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MARDEK - A Re-release AND a Remake??

5 years ago - Edited 5 years ago2,802 words

A couple of months ago, ∞ I talked about remaking MARDEK, but wanted to make changes and was met with resistance ∞. More recently, ∞ I talked about rereleasing my old Flash games exactly as they are ∞, including MARDEK. I've also recently ∞ talked about money struggles ∞, and I'm aware that trying to make money from novel indie games is like trying to scale a mountain. MARDEK remains my one taste of minor fame, though it wasn't profitable, and remasters and remakes certainly have their appeal. So I've been returning to this again, wondering this time: what if I were to do a faithful re-release AND a remake?

I spent yesterday playing through and making code tweaks to Clarence's Big Chance, one of my old games, then writing a review/commentary blog post about it. The game and the post are ready to be added to this site now, but first I want to talk about something else since I'm assuming it'll be more interesting anyway.

When I started returning to these old games a few days ago, I felt anxious, suffocated, generally unpleasant. I don't want to live in the past; I want to move on, make new things! I was also aware that they were from a very different time in my life, and that the there might be a whole lot to cringe and feel embarrassed about.

There were definitely some things in CBC that made me cringe, or which clash with the values I have now that I'm older - or which modern culture has since developed - but overall I was surprised by how much fun I had spending a few hours with it. It's fairly straightforward, uncomplicated; it's not trying to make any grand points, or to last in the player's life beyond the experience itself. And that kind of 'meaningless' fun isn't without value. Perhaps there's been a bit of a shift in how I perceive games design thanks to this.

A rerelease of MARDEK is obviously more appealing to people than any of my other games, so I've definitely been planning to do that sooner rather than later. I previously mentioned issues with it being made in AS2, though. I've got an old version of Flash thanks to one of the commenters, but I haven't actually tried it yet. If it doesn't work for whatever reason, I've been giving some thought to recoding the thing in AS3 to make that re-release possible, daunting as that is.

But then that takes me down the same mental path I was on starting with ∞ this post about three months ago ∞. "If I'm recoding it, I might as well IMPROVE it in the process!" There are a bunch of things I'd like to change, do differently, and I talked about a few in those other posts, but was put off the idea when people were resistant to anything other than a completely faithful reproduction of the original.

I do understand that, to a degree. MARDEK might not objectively be a remarkable game worth dedicated development, at least not now in my life and the world's culture, but some people remember it fondly from their childhood, so they'd want to return to it mainly to revisit fond old memories. So the closer it is to how it was when those memories were formed, the more effectively they'd be revisiting them.

Honestly, at this point I'd like to leave MARDEK in the past, and work on Belief, which I'm quite happy with and interested in. But I'm also worrying all the time about money, and how I've not exactly made any from what I'm doing now. Sindrel Song is unlikely to make me anything much at all, and promoting an entirely new project like Belief would probably be just as difficult and financially unsuccessful.

So I suppose I need to be pragmatic, at least until I can get on my feet financially. I need to delay my passion projects and make something that might have a higher chance of selling. I must have said this before, and it's what motivated the MARDEK remake I talked about previously, but then I was put off by people's resistance to any reimagining. Since then I've been talking about re-releasing a bunch of old games, making regular content in some form, whatever, but everything seems unlikely to generate much of an income for me any time soon.

MARDEK, at least, seems like something that might earn at least something, even if it might not be as much as the hardcore fans assume. Or maybe I'll be amazed at exactly how willing people are to return to and pay for it?

So I'm back here again, thinking about how to do that without annoying people or trapping myself into an unbearable creative prison. And here's what I'm thinking at the moment:

What if I were to release the old chapters on Steam exactly as they are, unaltered (except for maybe minor things like removing sponsor branding), and to also do a remake, set in the Alora Fane world, which makes use of all the mental and skill development I've had in the years since the original release?

Could the old fans be upset by this, if the exact experience they remember is right there for them? Would they resist a remake anyway? Would new people be interested in a remade MARDEK?

I suppose I'd have to think and talk and listen to people about it - like in the previous posts - to understand what it is that people would want, what would appeal to the audience. I need to silence the part of me that's driven to make games to suit my preferences, and focus more completely on making something for other people.



I have some ideas floating around in my head about how I'd approach a remake, which I'll blurt out here:

I'd want to do it in 3D, using what I've already built for Belief, so the graphics would look like this (I'd probably use these base models for the characters):





It might be interesting to try to make at least one of the MARDEK characters in that style in the coming days, to see how they'd look.

I know people have expressed interest in 2D for its particular charm, but 3D just presents a whole lot more possibilities, like using the same models for the field, battles, and conversations, giving them emotive expressions and animations, etc. The only reason I didn't use this originally was because it wasn't a possibility.

I want to set it in the Alora Fane world, since it'd be pointless to have set up all this Alora Fane stuff only to use a far less developed setting which can't interconnect with other games. This would mean changes like YALORT becoming the Aolmna, Solaar would be a sindrel, etc.

I'd want to make it a kind of combination of MARDEK and Taming Dreams, since the latter was planned as a remake of MARDEK anyway, and I spent an enormous amount of time thinking about how I'd better handle the characters.

There was heavy resistance to the 'non-violence' thing though, which is fair enough, so I wouldn't be going in that direction. I tried to address this in ∞ this post ∞ with a system that used weapons, but they represented ~altering the light and darkness in people's hearts~ or something, and I feel it lost some of the straightforward accessibility that might have been largely responsible for MARDEK's appeal. It did however separate physical attacks and 'sentimancy' in a 'brawn vs brains' way, meaning that physical attacks were straightforward and basic, but sentimancy required more thought, made use of runes, etc; this meant you could either force or think your way to victory. Sentimancy in that concept also led to converting your opponents, like in Belief, if you filled a separate Rapport bar.

I'm thinking of using a similar kind of separation. Characters would have weapons, which they could use for blood-spilling physical attacks in a familiar violent way. Miasmon are physically manifest anyway, so this is effective for getting rid of them. There'd be no talk about 'overcoming your inner issues made manifest!' or any of that. This would involve depleting a standard HP bar; nothing complicated or potentially irritating there. But there could be a separate rapport bar, and runes, and sentimancy which makes use of those runes to fill that bar. Filling it would 'tame' the opponent, but they wouldn't convert; miasmon would disappear, human enemies would surrender. This gives players the choice about whether to be a psychological pacifist, or a straightforward warrior.

From what I gather, one of Undertale's most remarkable and appreciated aspects was its potential for pacifism; it even used that in the tagline, didn't it? So you can't tell me there's no interest in such things.

Sentimancy could be renamed to something more suggestive of psychic skill (kind of like MOTHER's Psi), and lore-wise it'd be explained as 'manipulating the consciousness that makes up the universe' rather than ~empathetically understanding~ which might be regarded as 'sissy'.

Characters would have sentiments instead of elements (or maybe they're called 'elements', and the term 'sentiments' could be reserved for what I've been calling the 'social sentiments', which Belief uses). These would be Courage, Fear, etc, since they'd be representing the fabric of reality in exactly the same way that MARDEK's elements were. They'd be used for resistances/weaknesses for both physical and sentimancy skills.

Physical attacks wouldn't just be the basic Attack command. You'd be able to use more varied skills to affect HP too, so it's not as if the magic equivalent would have a bunch of interesting stuff while the alternative is prohibitively boring. Like the planned system in ∞ this post ∞, the reaction system would be included, but expanded.

I've even been wondering whether to give characters two distinct levels, for their sentimancy and their fighting. Kind of like a dual class in D&D.

But I don't want to overcomplicate things. I'd like to streamline a lot of stuff that was very granular in MARDEK, though I'm also aware that the Sonny remake got mixed reviews because it was perceived as having 'less content' than the original Flash games. So I wouldn't want people to feel like things were missing.

Game design takes time, and it's iterative; these ideas will need to be built upon before I could arrive at something that works best. These are just some starting ideas, based on what I've talked about in the previous posts about a MARDEK remake. I literally started thinking about this again while lying in bed last night, so it's not as if I've done any focused planning or experimentation.



Belief presents a bit of a snag to this idea though. I really like a lot of ideas I've come up with for Belief, and I find the encounter system compelling, intellectually stimulating, and fun. It's something I want to share with the world! But I don't know how it'd tie into this.

It was originally planned as a sort-of MARDEK remake anyway, though all the characters were renamed and most of the plot was drastically different. I really liked Rohoph being Dharma, Mardek becoming Blight, all the stuff about trying to convince the world to believe in the god in his head, the idea of a 'devil' being 'Jesus'... So many fascinating ideas there.

But it'd not exactly be a MARDEK remake if all the characters had different names, would it? And if I were focusing on this belief-based encounter system, I couldn't have the simple dungeon romping that probably makes the originals familiar and accessible.

I've been wondering whether Belief could be a prequel to this MARDEK remake, with Lileah eventually giving birth to Mardek rather than to Blight. Mardek would be Dharma's son, meaning that Enki would need to be dropped, and what about Mardek's Lucen horns and skin colour? Ehhh...

Or maybe Belief could be set decades or centuries earlier, and Dharma and Rohoph are separate Lucen? Hmm.

It's tricky, and I'm not sure what to do.

I mean, it's easy to think "sure, I'll return to this thing that might make me money!", but story matters a lot to me, and I don't want to make something that's just exploitative, without narrative value or interest. There are more interesting stories that could be told using ingredients inspired by the originals, but I do remember people saying things like "but they weren't the characters we grew up with!"...

I'll need to give it some thought.



I know I'm going in circles. But I feel there have been some changes since the last time I brought this up.

One is the realisation that the old MARDEK files weren't as lost as I once thought, and returning to and remastering my old games isn't as daunting a prospect as I thought. That changes a lot.

Another is the intention to release both the originals as they are and to do a remake with changes. Surely that should appease people who are interested in an experience exactly like they remember?

I'm more willing to try Kickstarter now than I was before. I'd definitely go down that path with a MARDEK remake, so then I could (hopefully!) get some money before I even start, or at least gauge interest. If it failed, at least I'd know there wasn't as much interest as the hardcore fans might like to believe, and I could scrap the idea and just get back to Belief rather than spending the majority of the year of it and getting nothing at the end. I feel that something familiar like a remake of a fondly-remembered old game would have a higher chance of success than a completely novel project like Belief.

The hope after that would be that MARDEK could help re-establish me as a developer, after which I could turn my attention towards more original projects.

I wouldn't want to spend years making eight huge chapters though. People previously pointed out that that'd be completely overwhelming for players anyway. I also don't want to set myself the goal of remaking all three original chapters before releasing anything, because that's ridiculous.

So maybe I could - as I talked about in the other posts - start by remaking the first two chapters as an initial combined chapter. The chapter 3 events could either be split up, or streamlined; I'm inclined towards the latter, then making a final chapter which ties everything up rather than rambling aimlessly for years, which was essentially the plan with Belief. I could combine ideas from the original MARDEK, Taming Dreams, and Belief to end up with something that feels complete without overstaying its welcome.



I know I keep going around in circles with this, returning to the idea then being put off and changing my mind. I think releasing both the originals and doing a remake might be a solution to the biggest points of contention last time, since people who want exactly what they remember will be getting exactly that, while people open to a new take on the familiar would be getting that too, but what do you think?

I'm not willing to devote years of my life to making MARDEK 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 using an ancient style I've long since grown beyond, and which only a handful of people might want anyway, but I am willing to make MARDEK 1, 2, 3 and maybe 4 using new skills and ideas set in the Alora Fane world - and maybe with a different title - incorporating ideas that might appeal to newcomers rather than just serving the nostalgia of an existing, long-since-dwindled audience. I suppose the challenge will (continue to) be finding a way to do that which is intriguing rather than sacrilegious.

It's worth remembering that very few people who play games play them through to completion, as you can see by looking at achievement statistics. An enormous chunk of people who played MARDEK 3 never made it out of the Sun Temple.

As before, I'm curious to hear thoughts about this. Perhaps this time we can work something out that'll work for everyone?



EDIT: I just slogged through all the relevant old blog posts about this, and a lot of what I said here is almost exactly what I said in those. I suppose it's still worth repeating though to show what I'm planning to stick with from all that thinking and writing about it before.