After weeks of wondering and planning, I feel I've got the ball rolling on Atonal Dreams now! I've made an info page and a roadmap to explain what the game is and when it might be finished, as well as some new systems that I just added this week!
1. Info Page
I've created this page - ∞ alorafane.com/atonaldreams ∞ - to explain what the game is. I've been getting the feeling that it's not clear, so this should help with that, plus it helped me get a better idea of what I'm doing by writing it. I can also use it when it comes time for marketing.
I'm not sure how many people actually view pages like this though; I suppose I'll find out!
Currently it looks terrible on mobiles; I'll look into that.
2. Progress Bar
Unlike with most past games, I've made a roadmap for exactly what I need to do on the game and when I'm likely to have finished everything. I've incorporated it into the site such that I can mark off completed tasks and a progress bar fills. I'm planning to add that bar somewhere obvious on the site, so hopefully it's already there by the time you're reading this!
3. Potions System
I want to avoid having a bunch of inventory-cluttering trash, but items are a big part of most RPGs, so I wanted to include at least something. I've added six reagents - peppers, insects, flowers, fangs, herbs, and bones (each corresponds to an element) - which you can find in the environment and get as battle rewards. You can combine pairs of them into potions for a variety of both restorative and destructive effects.
Combining two reagents of the same element produces a damaging potion of that element, for example, while healing potions can be produced by combining a flower and a herb. The others have various effects like altering arousal, runes, or the light and dark values.
Potions each have a unique name and colour, and they're discovered when they're first used, so discovering them all could be a mildly entertaining achievement (in the code it's called the 'PotionDex'). They're also created on the fly; you don't have a stock of potions.
I've also added this weapon - called a 'syringe' - for Ossoum. Instead of using normal attacks and magic, he'd use this to convert potions into gasses to deal the same effect as the potion on a whole party, kind of like Meraeador's Flamethrower or Potion Spray (which it was inspired by). It might take a turn to load up, though, to prevent it being too overpowered.
4. Musical Melodies
Normal attacks use a reaction system which is similar to - but has slightly more potential than - MARDEK's, but magic instead uses musical melodies, which use what's essentially the same system but with more points to hit.
With physical reactions, you can either miss, hit, or get a bonus. With magic, you always hit, but successfully hitting the rhythm notes gets you the bonus. So it's not necessary, but it is rewarded.
It uses some of the code that I wrote for Sindrel Song to play notes procedurally, though it's not nearly as complicated. Hopefully it'll add to battles in the same way that normal reactions do rather than being an off-putting nuisance, but who knows.
The melodies interfere with the background music, and you might find the sudden muffling of that background jarring in that video. I almost gave up on the idea because of this, or tried to completely rethink the music so that it's completely procedural and any melodies you play blend in with it perfectly... From playing around with this, though, it grew on me after a few uses, and now it feels fine. It's hard to gauge - and easy to find fault with - just from watching a video without all the surrounding context though.
I've been wondering recently whether porting MARDEK to Steam was a mistake. I hoped it might increase traffic to my site and interest in my new projects, but it seems interest is waning if anything. Maybe it's because I've changed course and people aren't sure what I'm doing or doubt I can finish, or maybe it just takes so long that people find other things and wander away (understandable), though it's something that's on my mind quite often since it's tough devoting hours of work a day to something which might not be able to sustain me financially in the end.
I'll need to try to generate interest, and I have some ideas for that, which I'll write about in a personal blog post soon.
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