gif bothers me because it doesn't feel right at all; I don't have the exact mouth I'd like to use there yet though.)

Encounters

I think how the 'battles' - or I'll call them 'encounters' - work will require a video to make clear, but hopefully some gifs should give an idea.



I think this interaction gives a good, succinct idea of a lot of the mechanics and potential for emotional involvement.

When the male character uses his 'Flirt' skill, all allied 'girlfriend' characters react to it by getting angry - and become slightly riled up - with jealousy. I think it's funny! There's a lot of potential for your skills to affect both your opponents and your allies in a way that isn't possible with straightforward violence.

The 'belief' or 'rapport' or whatever bars used to be either filled with teal or empty, but it occurred to me that it should instead be more like this, where the purple and teal show the person's belief in that side. Before you've convinced someone, it's not as if they 'have no belief'; they have belief in their current side, and you just replace that with belief in yours. It's similar to the light/dark thing from the other post, though not complicated by an additional bar measuring something different, and now it makes sense that the 'valence' of skills switches depending on side, because you're 'arguing for your side' and that side can change.

The issue of feedback to make skills satisfying came up in comments on a previous post. I'm already aware of the concept and wasn't planning to neglect it (why would anyone assume that?), but the social- rather than violence-based conceptualisation lends itself to different kinds of feedback than the usual visceral smashes and wincing and screaming in pain. Nodding and shaking of the head are clear and recognisable signals of emotional state, and here they represent the effectiveness of the skill that's been used (rather than different particle or sound effects or text that says "super effective!" or whatever). An average effectiveness skill might get a single nod ("yes, I see what you're saying"), while a very effective one might get a vigorous, prolonged nod, and both would be accompanied by facial expressions showing different levels of enthusiasm. Ineffective skills would get varying degrees of head shaking and disapproving looks. This would get silly if for example both you and your target are Angry, and you use an Enmity skill; they'd nod enthusiastically with a grin before going back to their angry scowl, then they'd maybe be converted and would join your side. But I don't see that as a bad kind of silly!

I do intend to add particle and sound effects as well, but things take time and I can only do so much at once.

I actually imagined using silly, snappy animations for skills (similar to Phoenix Wright, I think, from what I've seen of it), where the character would be surrounded by glowing coloured energy and dust rising from the ground as they, with a sharp pointing gesture and intense face, would say "Flirt!" or whatever. That makes me laugh. I'll need to find the time to play around it.

It's important for animations not to drag out though, which is one of the problems with a lot of JRPGs. It seems to be a trend now for these sorts of games (especially mobile ones) to include speed multipliers to make battles go even faster, but I'd rather just make the basic animations quick and snappy so that's not necessary. But not so quick they can't be appreciated, so it'll be important to find the right balance.

The basic 'cast' animation (as it's called in the code) used currently is weird because the player characters using it end up pointing at the screen rather than the other side. This is because the characters are actually angled by 50 degrees to match the look of the characters in Taming Dreams.



It's important to have this orientation because being able to see the faces is so important. If they're side-on, it just looks weird, and I can't have the camera behind them like in most 3D turn-based battle systems because, well, obviously. Perhaps I'd need to add separate animations for 'casting' depending on the side characters are on. Though different skills would have different animations eventually anyway.

As I said, I want to make a video to show this off more clearly. First, though, I want to add some additional character types, to show off more of a range of possible interactions than I can with just these two. It feels as if it'd be most appealing if the characters were cartoony (and hopefully not offensive) stereotypes that people would recognise, in a way where their behaviour matches their expectations in a funny way. I brainstormed a list of possibilities, and narrowed it down to these eight which I could possibly make:



Nobody's dressed like that 'nerd' stereotype in decades, probably, but if someone were to dress like that for Halloween, you'd probably immediately understand what they were trying to be. Funny, that. I feel these are fairly timeless (both hippies and goths feel like subcultures that are no longer common but would still be recognised, unlike, say, ∞ mods ∞), though perhaps 'bro' is too contemporary a term?

It's not difficult to imagine potential skills for them. Trolls might specialise in 'rousing excitement' and inflicting anger - and laughter on themselves - with skills like 'tease' or 'flame'. Old men might reminisce about the good old days to 'calm' (bore) targets, or might use an enmity skill called 'get off my lawn!', while old ladies might 'fuss over' any allied trolls (their grandchildren) to restore their belief ('heal' them).

There's a big issue though, which is that these are very much rooted in our own modern world. The Alora Fane setting isn't our world, though, so it wouldn't make sense to have 'bros' and 'nerds' that look exactly like this. It'd be better to make mediaeval-style variants inspired by these, perhaps with different names (giving each person an individual name might be better, but I still want/need 'class' names for them for an in-game encyclopaedia if nothing else). So that's something I feel I should work on next before making models that I'd only have to revise later.



There's more to say, but I'll leave it for now. The main takeaway is that I'm working on getting to the point with this where I can show a gameplay video with varied characters to demonstrate the concept, and this is what I've done so far.

Once I've done that, I should focus on Sindrel Song, since I really need to get that out. I wish I had more time in the days, or that this MARDEK stuff hadn't been so much of a point of contention. It's been surprising and an emotional rollercoaster for me.

I'm not sure what to do about MARDEK, but maybe separating this from that might be the wisest course forward. I wish there was a path forward where everyone would be happy, but sadly there probably isn't one.

(I want to reply to some of the comments on the previous post, but haven't had the time/energy yet; I'll do that soon, or maybe I already have by the time you're reading this.)