In a nutshell, Divine Dreams is what MARDEK could have been, if I'd had more skill and I'd done more planning.
I've talked about this all this a few times before, but some of the comments on ∞ Saturday's post ∞ - in which I talked about possibly changing the protagonist - made me wonder if people still have the wrong idea about what I'm trying to achieve here. Since I had the same thing to say in response to several comments, here's a new post instead.
I first used a character called 'Mardek' in an odd... thing made in PowerPoint - due to lack of other options - when I was around 14 or 15. It was kind of like a series of JRPG battles without actual gameplay; I used PowerPoint's transition effects to make dialogue boxes or spell effects appear, or to make HP bars shrink. Strange; a way of making my dreams a reality before I knew how to program.
Sadly I no longer have these files, and my memories of them are vague. I do know that one of them involved a knight with the random, first-thing-that-came-to-mind name 'Mardek', who was represented by this clipart:
He explored a place called the Sun Temple, where he fought green and red lizardmen alongside the temple's guardian, a golden, light-magic-wielding wolf childishly called Solaar (all also represented by clipart, which I annoyingly can't find).
Maybe a couple of years later, I spent a lot of time making adventures in a game called Neverwinter Nights. I made one called 'Governance de Magi', where the customisable protagonist, along with his childhood friend Emela Jard, and their adoptive father, a wizard called Rohoph, fought off a council of Rohoph's evil wizard allies, starting with a necromancer called Moric.
I talked about that - and showed gameplay footage - in ∞ this post ∞.
After that, I got into making my own games in Flash. At first I was trying to make something based around 'Yalortism', a silly fake religion I'd made together with my school friends, as well as an equally silly thing called Fig Hunter, in which you aimed to become a type of absurd mythical warrior who spent their lives battling inanimate fruit.
Fig Hunter was the first RPG that I made, and I actually got quite far with it! Some of you might have already played it, though I forget where - or if - I ever released it. I talked about it - and this other early stuff - in ∞ these blog posts ∞.
Both it and its successor-of-sorts, Deliverance (pictured here), were similar to MARDEK in that they blended together sci-fi and fantasy (both involved planet hopping, Deliverance began on a spaceship), and didn't take themselves too seriously. They both had customisable protagonists - like those in the Western RPGs I'd played, most notably Neverwinter Nights - but gameplay based on JRPGs, especially the Final Fantasies. Both had a semblance of a plot, but were poorly-planned, scattered. Both were also intended to be huge epics, on the scale of the games I loved, maybe even greater!! Naive.
As they were bloating so much that the finish line was getting further and further away, though, I had an idea which keeps coming up: what if, while working on these in the background, I made something short and simple that I could actually release, maybe in chunks? It doesn't need to be anything big or interesting, I just need something I can finish!
So, I created a folder called QuickQuests, in which I'd store these little games I'd make. I turned to the Sun Temple thing I'd made in PowerPoint as a basis, since it felt throwaway and saved me the time of coming up with something completely new. I started by making this tactical-RPG-inspired thing in early 2007, starring Mardek, the knight from the original PowerPoint thing:
I can't remember if I've ever shown that anywhere before! I only worked on it for a few days, and I reused a lot of assets from Deliverance. The (placeholder) dialogue is from that.
This armoured Mardek was the first instance of the character, though there wasn't anything to him as an actual character. He didn't even have a face! I didn't think too deeply about such things back then; I largely thought about characters in terms of what they were ('a knight', 'the king') rather than who they were on a personal level.
Perhaps this bothered me though, and I began wondering about how to actually give this Mardek character an actual story. I liked the idea of starting at the beginning, with his childhood, and that inspired the general direction of MARDEK Chapter 1. Looking for inspiration for the story beyond that, I turned to the Neverwinter Nights modules I'd spent a lot of time on, and Governance de Magi stood out to me as it was one of the ones I'd actually finished, and which offered some interesting potential with the council of wizards.
No longer bound by the limitations of Neverwinter Nights, though, I made the Governance de Magi (which weren't even a governing body in the original?) aliens instead of just wizards, and I had Rohoph's consciousness possess Mardek instead of having him bodily accompany the player, as he did in the module.
I built on and combined older ideas to produce something more interesting than any of them were originally.
So I made MARDEK 1 - really quickly, from what I recall, though it's hard to tell from the file dates how long it actually took - and planned to make eight of them, as I imagined they'd all be small and quick. Obviously that didn't happen, though, and they became too bloated - the third in particular - that I couldn't finish what I started.
As I worked on MARDEK 3, I had some interesting ideas for how the story could go. Potential brewed, and the narrative side of things developed beyond the fairly uninspired beginnings. It all grew gradually, organically, though; while I apparently had some kind of a plan from the beginning (as shown by notes included in the Steam extras), a lot of the better ideas only began to form over the course of development.
If you play MARDEK 1, 2, and 3 back-to-back now, you can see this. The way it starts is a lot less interesting than what it grows into.
Much of its content though was essentially cannibalised from earlier works, notably Deliverance:
This reusing and refining of ideas is something I've always done.
Since MARDEK, I've experimented with a few projects that I never finished (Miasmon, AFC, etc), and I've developed - over the course of several years - a setting (Alora Fane) I'm quite pleased with, as it's my own rather than just an imitation of Final Fantasy or D&D.
MARDEK remains my biggest hit though, so I keep returning to it largely for that reason. I spent a lot of time on it, and it's hard to just completely let go of that.
However, like with the original conception of MARDEK, I'm not interested in keeping every detail intact. Rather, I look at my old work, and see what could be polished, changed, done better. It's easier - and more satisfying! - to edit and refine something than it is to create something entirely from scratch.
Taming Dreams was an attempt to combine the MARDEK story with the Alora Fane world and 'non-violent battle system' I'd been designing. Again, I feel my plans were too ambitious (I planned dozens of chapters), and the ridiculous way I'd planned to release it (as a mobile game), plus other life events (going to university), ultimately led to its unfortunate end. Still, I planned it excessively - aiming to avoid the errors I made with MARDEK - and I still like a lot of what I intended to do with it.
While planning Taming Dreams, I reimagined a lot of the characters, while others remained essentially the same but varied in details. Meraeador was now a young female inventor called Meraeadyth, who was highly sceptical and lonely (but in denial), and who joined during the early forest section; her connection with Mardek and Deugan grew over time, as part of the game, in contrast to the told-not-shown connection they had with Meraeador. Emela gained an extra 'e' in her name, and the sorrow and social ineptitude which came from spending her childhood sealed away from others were explored more deeply. Child-Elwyen, rather than being a damsel-in-distress quest object, expressed her yearning for adventure in music, and was inspired by her meeting with a 'mermaid' (Emeela) to make herself beautifully blue.
There's this meme thing called "Draw This Again", where artists return to their old drawings after several years of skill development and personal growth, and the results are often striking. This is a random example by I-don't-know-who (it's not my art!) from googling 'draw this again'; I only seem to have done one of my own, years ago, though the differences in time and art quality aren't nearly as large:
(I should do that again...)
With both the other artist's and mine - though the former more obviously - the aim isn't to reproduce every detail of the original. Rather, it's to recreate the essence of the original while tweaking any details if a better design presents itself. Sometimes elements are lost entirely (eg the entire background in the other artist's image) because retaining them would just be gaudy.
It's interesting comparing the battle systems of MARDEK, Taming Dreams, and Divine Dreams in this way:
The TD and DD screenshots don't just show essentially the same thing as MARDEK, just with fancier visuals. That'd be a remake, a remaster. Rather, they take the essence of the game, story, and characters, but alter the details to something that I, as an older, more developed developer, felt was a better interpretation of the essential skeleton. They're still 'JRPG battles', but all the details of what that actually entails have been revised.
It's different with characters though, isn't it? For example, you might agree that visually, one of these is an improvement over the other:
But they're both still Tony Stark, tech genius alcoholic playboy. There are some different details between each incarnation, but he's still essentially the same character.
It's interesting though how many characters in these comics adaptations are changed dramatically to make them more fitting for something which we could believe could be the real world, but their names remain the same. To change the name would be sacrilege!
And I do understand that. Names are important, attachments to characters are important. Even if all the details change, the name allows the concept to root itself in warm familiarity.
Well, sort of. Sometimes you get fans who absolutely hate 'in name only' adaptations because nothing about them except the name is similar to how the character they know looks, acts, or thinks.
Going back a bit to the video of that old thing that eventually became MARDEK, you'll notice that Mardek's being followed by two generic soldiers. This was 'inspired by' (ie directly stolen from) Final Fantasy VI's beginning, where Terra's accompanied by Biggs and Wedge. In both instances, it's supposed to show the character's rank as a commanding knight (or whatever Terra was), and gameplay-wise it adds members to your party to aid with battles.
When it came time to actually do this bit in MARDEK 3, however, I reinvented these faceless flunkies as Donovan and Sharla, who at least had some kind of personality. I think this idea came before MARDEK 2 started development, so I incorporated them into that too rather than having Mardek and Deugan accompanied by nobodies during that mission/test/whatever it was.
Sometimes dramatically revising a previously shallow character like this can lead to a drastically better story.
(In Divine Dreams, those characters have been removed entirely because their role isn't important enough.)
5 months ago (!), I posted this set of silhouettes of (most of) the major characters from Divine Dreams:
I've been meaning to return to that, to reveal them one-by-one, though I've yet to find the best time and place to do that. If I had, though, you'd notice that - like with Taming Dreams before this - I've redesigned, and in many cases renamed, many of the characters to the point where they're only vaguely based on their MARDEK counterparts.
I wondered what it'd be like if I coloured some of those silhouettes to show which characters I'd redesigned or renamed:
The orange ones weren't in MARDEK at all... though they're all based, vaguely, on characters that were. Blue means the name has changed; the darker blues mean the name changed somewhat (eg Emela to Emeela, Muriance to Murias), while the brighter blues mean a complete name change. Some of them are roughly the same as their MARDEK equivalents in terms of general personality and story role, while others are dramatically different, though that's not marked here.
So far I've been showing off the protagonist, Deugan, Emeela, and Steele, and they're unusual in that they've changed the least from MARDEK... or at least from Taming Dreams. It probably gives the impression the other characters will be similarly similar, but that's not the case.
But I refer to 'the protagonist' there rather than 'Mardek', because, as I wrote about in the other post, I'm considering revising this character completely. And, understandably, that's been met with opposition by people who have fond memories of MARDEK.
But the point is, I'm not remaking MARDEK. That's not what this is. While developing MARDEK, I came up with some ideas that eventually made the story much more interesting to me than it was when I started. Potential bloomed, but the original settings and characters were like an anchor which limited the range of ideas I could explore.
Now, you could say that I could - or should - just start again from scratch, rather than trying to reuse anything from MARDEK, if I'm not going to stick with every detail (or at least the protagonist), but, well, I've already tried that with a few different ideas over the years, but none of them are things I've spent years thinking about and exploring from all kinds of angles so they never stick.
You might also say that if I change the protagonist, then I have to change the rest of the story, right? But it's more like the other way around. The way the story's developed, the original, relatively 'empty' protagonist, Mardek, now feels like a poor fit.
Like a musician who starts their career using a little toy keyboard with limited keys because they can't afford anything else, but as they grow in fame and fortune, they want to move to a big piano with the full amount of keys so they can play more varied music... but they're associated with the toy keyboard by fans, who often just want to see that keyboard, so they feel trapped. Or something.
As I've planned the story - which was based on the ideas that bubbled up during MARDEK 3's development - I've come to realise that it needs a different kind of leading character to do it justice. Something richer, someone with specific traits.
It feels strange having a story steeped in meaning led by a character who was born of none.
So do I stick with Mardek simply because it's what a few people are familiar with? How many people would that even be, exactly? MARDEK's reception on Steam will be a good way to gauge how much interest there actually is in the series. Obviously this blog is going to attract the minority who do have a lingering connection to the series, but limiting myself just to target that limited audience just doesn't seem right to me.
I mean, there are still people who'd want me to work on a Deliverance remake (or, even worse, to just expand the Flash version), because that's the thing they found during a time in their life they were most receptive. But it's just not feasible because I've long moved beyond it and the audience isn't enough to warrant it.
Would a hypothetical audience for an 'improved' version of the story, Divine Dreams, be any larger than the nostalgic few? I don't know. It's what I feel most creatively inspired to create though.
I mean, I'd absolutely love it if I could reward people's long-lasting interest in the MARDEK series, and I hope the essence of Divine Dreams will be similar enough that it pleases their minds in a similar way even if it doesn't resonate with that exact story thread. I just feel that some changes would be for the better.
I feel I've already talked about most or all of this before, several times, though it does seem to keep coming up because of objections to certain new directions... And I do appreciate people's interest and support, so I don't want to disappoint or just ignore what people have to say. So I try to explain my reasoning.
I've been needing to give the story another pass for a while anyway, so I'll likely be spending the next week (or more?) doing that.
I'm still unsure about the protagonist's appearance and name. Here's some concept art from last night:
I'm not sure about that at all! Refining the design will be a process. If I did go with this, I'd need to do something different with his knight form; obviously it couldn't have the M visor anymore. So there's design work to do, and it's important to do it right if this is to be the story's lead.
Anyway, I can understand why the recent Steam release of MARDEK might have rekindled desires to see a return to the MARDEK story, but Divine Dreams isn't that. At least, not exactly. It's a revision of the story, and that story has developed beyond the protagonist originally assigned to it. Changing the leading character opens up so many more interesting possibilities than sticking with the old just because it's familiar.
Which do you think is more important, though: telling a good story, even if things have to be changed, or sticking with what's familiar, even if some things are clunky or they close off opportunities for more interesting narrative turns?
EDIT: I REALLY like this idea!!
ANOTHER EDIT: I reeeeally like the designs in that image there! I went to bed with a huge smile for the first time in God knows how long last night, and I just keep looking at that image and feeling so pleased with it!
This is so rare for me. The creative process is rocky and full of doubt, but occasionally ideas just click like this and it feels like I've finally found what I was looking for all along. Feelings go from "eh, I'm not sure... maybe?", scrutinising every angle and wondering, to "YES YES YES!!", admiring every angle and grinning.
It's... disheartening when others aren't on board with it, but it is understandable.
I'll write a post specifically about the new ideas next weekend, and I'll spend the next few days brainstorming and revising designs to integrate everything together into a whole.
I want to reply to the comments that have touched on this individually, but I also want to make the point here that drastic ideas changing mid-production are likely more common than you'd expect; you just don't see them if all you ever do see is the end result. You're very much privy to the process here, backtracking and revisions and all! Of course it's going to be different to just seeing a finished work.
Clavis wasn't added to MARDEK 3 until right at the last minute! And did you know that the trials in Pokemon Sun and Moon - the replacement for the standard gyms - were added so late in production that they had to make do with the art assets the artists had already created since asset creation was finished?
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