Alora Fane

I've done a whole bunch of work on the MARDEK Remake this past week! I've been more focused on it than I have been on anything in a while, and I'm excited about it too! I've planned and drawn concept art of the major protagonists, and I'll post about them individually in the near future; now seems like a bad time though, what with jolly Chrimbo and all.

I've been working on planning story in detail before doing any actual programming or asset creation. The biggest problem I had as the developer of MARDEK - and other old projects around that time period - was making things up as I went along, not knowing what I had to do or what was coming next (except perhaps the vaguest of ideas for big plot turns), and that led to delays, or cramming in everything that came to mind, bloating the story too much to finish it.

I tried to rectify this when planning Taming Dreams, and I think I spent literally months writing a novel's worth of detailed notes. That did make the chapters much easier to make once I actually got started on them (I probably would have stuck with that had I not released it in such a stupid way, built it in an obsolete program, and gone to university). Since Taming Dreams was meant as a rewrite of MARDEK's story, I've been reading through those notes and seeing what I can reuse in this. A lot, as it turns out! Not the nonviolent themes, but a lot of character stuff that's essentially an elaboration of what was already introduced in MARDEK.

So far, I've got a rough idea of how the first three Belief chapters will go, a good idea of the fourth chapter - which I'll make first, and which is heavily based on MARDEK 1 and 2 - and I'm working my way through plotting the remaining two, which is more challenging since I want to incorporate a lot of MARDEK 3 while keeping everything resolvable in a satisfying finale. I'm getting there, though! I'm not expecting the planning to take months.

A big part of this planning is deciding on the cast of characters, and I've spent a lot of time these past few days drawing concept art of all the main characters that I intend to use. I've decided on eight protagonists (though this may change as I plan more), and I actually wrote an enormous 6000 word post yesterday going through them one by one, talking about their story roles, origins in MARDEK and before that, etc, with collections of concept art for each one I've made through the years.

I think rather than posting that as one huge mega post though, I'll write separate posts about each character, like one a day for just over a week. I feel that could help build hype and encourage discussion about each one, while the longer post would just be overwhelming.

I'd start that now, but the timing's awkward, with Christmas and then New Year so close. I don't know who'd actually be interested in hype for this thing when they're more likely to be distracted with other obligations and gifts and such. There's a lot I'd want to write about actually - I've composed a potential main musical theme too - but it just seems like such a bad time. Unfortunate.

Personally, I won't be doing anything for either of those special days, other than writing a summary of how the year's been for me at its end. I'll keep working away at this in private anyway, and my hope is that I could have a working demo by February, at which point I'd release the original MARDEK on Steam and run a Kickstarter for this remake at the same time, hoping interest might spill between the two. I'll also work on building contacts and addressing my anxieties, but I'll write more about that in a new year's post, probably.

For now, here's a TOTALLY EXCITING TEASER IMAGE of the silhouetted protagonists! You can probably tell who most of them are, and I've already posted the first three on ∞ my Twitter account ∞, but I'll post the individual write-ups maybe in January?

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