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More Silhouettes and Title Possibilities!

5 years ago1,071 words

I've done more work on the MARDEK Remake, so here's an updated version of the character silhouettes with almost all the major characters, not just the 'main protagonists'! Also some possible titles!

Christmas is behind us now, though the New Year still looms ahead. I'm aiming to have the plan for the MARDEK Remake's story roughly finished by then, allowing me to start working on a demo in January, which I'd release alongside a Kickstarter and the Steam re-release of the original MARDEK (as I've said before). It's coming along nicely; I've got a rough idea of all six chapters now, though I still need to clean some things up. I think I said that in the previous post??

I've been drawing more in the last week or two than I have all year (now that I have something I need to draw), and I've now drawn all the major characters with these stylised proportions which'll be used for the in-game models. Originally I wanted to group them into Protagonists, Supporting Characters, and Antagonists or something, but unlike in many JRPGs where you get a fixed party early and keep them for the whole game, in this all those categories are in flux, with characters shifting between them so much that it's too difficult to group them like that.

(In MARDEK, were Deugan and Emela "main characters" despite being absent for chapter 3??)



This shows most of the major characters who appear throughout the second MARDEK-based trilogy, though there are a few not included here who play important roles but never join or battle your party (probably).

They're all based on characters previously in either MARDEK or Taming Dreams, some more loosely than others. I'm not sure how many you'd be able to recognise!

The bottom row are obviously the Governance de Magi equivalents, here called the Magisterium. They're designed to all be wearing hoods, which they can put up to look like the original MARDEK designs (roughly), though they can also be left down to reveal horned lucen heads, which is the case in these silhouettes. Some of them take heavy inspiration from their Taming Dreams incarnations, while a couple are completely new designs. They've all got new names too, based on some actually relevant mythology, which I'll talk about in a later post.

Starting at some point in (probably!) January, I'll start revealing these one-by-one a day at a time, with a post roughly describing them and their origins in MARDEK, and I might have this image as a sort of 'calendar' on the main page of this site (where the Sindrel Song thing is currently), with one being revealed/lit up for each post. It'd be a good idea to have the last one align with the release of the original and/or Kickstarter for the remake, but I'm not sure how it'll all work; I'll have to plan it a bit!

My art's nothing special since I'm using these to explore and demonstrate concepts rather than make pretty pictures (and I rarely draw), but I like how these have turned out and really want to show them all off! And to make 3D models of them for use in the game. But I also know revealing them gradually would be a good way of building hype, so that seems the best course of action!



While I have the urge to just blurt out all my planning because I like a lot of what I've come up with, I'll be trying to keep that to myself to avoid spoilers. I will mention that I've been considering what to call the series though, since "MARDEK Remake" isn't really a title! And I don't want to just use the "MARDEK" title again, partly to create distance from that so it doesn't seem like I'm defiling people's memories, but also because I don't know why I used that title in the first place; it's not exactly meaningful.

The whole setting is based around the idea that consciousness is the fundamental substrate of reality, which minds can manipulate, which is why the elements are 'mind-like' (Courage, Sorrow, etc) rather than the typical physical-oriented ones (fire, water, etc), and it ties to the formation of miasmon and 'elemancy', and the nature of life and what happens after. Interesting things to explore, which I already began exploring in MARDEK with things like the dreamrealm. That plays a major role in this story, as the 'mental sea of chaotic potential' in which dreams happen and the petal worlds of Alora Fane exist as 'islands'. "Dreamrealm" is a bit of a clunky word, though, so I've condensed that to "drealm", which I feel is a nice bit of lore specific to this setting that gives it a bit more flavour.

So I've been wondering whether to call the game Drealm. It's six letters, and google doesn't come up with any major results (though it has been used for a few obscure things), so it'd become strongly associated with this game if it ever gained traction. As a word, to me it sounds like a combination of menacing and mystically intriguing, which is fitting, but it doesn't contain much information... but then again neither do titles like MARDEK or the bizarre "Chrono Trigger" (which we just take for granted now despite it being such a weird title; I suppose the 'chrono' hinted at time travel though).

Another possibility is Divine Dreams, which is a variant on Taming Dreams. It's a title I already used for another non-game project I worked on briefly, so I own ∞ this url ∞. It's multi-layered; the world is the dream of divine deities, plus 'divine' as a word means discover, especially through insight or magical means, which is relevant to the story. Plus it means 'dreaming of becoming divine'... Neither word is unique, for which there are pros (better remembering) and cons (less association). "Star Wars" is made of two common words though, hmm... Plus Divine Dreams can be shortened to DD, while Drealm can't be shortened at all. HMM.

I might come up with something else later; I'm still very much in the brainstorming stage at the moment!

(I've been doing tons of that, too... I've been more productive these past couple of weeks than I have been in ages. Too bad most of it's unseen behind-the-scenes stuff though!)