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MARDEK + Belief - Two Trilogies

5 years ago2,769 words

I played MARDEK recently, and it was much better than I expected! I'm now a fan of the series again! Here's how my new feelings about it have influenced what I want to do with a remake.

Sindrel Song's been out for just over a week now. In this time, it's got a whopping 5 reviews (all positive, thankfully), and 70 sales (including the soundtrack, I think). That's... not exactly worth the months of work involved, but the whole thing has been a big and valuable learning experience, so it wasn't all for naught. I'm just glad that anyone got something positive out of it.

I haven't promoted it at all, but I've got emails from a bunch of influencer types asking for free keys, claiming they'll make reviews to promote the game. I wrote ∞ the previous post about 'exposure' ∞ out of frustration with these, but my attitude's changed since then, and I've given out a few just to see what - if anything - might happen. Things can only get better, right? Obviously the sales haven't rocketed or anything, but maybe it takes time for these supposed reviews to manifest. If nothing else, it's got me used to talking to these strangers in emails, less anxious, which makes me feel more capable of the promotion side of things for future releases. I feel I've already made a couple of vague connections just by these people emailing me.

I haven't fixed any bugs or replied to several comments about it yet, sorry about that. I want to get around to that, but it's been difficult to think about Sindrel Song recently.



I've been playing through the old MARDEK chapters, partly as a form of avoidance behaviour so I didn't have to think about Sindrel Song, and partly because I want/need to do this anyway if I'm going to be re-releasing it. I suppose I'm motivated by the thought it might be more successful than Sindrel Song has been.

I finally got to the end a couple of days ago, after a week of hours-a-day playing, though I've not done a lot of optional stuff yet, like the character tournaments (which I'd forgotten all about) or the superbosses (I got to Karnos but couldn't even survive one attack).

I'm not sure if you know this because I've been so secretive and diplomatic about it for the past few years, but I didn't have the best opinion of MARDEK. I was highly resistant to the idea of a MARDEK IV and beyond, and I fully expected this playthrough to be a cringeworthy trudge full of frustration at things I feel I've long since moved beyond.



The result was quite different, though. Surprising. There are a lot of parts I'd completely forgotten about, and the writing for bits I did remember wasn't nearly as bad as I remember, at all. A lot of silly comments made me laugh - I liked going around talking to every NPC - and some of the heavier plot stuff really landed, even sending chills down my spine. The music, though not masterfully made, was varied and interesting, not as harsh as I expected it to be. I often paused to let tracks continue rather than being interrupted by battles.



The gameplay was also surprisingly solid. At first I was annoyed by the bittiness of it, the granularity, and the straightforward violence, but there's definitely appeal in that kind of combat system, and I found the grinding, arena challenges, etc fun rather than tedious. Some of the bigger boss battles required strategy and thought and sparked excitement about the outcome in a way I didn't expect. Each of the characters felt interestingly different in their abilities and value, too, and I enjoyed switching between them, and eventually settling on a team.



It's not without its faults, of course. The story was made up as I went along, and the early parts are definitely inferior to the later parts, so I'm concerned that people unfamiliar with the game might be put off by the beginning, assuming it's all like that. Some of the jokes - or just general comments or characters - seem inappropriate here in the future, which is embarrassing; I imagine this is true of a lot of stuff that was popular in the culture surrounding Flash games back then, focused as it was on grotesque violence and pimps and hos and all that lovely stuff. Most of the characters sound like me - or express my traits - and a lot of the wording is clunky, stumbling, or rambling, because I was inexperienced as a writer. There might be too much grinding in parts; the back-to-back dungeons at the start of chapter 3 are a chore. The non-linearity of chapter 3 is perhaps annoyingly obscure, as are many of the hidden things (I had to check my own walkthrough). And there are too many plot points, antagonists, etc all overlapping at once.

I'm surprised how much of the dialogue dealt with reproductive/relationship themes; I'd been thinking that was a relatively recent obsession, but apparently not. It's all quite naively explored though; clearly the work of a shy, inexperienced 'nice' guy who'd always resented the macho guys getting the girls. Though I had a girlfriend as I made this, who seemed to like my traits and not those traits, so a lot of it was brought out by exploring relationship things after a lifetime spent too bashful to even say the word 'sex'.

Overall, I definitely warmed up to the game while playing through it this time, going from having to force myself to play it at the beginning, to looking forward to having the chance to towards the end. It's a good game! I'd go so far as to say I'm now a MARDEK fan myself, hungry for a fourth chapter, ha.

Though that doesn't mean that I'll be making one. At least, not a direct continuation of this. As people have previously expressed, making the eight chapters as previously planned would just be overwhelming.

I've looked at the notes that I made for those later chapters, and it's probably a good idea that I didn't make them because they wouldn't have been very appealing. There's a whole lot of repetition, including directly traversing areas you already cleared in chapter 3 (eg the elemental temples), multiple times. A lot of it's clutter, rambling, filler. It'd be better to just compress it all into a single finale chapter.

But as I've said previously, I'm more interested in doing a remake, and continuing on with that rather than making a direct continuation in the ancient style, even though I'm fond of it now. I've been giving some thought about how best to do that.



Much of what I'm thinking was already laid out in ∞ this post ∞, and I might be repeating myself a lot here, though I suppose it'll stress what still appeals to me after thinking about it for a couple of weeks.

I've been building up this Alora Fane world for a while, so I definitely want to set a remake there. A big part of Alora Fane's lore is the Cataclysm that shattered one of its six 'petal' worlds, and severed the world's link to the gods. Before this, the gods - the Aolmna - walked among the people and interacted with them directly, teaching empathy-based spirituality ("Unisis"), but afterwards the world fell into decay without the gods maintaining it.

I'm aware of the resistance people have shown towards the nonviolent approach Taming Dreams - the previous MARDEK remake - took, and while I'm no longer opposed to doing a standard violent combat system, I'm still attached to that and want to make some finished game that uses it. Belief was meant as an attempt to do this, but I wrote in the previous post about how I'm not sure how to marry it together with a MARDEK remake, especially since Belief's cast and story were loosely inspired by MARDEK's anyway.

I've had an idea which I feel could work:

A big story told in six chapters, divided into two trilogies.

The first would be the Belief trilogy. This would be set in Alora Fane with its six petals intact and the gods present, and 'combat' would involve convincing other humans using social skills instead of violence; I've already made much of the first Belief game and talked about that extensively in previous posts.

Each of these three chapters would be fairly short, with just three acts. Not super short, but maybe around the length of MARDEK Chapter 2, something like that.

The trilogy would culminate in the Cataclysm.

This would be followed by another trilogy based on MARDEK (perhaps with a different title, to distinguish it and make it clear it's not an exact remake? Like the "ROHOPH" suggestion a while back), set over 600 years in the future, in an Alora Fane that's been without gods for a long time. With the gods gone, there's no longer any emphasis on nonviolence, and the Cataclysm stirred up the fundamental structure of the world, and brought into being miasma and the monsters that form from it.

People battle these monsters using weapons, and they use a kind of 'magic' - elemancy? - which involves manipulating the same fundamental structure of reality to conjure up flames, lightning, etc. This would utilise the six 'natural elements': Courage, Fear, Bliss, Destruction, Creation, Sorrow. Characters would also be attuned to one of these elements.

The elements aren't tied to emotional non-combat. Rather, the lore is that the universe is fundamentally made of consciousness, 'dreamed into being', and these are the 'fundamental particles' of that consciousness. It's just an idiosyncratic extension of what the elements were in MARDEK, as we've talked about previously.

So the combat system would be essentially the same as MARDEK's. It might have a few tweaks here and there, but in spirit it'd aim for the same kind of appeal, with snappy 4v4 encounters where you use attacks to deplete HP.

I'm not certain about this and still like giving the player the choice to charm or kill... but we'll see how it goes; it's something I'll need to experiment with.

The first episode of this second trilogy would be heavily based around the first couple of MARDEK episodes, with a lot drawn from the Taming Dreams take on them (including stuff I never got around to making but had planned in a lot of detail), and some new changes I feel make things more interesting. I've been planning its events in detail, and I like what I've got so far.

The second would be roughly based on the third MARDEK chapter and the Taming Dreams plans for those events.

The third would be a climax and conclusion to the previous two.

These would be about twice as long as the Belief chapters, with six acts each, where each episode roughly consists of a single dungeon and a bunch of plot events throughout or before/after it. I've been planning rough structures of each of the chapters, and this seems to work well for something that feels substantial but doesn't drag on (and wouldn't take too long to make).



Maybe this structure seems familiar? I should start thinking about what supposedly racist comic relief character I can include in the first episode if I want to win the audience over.



I'll be drawing heavily on all I've got for both MARDEK and Taming Dreams, but I don't want to be bound to bad decisions. I'm keeping most of the primary characters, but not all of them. Some of the characters that are kept have changes, like different names, since I want to make them all six characters long.

For example, Mardek uses his Taming Dreams look (rather than the extremely bland ""design"" from the original), and is possessed by a Lucen called Dharma rather than an Annunaki called Rohoph (who's essentially the same character otherwise, and who serves as the common thread through both trilogies, meddling with Lileah then Blight in the first, and possessing Mardek in the second). Deugan and "Emeela" are sort of combinations of their MARDEK and Taming Dreams versions. Meraeador uses the female Meraeadyth design - now called Meryth - and joins earlier, as in Taming Dreams. Steele takes the role of Mugbert in the early events, as in Taming Dreams, but now his relationships with other characters is deeper and interconnected, and his personality's less cartoonishly awful. And so on.

I've dropped some characters completely since they'd only pad out the development time and aren't very interesting (such a subjective statement!), while others that weren't present in MARDEK have been carried over from Taming Dreams (eg Collie replaces Jacques). As much as I like MARDEK's tons of characters, it makes storytelling too difficult and time-consuming, and I've regretted for years that the cast wasn't more streamlined. So that's definitely something I'm keeping in mind for this, even though I'm aware it might mean some people's favourites are cut (though I suspect the ones I've cut would be the least popular).

I've done some concept art of the characters already, but I'll write a post focused on that in the coming days.



I don't know how receptive people will be to a version of this game with major changes like this. I'd like to think that if I try to retain what made MARDEK mechanically fun, and thematically interesting, while using my years of planning and growth to write a better story rather than being bound to details I made up as I went along years ago, I can make something greater than the original, but... we'll see. I suppose we've already discussed it quite a bit, heard thoughts for and against, but we'll need to actually see a demo or something for people to really know how they feel about it.

I've been thinking about it a lot, and I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to spend the next two or three years of my life working on just this. Not messing around with different projects, following my whims, but just really sticking with this one series and making it something great. It no longer feels like a 'creative trap'; I'm actually excited about it!

My hope is that the nostalgia from the re-release of the original MARDEK might give me a jump start, fuelling interest in a Kickstarter for the first of these remake chapters. Not Belief 1, necessarily; I might work on the first chapter of the MARDEK-inspired trilogy first, then Belief 1, then see which is the most popular and appealing to decide which sequel to do next. Perhaps alternating like that might reduce burnout for both me and players.

I used to resent being 'the MARDEK guy', and tried to distance myself from it, but that game series has definitely brought a lot of joy to a significant number of people, myself included. I suppose I just lost touch with that because of all the horrible stuff going on in my life outside of games development during my twenties, but now I feel I'm at a calmer place mentally that should allow me to focus on this without all that getting in the way.

It shouldn't even take that long to make the chapters. MARDEK 3 took so long, from what I recall, because of personal issues outside development, and jumping around between projects, following whims. Taming Dreams stopped because I went to university. The Taming Dreams episodes only took a month or two to make, and I remember MARDEK 1 and 2 taking a similar amount of time. If I really focus on this, I can imagine making six chapters in 2-4 years. I'm aware I once thought 8 MARDEK chapters was realistic, and this might seem like going down the same dead end yet again, but... well, all I can do is see how it goes.

I'll start by adding the MARDEK re-release to Steam early next year. In the meantime, I'll be working on planning all of the chapters as a whole, to make sure I can tie them together in a pleasing way with foreshadowing and without plot holes! Having everything planned in detail before I begin also means it should come along smoothly once the production work gets started.

(Also, I still have a post about Clarence's Big Chance ready for posting, so I'll add that soon.)