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Some Possible Plans: Divine Dreams Prequel, Pokemon Clone, Marooned

5 years ago - Edited 5 years ago3,929 words

Yesterday's panic and despair transformed to creative excitement overnight, though I'm still not sure what to do next, if Divine Dreams as planned might not be financially viable. Here are some thoughts about some potential 'short' projects I could maybe release by the end of the year.

EDIT: After thinking about this for about a day, I definitely prefer the first thing I describe!

Well, yesterday was interesting. I was hit by a wave of depression deeper than anything in ages, all the old thoughts of JUST ENDING IT ALL reared their heads at least briefly, but at night I struggled to sleep because my mind was buzzing with ideas. I was eager to get up and write about them, so that's what I'm doing here. I already said most of this in a response to a comment on ∞ yesterday's post ∞, but I want to elaborate on and further explore some of the ideas that I presented.

EONS AGO (December 2018), I wrote ∞ this blog post ∞ which began:



This was followed by a couple of other posts where I brainstormed a few ideas, and eventually decided on what ended up becoming Sindrel Song: a 'quick' project that took at least six months to develop, and wasn't actually released on Steam until about a year after this post (and which in the end earned a pittance).

I suppose there are a few differences between now and then, though. I'd never released a game on Steam then, and I was still getting used to developing in Unity and 3D. Also, quite notably, I'd had major brain surgery in October 2018, just a couple of months before that linked post, and I had a month of having my brain bombarded by radiation to treat the remaining cancer through late December and early January. Obviously my mind was in a very different place than it is now! I'd say that these factors were the main ones that caused Sindrel Song to take so long.

Anyway, this return to brainstorming short, simple projects is something that comes up again and again, in a sort of cycle. It happened again following Sindrel Song (11 months ago), where I did ∞ some planning for a game involving Alora Fane's varnyn race ∞. I didn't get very far with it though, and the long creative process that eventually led to the formation of Divine Dreams followed not long after. There was also Belief, which I still love, but which I felt might have a similar level of obscurity to Sindrel Song and as such I decided to delay it while working on something more accessible. That morphed into Divine Dreams anyway, so it wasn't wasted effort.

I don't have a history of making short games, and I wonder to what extent they're actually a good idea. They seem like they obviously would be, in the abstract, because surely they'd take less of an investment to make, but it's easy to underestimate how long everything takes. Production, publishing, and promotion all take months even with something fairly small. It's why I like the idea of releasing something episodic, as it allows for building momentum.

That said, in ∞ yesterday's post ∞, I expressed my fears about whether or not an episodic idea would even be sufficiently profitable, especially now while I'm still quite obscure. Perhaps I'd be locking myself into years of financial failure? This led to some brainstorming about what 'quick' things I could do first. Here are a few ideas.

Divine Dreams Prequel

I love Divine Dreams, and have no intention of abandoning that! It'd be such a shame to have essentially six months of planning and production go to waste, so that's not happening. I'm going to do something with it.
The plan, as described in previous posts, has been something like this:

> The whole game will be a trilogy of three Episodes.
> Each Episode will contain six Chapters, each short, focused around a single dungeon.
> I'd release one Episode as a free demo, then perhaps I could release the others as I made them to patrons of a certain tier to test.
> Then, I'd review all six and combine them into a Chapter, which I'd release on Steam.

The stuff I talked about yesterday cast a lot of doubt on whether this would work, though. While MARDEK's audience grew with each chapter, even though they depended on the previous ones to make sense, perhaps here it'd be the opposite, with the audience dwindling after the first. And if that audience for the first isn't big to begin with, then, well, obviously that's an issue.

There was also objection to releasing the three Chapters separately if they're all so interconnected. Personally I see them more like sequels than parts in an episodic series, so it makes more sense to me to release them separately, but I suppose one narrative would be tying them all together. The alternative is adding them as DLC, though I wonder if that even earns money? Is the release of DLC given any fanfare? Would people check out an unfamiliar game upon seeing it getting new DLC?

It seems that episodic games typically have a Season Pass, allowing access to all episodes even if they're not released yet. So one option is to have three "Seasons" of Divine Dreams, so three Season Passes, and of course each Season would be six episodes, released as updates/DLC as they're finished. That's an idea.

I'm not sure what to do there. I could also just try to compress what I have into one big game and release that, but then there's a big chance it won't do well anyway, and then what? I'd also have to trim out a lot of what I've already got planned, probably including playable characters, and if it did do well, I'd have lost a lot of potential.

Another idea I recently talked about is making the first demo separately to the actual story episodes. That is, it'd use all the same assets, engine, etc, but in a different arrangement, detached from the main story. Kind of like ∞ what I made for the video demo I released a couple of months ago ∞ (in the actual story, those four characters would begin the Dreamcave section together; they wouldn't have to meet up like that).

This then naturally leads to a suggestion/some of my brainstorming from the comments on yesterday's post: What if I use the engine to tell a shorter, independent story using the world and assets I've already got, to introduce the game's concepts without investing too much development time into it or locking myself into a long commitment?

This is one of the ideas that I got excited about as I struggled to sleep last night, and there are a couple of possibilities that jump to mind.

One is to use these four protagonists, who I posted about recently:




I like them a lot... but the main concern is how it'd tie something about them into the narrative I already have planned, if I were to go through with making that. In the main story, Dayvha and Nytsky are childhood friends, and they meet Lavent when they join the cherubim (she's already a cherub). They meet Cywren (I prefer that name!) later for a brief adventure based on the Lake Qur section of MARDEK, but part ways with her soon after (that is, she's only playable for Chapter 4 in Episode 1). Dayvha reunites with Cywren again only after Lavent and Nytsky have left like they do in MARDEK.

So having the four of them travel together would have to be disconnected from that narrative in a way I don't like... unless I do some rewriting of that story to make it work.

There's a lot I'd like to use there, though. A cast of four would give a lot of variety, and I'm eager to explore mechanics like the 'resonar' swords I recently designed for Dayvha. I find that exciting. Still, I can't really think how it'd work in a story sense, and that matters to me!

There's another possibility:



In Divine Dreams, Dayvha's father is called Savitr, and he's the shining star of the Seraphim, their most renowned member, this great hero essentially, though he went missing a few years ago. Nytsky idolises him because of his status - and for other personal reasons I've explained elsewhere - while Dayvha is less enthusiastic because, well, he ran away, and wasn't really that great of a father to him.

Like in MARDEK, Divine Dreams would begin with a fantasy sequence, though instead of having Hero Mardek and Hero Deugan, Dayvha would just be himself, essentially, and he'd be accompanied by Savitr, who it's revealed at the end of the segment was actually Nytsky pretending. That'd be the player's first direct introduction to Savitr, right at the beginning of the game, but he's not set to appear in the plot again until much later, probably in Episode 2.

Dayvha and Nytsky are also trained by a seraph character while cherubim, who later joins the party. She's essentially a replacement for Donovan and Sharla in the Gem Mine/Dreamcave section and what would become the Sun-Temple-inspired bit, and a more interesting replacement for Jacques too.

Those things in mind, here's an idea:

Perhaps there could be a Prequel Episode kind of thing, short and snappy, set a few years before the events of Divine Dreams. You control Savitr, Seraph extraordinaire, and his young cherub apprentice, as they go on some mission in a new area that wouldn't be featured in Divine Dreams.

It could be a way to introduce the gameplay, set the scene, and hint at Divine Dreams' story (perhaps this is shortly after Dayvha was born, and they talk about Savitr's 'son back home', or perhaps at the end you'd get a glimpse of Dharma or something) without necessarily setting it up as CHAPTER 1 OF A BILLION MORE. So if it was a complete flop, I could call it a loss without it lingering incomplete.

Another idea is using the Muriance character as the villain. In Divine Dreams, he's a cult leader instead of a bandit (and I haven't decided on his name yet), and I'm imagining the cult being almost like a Pokemon EVIL TEAM in that they've got their own distinct look and battle music and everything. He and his cult are set to appear in the Dreamcave section (Chapter 3 of Episode 1), and again in Episode 2, but perhaps I could introduce them in this. Saves on idea generation, and the familiarity they'd have in Divine Dreams wouldn't be a bad thing (especially if this was kind of like a backstory for that character, and you saw what he became in DD).

This all sounds interesting enough in the abstract, though there are some concerns.

How long should it be? One dungeon seems like it'd be too short. Even MARDEK 1 had three dungeons and a hub. I could do something like that, but then it ends up being about half as long as Episode 1 is planned to be!

What should I charge for it? The original aim was to have an entirely free demo to maximise the number of people who'd at least give it a try. But I wouldn't want to make something like this just to release it for nothing. That'd feel like a waste. But then I'd also feel like I was charging too much if it was only a couple of hours of gameplay, if that. So I don't know.

I also don't know what I'd call it! "Divine Dreams Prequel" sounds clunky, and hints at something to come so it wouldn't really be self-contained. Something like "Seraph" or "Savitr" or "A Seraph And His Cherub" or "The Spectacular Adventures of Savitr" or "Splendid Savitr" come to mind, I don't know.

The seraph character who'd be Savitr's plucky young cherub apprentice here (I do like the enthusiastic youth paired with grizzled mentor dynamic, like Batman and Robin) is the only one of the planned Divine Dreams protagonists who only uses physical attacks (she'd be a straightforward heavy hitter, kind of taking Sslen'ck's role), though, which wouldn't really be a great introduction to the magic/music mechanics I have in mind! Savitr, too, has a weapon which doesn't translate well to an instrument, and is what it is for fairly important story reasons; I'd need to do some revising somewhere. There's another character from Divine Dreams I could quite interestingly include as an spellcasting ally, but that'd spoil the daring duo dynamic. He's sorrow, though, and an intriguing and colourful character in his own right, with a lot of plot relevance but not much actual appearance in Divine Dreams' planned story, so... hmm.

It's something to think about, anyway.

Monster Catching

Over the years, I've attempted various Pokemon clones, due to my love of the genre. One of my earliest game attempts - now long lost - was one of these, which was followed by Beast Signer, then Miasmon, Maybe there were some other brief things in there too. I tried returning to Miasmon several times, though none of those attempts ever went anywhere (they were all during Flash's final days anyway).

Recently, a bunch of random Pokemon playthroughs came up in my suggestions, things like this:



Apparently it was a trend for a brief period. Watching a few of those rekindled my desire to make a Pokemon-like game of my own... though I wasn't exactly going to drop Divine Dreams to do it.

As I watched some of these, other Pokemon videos came up in my suggestions with things like "CATCHING HUMANS AS POKEMON IN BLACK 2". In Pokemon Black and White 2, the 'PokeStudios' feature allowed you to take part in films, one of which had the premise that you were in a flipped world where Pokemon trained humans. The participants in these films were functionally the same as Pokemon in the game's data, to allow for battles against them, and this person hacked the game so that these never-meant-to-be-caught human 'Pokemon' appeared wild in grass. It seemed to be entertaining enough of a concept to people. Training humans and sending them out in battles! Lol!

This got me wondering about a game concept where you play as an alien, and you capture types of human and battle against other aliens' parties of humans. This ties into similar ideas I've had in the past, where human opponents represent various stereotypes. This is some concept art for Belief that I linked to a while back, for example:



I've even considered ideas in the past where some of these stereotypes evolve into others, virtual-pet-style ("Nerd evolved into Scientist!").

Something like that - where you're an alien catching people - would be conceptually amusing, and light on asset requirements. Since I wouldn't be designing a bunch of separate monsters, I'd only really need to make some basic human models which could share animations between them.

But maybe that could be taken a step further. Perhaps instead of being 'species' in this sense, every human you encounter is randomly-generated using a simple character customising system. I've wanted to make a 3D one for a while, and I've tried in the past, but my skills weren't developed enough at the time. It'd be interesting to take another shot at it.

Perhaps something like this could use a rudimentary version of Divine Dreams mechanics, where the humans have runes - randomised, of course - and use elemental or sentimental skills (elements are courage, fear, bliss, destruction, creation, sorrow, aether; sentiments are joy, sorrow, amity, enmity, lust, and fear) alongside slaps, kicks, punches, etc.

I can imagine a system where the humans battle one-on-one, and stand close enough that those punches etc physically connected. I could even animate them such that it really looked like the action and reaction were one rather than using a generic 'hit' animation... HMM.

Marooned

This led to a different idea that I've explored a number of times over the years, mostly privately. I've talked about this a bunch of times before, but one of the earliest games I ever made was a text-based thing called LONE WOLF. In it, you explored a grid full of rooms and did typical text-based stuff like "FONDLE MAN" and "CHOP OFF OWN TODGER". I was young.

Later, I revisited the idea as something called Marooned, which was a simple survival game, again with a text-based interface and a grid of rooms to explore.



You woke up naked, and had to rummage around in bushes and suspicious mounds of sand and such to find food and bits and pieces you could craft simple clothing from. There was a battle system, where enemies could target your limbs individually, or you could target theirs, which could result in severing eventually. I don't think I worked on that for maybe more than a couple of weeks, probably more than a decade ago.

I returned to it, sort of, in 2017:



This was while I was at university, not really doing the games thing as anything more than an occasional hobby, and I remember making this maybe around Christmas? It was mostly just me playing around, and I suppose using naked women was a way of pervily appeasing my loneliness (better to channel the urges creatively than just sit around watching porn, right?!?). I've always liked the idea of starting from nothing, though - when I was younger, I often replayed the beginning sections of games since this building up from simple beginnings was way more interesting to me than being powerful - so I liked it conceptually for that reason.



There wasn't much to it. You explored an area made up of these 'rooms', each of which could have up to four bits of scenery in the corners, and each of those had a random selection of items you could find. You could craft those items into clothing; eg Leaf + Vine = Leaf Thong, and Leaf Thong + Leaf = Leaf Bra. These clothing items got damaged and eventually fell apart as the limbs they were on were damaged. Each area you entered had a chance of triggering a battle, and those battles were meant to have both attacking and 'taming' mechanics (represented by the card suit icons), but I didn't stick with it long enough to really do anything with that.

That was, I think, the last thing I ever made with Flash, and I made the transition to Unity shortly after. To familiarise myself with Unity, I actually revisited this idea in mid-2018 (feels like a lifetime ago, though...) to make a kind of 3D version of this:



Again I was being pervy here by using a naked woman as the protagonist (a good opportunity to practice anatomy skills? This model irritates me now though because it uses a subsurf modifier and as such is too high-poly), but this time I was experimenting with random terrain generation, shaders, things like that.



Each time you start, the island is randomly-generated, and... that's about all there is to it, really. You can equip and craft the things you find in grass and bushes, like in previous iterations, but that's it. Again, I didn't spend more than a few days on this, since it was only ever meant as practice anyway rather than something I'd eventually release.

Still, it came up again as a possibility when wondering what I could possibly make... but sort of combined with other ideas, like the Pokemon-catching one. Here's what I have in mind:

You'd control a character - possibly customised - who awakens 'naked' (probably not actually if it was for public release) on a desert island. You then have to scavenge what you could find from bushes etc; you'd need to find food, and you'd be able to craft simple clothing items.

You'd also encounter other scavengers like you, which would trigger battles. These battles would be one-on-one, but you and the enemy could also have allies, who'd politely wait in the background unless switched in (like a traditional Pokemon battle). You could either kill them to harvest their items, or you could 'tame' them to join your party (you could have up to six members). Again I'd use concepts like runes alongside standard physical damaging skills.

The goal, other than just surviving, would be to find six Golden Keys scattered randomly around the island, and a Golden Gate, which could be unlocked with those keys (this was the 'plot' of the text version of Marooned; the gate's mentioned in that screenshot).

I imagine the graphics would be tile-based, similar to what I've got for Divine Dreams, but procedurally generated so that every time the island was different.

It could be tied to Alora Fane by saying that this is the Bold first awakening in their petal world after being 'planted' there by the Aolmna. It's loose, but the point would be not to make a narrative game.



So those are some ideas. Personally I feel that the Divine Dreams direction would be best because that's what I'm most motivated to make, whereas my interest in these non-narrative ones tends to dwindle fairly quickly. Plus I don't think there's as much of a hook to them that would make them stand out; there are already a bunch of similar games out there. At the same time, though, it's true that games with scanty narrative but a lot of potential for pure gameplay and replayability might be more appealing to people, more likely to be played by youtubers etc. But most indie devs make these 'toy' games which don't receive much attention. I don't particularly want to spend the rest of this year making one myself.

So maybe a Divine Dreams thing would be more remarkable, and would better demonstrate the direction I want to take my games in going forward, whereas the other possibilities would be more like detours.

It'd be nice to have some form of Divine Dreams I can release by the end of the year, but I'm wondering whether it's best to do this as this standalone thing, cheaply-priced, or whether I should just go through with the original plan, and have the first chapter (or a standalone demo) free, do a Kickstarter, get better at promotion... I mean, if I had a paid prequel that's about half as long as Episode 1 is meant to be anyway, then it'd be senseless to have a free demo for that Episode 1...

I'll need to think about it, and I probably should spend the next week or two just familiarising myself with the indie dev community and researching marketing. Perhaps I should mention MARDEK too, and I might send out some keys to some of them many who've asked me for them - or try using the giveaways thing someone mentioned - just to see if anything happens.

There's lots to think about.