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Fungoblin + Battle Videos + Mardek's Race

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago5,191 words

I made a new monster model; here's a bit about the process! I've also continued implementing and refining the revised battle mechanics; here are four short battle videos showcasing my progress!! Also, should Mardek be a pink elf??? This is a long post!!!!

It's been a few weeks since the last Divine Dreams post! Both the MARDEK stuff and the website issues got in the way of posting about my progress with it, though I have done a bit more, so there's a lot I'll be covering here.

In the previous couple of posts, I talked about some drastic revisions to the battle mechanics. I've continued developing those, and while they're not complete yet, I feel I'm getting to a place I really like with them. I'm finding the battles really fun to play, and have to stop myself just repeatedly playing the game when I should be working on it, which is always a good sign.

Before I talk about that though, here's what I would have talked about last week if not for the website issues:

Creation Process of a New Monster

I'd only added a couple of monsters to the game previously (Stratapillar and Neuronaut, shown in older posts). It doesn't make sense to add too many at a point where things might change drastically! Still, neither of those are physical attackers, which meant I had nothing to test the new physical/mental battle mechanics with.

I like the idea of reusing my old monster designs, as a lot of series do. It gives a nice feeling of continuity and familiarity even if there's no direct connection between the worlds or games in a lore sense. Since this is a Reimagining of MARDEK, it makes sense to reuse some monsters from that.

In ∞ a post from 3 months ago ∞, I showed some concept art of potential monsters for the Dreamcave area I've been making first. There were a few designs of Fungoblins - one of the first monsters you encounter in MARDEK - as well as a variant called Psilocyblin (a ∞ magic mushroom ∞, har har), though I couldn't decide on a design and didn't intend for it to be one of the ones I'd include for this dungeon. For whatever reason, though, I gave it another go, and ended up with this page of chaotically arranged and crudely rendered concept drawings:



I considered combining them with the silly 'Happy Johnny' enemies from MARDEK (which were a bouncing cactus in a single boot), but nothing felt right. Eventually I settled on a sort of combination of the old armless, faceless fungoblins and the more 'standard' goblins from Alora Fane: Creation. Interestingly, AFC also included fungoblins as a separate species, as well as a purple-capped variant called Myconimp:



With a design decided, I got to work on bringing it to digital life. Here's what I made in about an hour; I feel I'm getting better and more confident at 3D modelling (I'm still hardly an expert). And of course that's the base male human model for comparison; useful to get the right scale. I originally intended for it to be eyeless.



This how it was after about another hour, when it felt good enough to call it done:



To animate a model, it has to be 'rigged' with a skeleton, and its vertices have to be 'weighted' to the bones in that skeleton. It's complicated, and this is no place to try to explain it! Making this rig took about an hour too, probably?



I build my rigs manually, and I add the vertex weights manually too rather than relying on any auto weighting (which the tutorials I started learning with always recommended, but which I feel gives me less control and contaminates the model with a whole lot of 'sloppy' values; assigning my own feels so much neater and cleaner).



The next step is to do what's called 'UV unwrapping', where you specify the locations of the faces on the texture. Again, complicated to explain, though not as time consuming to do as adding the rig. My UV unwrapping is crude; professionals can create these really neat, tightly-packed unwrappings where every pixel of the texture is used well, but I end up having these big areas which aren't used by any parts of the model because I can't be bothered refining it! It doesn't really matter for the style I'm using, which has mostly flat colours without shading.



And here it is with a final texture and idle animation! I feel I'm getting much better at animation too; look at how complicated this animation is compared to the ones in my other work like MARDEK, where I often just tweened between two poses. (Also yes MARDEK is making a silly face here and it is amusing, much laughter.)



I'm quite pleased with this model! It turned out much better than expected. It's an ugly thing, but that's sort of the point! I still see myself as very much an amateur modeller, so the confidence I felt making this and the quality of the end result gives me hope for the other models I'll need to make for this and any other future games. It's nice to feel I've evolved beyond the "still figuring out how to do this" stage.

Still, it takes a while to create and animate a new model. At first I was planning to make every monster unique, like Pokemon - or like the monsters in FFVIII (and I think FFIX too?), to avoid the whole ∞ Underground Monkey ∞ thing... though there's a good reason many games - including MARDEK - use that. I remember monster creation for MARDEK giving me little trouble and not consuming too much time, because I mostly made variants of existing models. Perhaps I'll do a similar thing with this; it's more practical, and I doubt anyone would be upset by it!

Battle Mechanics

With that out of the way, I shall talk about the battle mechanics! I wanted to make a gameplay video like the one from... ∞ wow, two months ago? ∞, but I wasn't able to achieve that, so I'm aiming to have one for next week instead. Probably not a bad time if people will be playing MARDEK on Steam not long after, and hopefully coming and having a look at what I'm doing now.

I do have some short videos though, which I've emdedded directly rather here than YouTube videos (far less hassle); hopefully they'll work!

Rather than just dryly explaining the mechanics like I have done previously, let's look at a few battles, after which I'll explain some of the features they showcase. Here's the first one:



The player would be introduced to the game's mechanics with battles as simple as this. Just a familiar back-and-forth of physical attacks, healing when necessary. You don't have to worry about light or dark or runes or any of that.

That's a fungoblin variant, called Psilocyblin, though it doesn't look like the original design for that from the post 3 months ago. It was quickly-made, and I'll probably change it for the final game! It's also a bit silly that it's a 'magic mushroom' but only uses physical attacks, but I'll likely change that too; perhaps all the monsters in the final Dreamcave will be magic-users, unlike the monsters in most areas in the game.

There's this ∞ letterboxing ∞ effect when you're taking a turn, party to direct the player's focus to the menu in the centre (I've used centred menus in most of my earlier games, apparently, though MARDEK is an exception), but also to clarify the status UI things (they're called 'statues' in the code, from status + depiction of a person) which might otherwise get lost in complex backgrounds.

I've also added a turn order bar, like MARDEK's! Originally I had it in essentially the same place as MARDEK's:



But I felt that the letterbox effect was already covering up a lot, and I don't think it's necessary to see that many turns in advance anyway. I used the current position because there's nothing else there, and this width because there are eight 'slots' on either side, so this is how much space would be left if all eight statues were visible.



I'm not sure about it, though; it feels imbalanced, aesthetically irritating. Perhaps it'll grow on me though; I only added it last night.


Effectiveness Rainbow
In the video, you might have noticed that it says "Eh" in blue under the damage numbers. This shows the effectiveness, and I'm still trying to decide what to do about it! I feel that Pokemon's "super effective!" is iconic in a way that "2x damage" (or just nothing) wouldn't have been, though it bothers me how an electric attack hitting a Gyarados is still "super effective" despite being 4x effective instead...

So I like the idea of using a 'rainbow' of words which signify different degrees of effectiveness. That is, there are seven different ones, with violet as the least effective, and red as the most effective. Blue - rather than green - is used as the neutral to allow more range for above-average effectiveness.

At first I wondered whether to use words like "Okay", "Good", "Great!", "Amazing!" and so on, but currently I have these, which I found funnier:



I personally would use 'bleh', 'meh', 'eh' (like the 'eh' in 'pet', not the Canadian 'ay'), 'ooh', and 'wow' in that way, though 'eyy' makes me think of Fonzie from Happy Days (a character I only know from references in other things like The Simpsons), or an Italian American stereotype (I think?), and 'aah' reads like a scream of fear or an orgasmic moan as much as an expression of awe. I think they'd all be subjectively read, not necessarily as they were intended.

So I'm still deciding what to do there, and I'm interested in hearing some thoughts about it!

I also considered just adding coloured stars, or even a numerical percentage, but they felt a lot colder and less likely to stick in players' minds outside the game (as "super effective" does).


Let's move onto the next battle, where Mardek is now accompanied by Deugan:



Buffs
In a previous post, I talked about my uncertainty regarding buffs. I described a system of 'buff petals' where characters had a limited number of 'buff slots' which could be filled with these petals... but it all seemed a bit unnecessarily complicated. The buffs were also permanent, which is something I dislike about MARDEK's stat reductions and status effects in general (I think resistance to status effects allowed you to recover from them each turn, though I don't remember).

So I'm using a more simplified system of buffs now. Characters can have up to six buffs (or debuffs) at a time, and each one has a duration. So a buff might increase your Defence or Attack by 3 points, though it expires after a couple of turns to prevent infinite stacking. I feel this would work better on a gameplay level.

There are still other things like Moods and arousal on top of buffs.


Taming!
This is the biggest change from the old system, which I feel makes these battles way more interesting! I've touched on it previously, but I think seeing it in action goes a whole lot further towards selling its appeal than words could.

You tame opponents by increasing their Light, using skills which have that effect (such as MARDEK's Tame here). These skills typically use the runes, element, and the user's Light stat to calculate their effectiveness. It's not something you have to really think about every time you use them; it's more like if you understand the underlying mechanics, you can manipulate conditions to produce huge effectiveness chains for enormous 'damage', but you could otherwise tame more slowly using less effective skills. Kind of like if you didn't understand Pokemon types and just used Scratch and Ember on everything (like child-me playing Red for the first time); you could still get by, just not as efficiently as someone who knew the mechanics well.

Tamed monsters move to your side of the battlefield, and can be used like any other ally. I'd have been so excited by something like this when I was younger! I still am now!

Notably though, tamed monsters would be at full Light and 0 Dark (since you just filled their Light to convert them), meaning any skills they had which used Dark as the offensive stat would be useless straight after taming. This means the player has to manipulate the battlefield carefully if they want to tame a monster but then use it for violence. This Stratapillar has a skill (Balance) which balances its Light and Dark (and arousal), allowing it to use its Dark spell, Stonesplosion, on its second turn. Other monsters would have taming skills of their own to help you tame the other opponents; they wouldn't use these themselves on the opponent side, but the skills you could use when controlling a monster wouldn't necessarily be the same as the ones it uses itself in its AI.

Tamed monsters disappear (with a gold dissolve effect rather than the defeated purple) at the end of battle; they might grant different rewards, though I'm still deciding what to do there.


Next battle!



(There's an annoyingly-placed rock next to MARDEK because I've changed the positions of the camera and characters, but haven't edited the battle background around that yet!)

There's not much that's new in this one (the Psilocyblin's movement isn't enough like a run though, and it shows the wrong icon on its Attack command!), so now's a good time to talk about what you might have noticed in the others, and which people have talked about a lot in previous posts:


Skill XP
Skills have a level, from 1 to 6. Increasing the level increases the power of the skill, or what it can do; for example, at level 1, Heal might heal the lowest Body ally for 100% of MARDEK's Light, while at level 2 it might heal the two lowest Body allies for 120% of MARDEK's light, etc.

Skills have an XP cost to level them up. The amount of XP that a skill gains is equal to the 'damage' that it inflicts when you use it. That means that using a skill well is the best way to level it up quickly. I feel that clever players would get a lot out of setting up all the multipliers (runes, elements, etc) in such a way that they can level up their skills most efficiently; it'd still take effort on the player's part, but it wouldn't just be restricted to spending time grinding the same action again and again.

A potential issue is that you could just grind against the weakest enemies with the lowest defences... but there are a couple of ways to tackle this. One is that things like runes and elements don't exactly have numerical values anyway, so it's not as if some have 'weaker' runes than others; it'd still be up to the players to either find monsters with the right elements and runes, or to manipulate them to what they wanted. Also, I could perhaps make it so that damage inflicted - or at least the skill XP gained from it - never exceeds the opponent's Body/Mind (as appropriate)... So if you dealt 600 damage to something with only 10 Body, you'd only gain 10 XP rather than 600. Though that seems to remove some of the fun of building up those ideal situations for huge effectiveness combos, so I'm still thinking about this. I feel it should be about fun first and foremost though, not putting restrictive barriers in the player's way. If a player would enjoy going and grinding around the first forest, why not let them? Most players wouldn't play that way even if it seemed the most efficient way for a few. Most players are neither completionists nor min-maxers (or whatever the term is).

Skills that don't deal damage (such as both of Deugan's here) are more like MARDEK's in that they accumulate 1 XP per use, but they obviously don't cost nearly as much as the other type.

I wasn't sure how the UI for the skill's level and XP should look, and played around with a few possibilities:





I really like what I decided on:



I also edited the concords menu for clarity and consistency:



Emeela's getting a debuff from a piece of her equipment:



Some items would grant permanent buffs or debuffs, like in MARDEK. This one, Isolate, was added partly out of necessity. One of the concord effects is "Cheer", which causes someone's allies to cheer them on when they take their turn, restoring their Light a bit. Emeela requires Dark to fuel her dark spells, which means these spells are actually weakened every time she takes a turn and gets cheered on. It was annoying! Isolate disables all effects from concords, including this... but while I like that it maybe feels in character, it seems like a sloppy and short-sighted fix for the issue. A better solution would probably be to rethink the Cheer thing entirely. Maybe it could restore Body instead, which is always desirable? That makes no sense, really, but aren't gameplay mechanics full of stuff that don't realistically make sense?


Here's the fourth and final battle that I'll be showing here:



Some monsters have skills which don't deal standard Body damage, but which instead increase Dark, like the Neuronauts here. I talked in previous posts about uncertainties regarding what happens when Dark fills, but I like what I've got here: when a character turns fully Dark, they convert to the other side!

Mechanically, I like this, but I've been thinking about the lore behind it. I think that the characters should undergo some kind of transformation to show that they've 'fallen to darkness', that they're not in their right mind, so it's more about something beyond their control than anything they can be blamed for. Since it's a fantasy game, that opens up a lot of possibilities.

One is to give characters some kind of 'beast form', which looks and acts feral. It could be subtle, like a posture change and maybe some bits of fur on their face, or perhaps it could be a full werewolf-like transformation, or even a change to an entirely different animal form? Emeela could turn into a deer, Deugan into a wolf. It seems an interesting way to add an additional layer of character, by having their transformation represent some aspect of how they see themselves.

Another alternative is to have them become sort of undead, or possessed. Perhaps they become Lost, and their eyes turn fully black, their faces expressionless?





Either way, it seems that whatever they become should play a big part in Alora Fane's general lore, and the way that the story develops. It's too big of a thing in their lives to be relegated to some gameplay mechanic nobody even talks about! It's not something I thought of until recently, though, so it's not written into what I have so far. But it's still early - and my plans are still so incomplete - that I definitely could tweak some things to make use of something like this.

So I'm still thinking about how best to handle this.

Mechanically, their lost/beast forms would each have maybe three different abilities, which are unique to the character, but which wouldn't necessarily overlap with which skills you'd actually equipped on them. They'd use the same AI mechanics as monsters. Interestingly, you could even deliberately use these monster forms to your advantage in certain situations. Perhaps one character's monster form uses a skill that rouses their entire party, denying their new monster allies the opportunity to use their calm skills. The mechanics afford a lot of potential scenarios.

When a character has been lost to the other side, you can deal with them either by taming them like any other monster, causing them to regain their senses when they reach full Light, or you can just KO them using Body-damaging attacks. If you did that, they'd be handled the same after battle as if they'd died while on your side (that is, they'd revive with 1 Body).

From playing with the few assets I currently have, I've found this mechanic really immersive and emotionally engaging. Upon seeing Steele converted, I put myself in Deugan's mind: he won't let this monster hurt Emeela; Taunt! I've been wanting to do this for ages; Attack! But when it's Emeela who's lost, Deugan taunting feels so different; there's an extra layer of interest beyond the technical mechanics. Now, Deugan's drawing her attention to him so then he can endure the pain to be the hero in her eyes, to avoid hurting her, to help his friends, and he guards against her sorrow spells while feeling his own sorrow, seeing her lost. And so on. It's interesting!

Also, Steele has a skill here which rouses both himself and Emeela, so then he can use his "Ultraviolence!" attack and so then she can use Hate. That's another thing born of character which I quite like... though I need to balance the numbers, because currently he needs to use it twice before she can use Hate, and after just one use she can't use Despair anymore. Maybe that's not inappropriate though? Interactions like this will be more tricky to balance than just deciding on how powerful to make an attack, but I feel the results will be more interesting too.

(Steele doesn't have a proper animation for that skill yet; he's just using Deugan's taunt one currently and it looks stupid.)

Also, the battle models were animated for their respective sides, so when switching like this, they end up facing away from the camera in a way I don't consider acceptable. I'm thinking about how best to handle this without adding too much extra work. I want to add different idles for the feral/lost forms of the playable characters anyway, so that should address that, though I'll need to consider other options for monsters.

There's also a bug where Emeela starts rotating as she runs back to her party after being tamed; that's not intentional!



Phew! There are a couple of other things that I want to mention before ending this.

Skill Learning

One is about skills, and their acquisition. Currently, characters have a relatively small arsenal of skills unique to them, which they can equip up to 6 of at a time. They'd acquire new skills through dialogue, either through plot events or as sidequest rewards. That is, you'd witness them have the ideas for their abilities through words said to or by them.

I also like the idea of binding skills to 'memento' items though. These items would strongly remind the characters of certain feelings from past events, and it's those feelings that they draw upon to shape the miasma into spells. I think this is fairly accurate to how our actual minds work; it can be very surprising how much raw feeling certain objects can cause to explode within us, even if they're reminding us of something that we think about all the time.

There's no real point having items as an additional layer in what I've got currently... But I like this on an immersion level more than a technical one. Perhaps the mementos could also be used to trigger scenes, similar to the Dreamstones in MARDEK 3? Perhaps Mardek has a Stick as a memento that grants a helping skill, and you can press a button on it to show a (text) scene where he once helped Deugan out of some quicksand using this long stick. It seems like an interesting way to explore the characters.

Also, if every monster is tameable and has its own skills, it's going to be hugely taxing and time-consuming coming up with abilities for all of them! It'd be more reasonable to make a set of 'standard spells' which could commonly be available, like Final Fantasy's Fire, Fira, Firaga, etc, or, to a lesser extent, Pokemon moves. I thought of some potential names and effects for some:



It's interesting how the six runes fit quite nicely with the six elements!

Perhaps characters could also acquire spellbooks as 'mementos', with these standard spells as linked abilities? That would mean that each character would have their personal list of more nuanced abilities, but that you could also customise them with a more limited selection of spells from every element?

I'm uncertain about this. Final Fantasy games did this sort of thing, but MARDEK didn't. It's been interesting seeing people discuss the viability of certain MARDEK characters in recent blog posts based on the abilities available to them, and I always felt that my characters in Final Fantasy games were essentially interchangeable because they were all capable of equipping the same abilities.

But I suppose it's like how Pokemon species each have their own natural move lists, and some of what they learn are signature moves unique to their species, but there are also TMs to grant a wide range of other moves. This means that most Pokemon end up with the same few best moves (eg every Fire type has Flamethrower)... but wouldn't it be way more restrictive, way worse, to be stuck with just the moves they learned naturally?

I'm undecided! What do you think?

On a technical level, if skills were bound to mementos, I'm not sure how the menu would look. I don't much care for having the skill list 'broken up' like this:



But would the mementos be in separate slots above or below the skill list? That seems awkward. It'd make more sense to have them side-by-side, but there's no room. Could these skills be made horizontally narrower? Maybe. Things I need to think about!

MARDEK as a Pink Elf

FINALLY, in MARDEK, Mardek's skin was white, because his father - despite coming from another planet - looked exactly like a Caucasian human. In Taming Dreams, I did away with the other planet thing, and instead Enki was from another 'petal world' of Alora Fane. He was one of the dark-skinned Mhandisi; his alien-ness was obvious on the surface. As such, Mardek had dark skin too (though as his mother was a Bold, he was somewhere between their tan skin and the Mhandisi's dark skin).

The design I'm using for him in this is the same one as that, though his father is no longer a dark-skinned Mhandisi.

I have this image from December 2019 that I don't think I showed off here? I wasn't happy with some of the drawings (I'm still not, bleh), and wanted to redo them. I can't be bothered though, so here's how the five extant Alora Fane races look:



The 2013 ones are the Bold, Meek, Mhandisi, Sindrels, and Varnyn. They all look fairly bland to me now, like something you'd find in a D&D campaign.

The 2019 ones feel more mine, at least. They're the Bold, Meek, Lucen, Sindrels, and Varnyn. (I've also designed the extinct sixth race, the Elarna, but I've omitted it for now.)

The Mhandisi were a kind of 'steampunk African' which would have been quite similar to Wakanda from Marvel (which I'd never heard of when I designed them; this was pre-Black Panther). The Lucen, on the other hand, are more like "alien angel-demons". Their petal is a sparkling sci-fi city called the Enlightened Technopolis, and they devote themselves to opening their minds both scientifically and spiritually. The Magisterium - Divine Dreams' Governance de Magi - are all Lucen.

Mardek's father is still from another world, though this time he's called Savitr rather than Enki, and he's half Lucen. Mardek's mother is a Bold woman called Idalia.

Lucen skin tones range from purple to red, and instead of human ears, they have long horns which serve a similar function.

As such, it doesn't make sense that Mardek's skin should be the colour that it is. He should probably look something like this:



(That's Deugan and Emeela too, obviously; I was going to draw the whole cast, but ran out of time and energy and stopped here.)

That is, a sort of magenta colour, with spiky ears.

Like a pink elf.

He looks like something out of World of Warcraft or Star Trek though, and I really like the shade of brown that I'm currently using for his skin, so I've been wondering for a few weeks now whether to make the change or not.

I've also been wondering about annoying political stuff that would inevitably get drawn into character perception. I've no intention of making a 'woke' game; I'm not that kind of person. I don't want to make any political points about forced, unnatural representation since that's not something I feel I have the personal experience to do any justice to. Still, I like the idea of the player character having a skin colour which resembles the majority of the human population (that is, brown), and ambiguous facial features, and I know that people do... notice these kinds of things, for better or worse.

But then wouldn't him looking like a pink-skinned elf be even more race-transcendent, such that anyone of any human race could identify with him instead of seeing him as a representative of an existing group they're not, with all the connotations that come with that?? Or would it instead be harder to relate to because he looks too alien?!?!

I don't know. I just know that the lore would suggest an appearance like this more than like what I've already got. But then wouldn't he stand out too much among the other Bold? Wouldn't he anyway if he was dark-skinned?

What do you think?



Here's this version of Mardek from some lost/beast concepts, which I didn't include earlier since I had to explain it first! (I haven't decided on which exact shade of pink he'd be...) The more I think about it, the more I like the one with the black void eyes since it looks like it lacks agency, like it's possessed, rather than acting deliberately... HMM.



Finally, we have reached the end! I would have preferred this to be three separate posts, but OH WELL.

(Also, account creation and validation are still not working... I'm looking into it, but again I'm waiting on my webhost...)