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Weekly Update - Mysteed, World Map, & Game Idea - Figmon Mobile Game?

3 years ago3,836 words

A long one this week! For Atonal Dreams, I made Savitr's flying figmon steed, and the beginnings of a world map you'd use for fast travel. I also want to talk about an idea I have for a potential smaller side project: a simple roguelike virtual pet thing...

Another Friday update!

This week, I was working on the connection between the intro and the tutorial island section in the waking world, which I've been unsure about for a while.

Ages ago, I talked about - and designed - some kind of transport monster/figmon that'd explain how Savitr and Collie got to where the island they're on when the game begins. The nameless old version from... June, apparently (wow) was like a kind of dragon boat, meant to be reminiscent of a chess knight but it wasn't really:



This week, I created a revised version. Here's a progress picture with Savitr and Collie mounted on it; Collie's asleep, and she'd wake up like this following the intro (looks like she's in the throes of sexual ecstasy or something though):



And here's a 'finished' version (though I should probably add at least a bit of texture painting, and the animation needs refining):



I'd say it's clearly more horsey! Plus it has some design similarities to other figmon (like the ghostly tail). I gave it a name, Mysteed, which is mystic + steed but which I keep reading as "my steed" (as I assume everyone would), so either I could make jokes about that in the dialogue or think of something else.

I've always loved abstract world maps, like the ones in Super Mario World or early Final Fantasies, so I decided to try adding something similar here:



Savitr and Collie would be astride the Mysteed (this was tricky to set up since it required synced animations), hovering at the side there...though I wonder whether they look like they're in the foreground or just massive. I did it that way to allow for dialogue without moving any cameras or models around.

You'd select a node using a cursor, causing them to fly down to it. The new nodes would correspond to (some) save crystals, and you'd be able to return to this screen from those crystals, like Fly in Pokemon.

The Mysteed being aerial works best for something you could summon from anywhere, but "if they can fly, why land at the beach rather than right at the monastery??" is a question I'd have to make up an answer to if I stuck on this path. And lore stuff matters to me a lot, so this bothers me! I'm not sure what to do there. (It's not like Pokemon ever had a reason for not being able to Fly to places you'd not visited, though.)

The map's based on this concept art I posted somewhere a while back:



Obviously it's not finished yet! I wondered at first whether to use a static painted image or something, but it felt a whole lot quicker and easier to just use the existing map-building code, so I did that. Unlike a static image, it's something I can easily add to over time rather than having to fully plan all at once.

I've been wondering whether to do it super stylised, with everything sepia-toned like a cloth map - like the world map in Taming Dreams - though maybe that'd clash with the coloured Mysteed and characters hovering above it?

But yes! That's what I did on Atonal Dreams this week! I'm getting there! Hopefully soon I'll be able to combine the intro and Sprouting Isle bits and have another alpha version to test... as I've been saying for a while.

I want to spend the rest of this post talking (at some length) about a refined idea that I first presented in ∞ a post about a week ago ∞...

Side Project Idea

In that post, I mentioned that I'd been wondering whether to make a virtual pet mobile game, as a quick side thing, but I didn't really give any details... since I hadn't come up with any! Though the idea was hardly met with enthusiastic excitement, I like the process of coming up with games, so here are some ideas I wrote out the other day for how I might go about such a thing! Does this even slightly interest you??


I've always approached the games I make as standalone things, which you play through once then move on from, like all the games that I played growing up. Back then, developers had to release games in their full and final form because there was no easy way to patch them (for console games, at least). These days, with the omnipresent internet connections and many games purely being digital anyway (I've stopped getting physical copies myself), 'games as a service' seem to be more common, maybe even the norm.

I see a lot of indie devs speaking about working on their game months after its actual release, maintaining a userbase and gradually adding more and more content... though these are games released on Steam for a single price at the start, with no additional costs, and with the 'L-shaped' sales graph you usually see - where the majority of sales are in the first week, or first couple of days even - it seems to me like pouring tons of effort into something that'll give nothing (money-wise) in return.

Mobile games are ridiculously more profitable than all other forms of games, apparently (I saw a video talking about this in detail recently, but I'm not sure which one it was; maybe ∞ this 40-minute-long one? ∞). It's largely due to using free-to-play models that remove any financial barrier to entry, being available on devices that everyone already has with them at all times, and keeping players playing for months or years with constantly-updating content.

And unlike Steam games (actually I'm not sure about this), in-app purchases are accepted as the norm on mobiles. While over 90% of players never buy a single one, a tiny subset of 'whales' will buy every one that they can if they believe it'll bring them some kind of advantage, and over time the small investments here and there really add up, both for the player and for the dev.

It's exploitative, and not exactly a path I've ever wanted to go down myself. I'd much rather make games that improve lives rather than sucking suckers dry. Especially since a lot of people who do become whales spend money they can't really afford due to mental issues like gambling addiction.


[...I wrote that a couple of days ago, but saw a thread somewhere like r/gamedev yesterday talking about this, with people saying it's more like a 0.1% conversion rate, not 10%. Hmm. So maybe there's no hope of making money from a mobile game. Oh well, I've already written the rest of this post, so...]


I'll need to fully finish Atonal Dreams before I can release it, and that point is a long way off still. I often think about how I wish I'd made - or was making - a game I could just pick up and play a short session of. Something with low commitment, which I could also upgrade gradually over time with little bits of new content. I've explored a bunch of different ideas in that general direction in private over the past few months.

I always wondered about what PC games I could make, though, and the aims of PC and mobile games are vastly different. The former expect you to hunker down and immerse yourself for a duration - so even if they have sessions those sessions are expected to last at least a few minutes - while the latter are much more casual, the sort of thing you could load up instantly and play for five minutes while waiting for a bus. I'm not actually sure which of those I'd like a game I made to be based around.

∞ I started a Twitter poll the other day asking how often people play mobile games ∞. About half of the respondents said they never did, with only about 10% playing them for 'many hours' a week. I used to play a bunch back in uni - mindless puzzlers, town builders, that kind of thing - though the only one I've really stuck with is a gacha game, Marvel Strike Force, which I started playing when it was newly released. I've quit and come back to it several times over the last, what, three years or so? I know I should be spending my time more wisely, but when I'm too depressed to do anything else, it's just so much easier to spend seconds opening up an app I already have right there on my phone than it is to invest the mental energy into finding some new or more worthwhile game to play...

The virtual pet thing was an idea that's been floating around in my head for years, which only resurfaced recently because I was talking with my step-dad about games dev and he said he'd been thinking about the Digimon VPets I was obsessed with as a child, and how maybe I could do something related to that. He's clueless about games - he's never played one - so it's not as if that was a suggestion born of wisdom, but since I already had the idea at the back of my mind, it got me wondering.

The Digimon virtual pets were a big part of my childhood, as I've talked about many times. ∞ Apparently there have been a billion different versions of them since then ∞, plus ∞ a veritable panoply of Digimon video games ∞, though - unlike Pokemon - I never hear about any of them. Maybe they just never took off - or were even exported - outside Japan? Though the couple of Digimon games I have played felt kind of like shovelware, so that's probably a factor too.

There are virtual pets on the mobile app store, but - as I said last time I talked about this - the top results are either replications of the original Digimon pets that people like me grew up with, or they're these cutesy, made-by-a-corporation-for-a-demographic-looking things where it looks like you just look after one pet that doesn't change. Though I haven't looked into them, so I could be wrong.

Procedurally-generated roguelikes - a term I can't say I fully understand and might be misusing, despite them coming up a few times in discussions on this blog - seem popular among the indie dev crowd, since the relatively little investment and huge replayability factors are obviously appealing from the perspective of a creator.

All that said, I should actually describe what I have in mind, so...

Idea Summary

Essentially, you have a simple home area in which you raise one or more figmon - based on the designs from Atonal Dreams - which age in real time and have finite lifespans and basic needs like hunger that you need to check on. You can also venture into simple procedural dungeons to engage in 1-on-1 simple battles and to collect various loot, which you can sell in the home area to accumulate currency. Your figmon's stat growth, level, and the quality of care you give it determine which of many forms it evolves into. The aim is to collect all possible forms over the course of many lives.

Some more detail:

Home

The default Home screen would show your (one or more) figmon wandering around and performing various idle animations (kind of like the Pokemon Sword/Shield's camps, come to think of it). You could interact with them in cute ways; they'd feel like pets. They'd probably 'greet' you upon opening the app, for example.

You could probably buy cosmetic furniture, 'wallpaper' or equivalent, etc, some of which your figmon (or at least specific species) would interact with cutely.

You could perform actions such as feeding from your inventory, checking status, etc.

At first you could only raise one figmon at a time, but as you progressed you could unlock the ability to raise several at once (maybe only a small number like three though, since a big aim would be to minimise checking time and maximise the sense of connection to the figmon).

Feeding & Growing Food

Figmon would get hungry over the course of real time.

Expendable food items would replenish a figmon's hunger while also altering other stats; elemental foods might slightly boost the elemental affinity stats, for example.

You could buy food in the shop or find it randomly in dungeons, but you could also collect seeds to grow plants. You could check on and water these several times a day, and more watering would lead to higher quality (and more numerous) yields.

The food/plants would be based on abstract concepts rather than real-world ones, since figmon are mental hallucinations, not animals. Maybe they'd be 'thoughts', and instead of watering them, maybe you'd just 'acknowledge' or 'remember' them, or something.

Status

Figmon would have a series of simple stats:

- Either some vague Age that goes up over time, or a Lifespan stat, which decreases over time, and when it reaches 0, the figmon dies.

- HP, used in battle.

- Energy - increases over time up to a cap. Spent when performing battle/dungeon actions.

- Level & XP - increasing level boosts HP, might be used in damage calculations, and is used to determine possible evolutionary forms. Set to level 1 and 0 XP at birth.

- Elemental affinities - six primary stats which are used to determine the attack and defence when using skills. The elements are the Alora Fane mental elements: Courage, Fear, Bliss, Destruction, Creation, and Sorrow. They grow through skill use or by defeating opponents (maybe in a way similar to Pokemon EVs).

- Six (?) skill slots, which can be filled with Skillstones.

Skillstones

These are items which grant a skill. Each skill has an element, and a power level marked by a letter (E to S).

Notably, they have durabilities, and with too many uses, they break. Durability can be restored for a cost (it usually wouldn't be worth it).

Skillstones could be found in dungeons or bought from the shop. They could also be sold.

There might be limitations on which monster could equip which Skillstones, like limb type (can't Punch if no fists) or species.

They could also potentially level up from use, though that might clash with the durability idea so maybe not.

You'd need to equip at least one skillstone to a figmon before it could go into a dungeon, and if its skillstones all broke when in there, it'd be forced to flee from battles.

Evolution

Figmon would have several stages, kind of like a combination of Digimon and Pokemon. For example, there might be a small, Charmander-like Essent stage, a teenish, Charmeleon-like Transient stage, and an adult, Charizard-like Prime stage (to use stage names I used back in Miasmon years ago). Some Prime figmon could also evolve further into a Paragon form under difficult-to-achieve conditions.

They'd evolve after set periods of time, like maybe 24 hours for Essent to Transient, then 4 days for Transient to Prime.

Each figmon would have a number of potential subsequent stages, which it could evolve into depending on several factors:
- Level
- The balance and totals of the elemental affinity stats (for example, a highly Courageous form might require Courage Affinity to be the highest and above a certain value)
- Quality of care; if left to starve or never checked on, you'd get a worse form than if you were more attentive

The number of these available forms would of course be very limited at first, but new forms could be introduced over time.

For the sake of ease of development, many forms could essentially be "Fire Goblin" and "Ice Goblin" style palette swaps/model reskins. Elemental variations, for example. They could be called Variants, and the way it could work is that the base form determined the place on the evolution chart, and all variants would be able to evolve into the same forms... though some forms might require a certain variant.

New Eggs

There would be a number of different growth trees, depending on the egg that you hatch. The egg and Essent form might be based around one of the Species from Atonal Dreams (Beast, Avian, Fey, etc), so you might get a Beast egg which always gives you a simple Beast essent which can evolve into a wide variety of other beastly forms.

Eggs could maybe be found like items in dungeons, or bought in the shop. Some might hatch into variations of the basic essent, such as a Courage Beast essent or whatever.

If all your figmon died and you couldn't afford to buy a new egg, you'd probably be given a basic one.

You could choose a starting egg from three options (maybe Beast, Avian, Reptilian, or something.)

Or maybe there'd only be two possible eggs: angel/pure/light/good, and devil/beast/dark/evil? That'd be more limited though.

Dungeons

These would take the form of a simple grid of rooms, which you'd navigate by tapping buttons corresponding to cardinal directions; I wouldn't worry about making 3D environments to traverse, since that's just too time-consuming both to make and to play, and it'd be awkward on mobiles anyway.

Each room would contain nothing, a battle, or treasure. Layouts and room contents would be randomly determined.

There might be six dungeons - based on the elements - or perhaps dungeon types ('cave', 'forest') could be added gradually.

Each would have different depth levels, maybe, with more powerful monsters and loot the deeper you went. Perhaps a figmon could choose the floor it wanted to start at when entering a dungeon based on how far it had got previously. (Maybe a figmon's 'level' could literally be the level of the dungeon it'd reached?)

Moving between rooms and using skills in battle would cost Energy.

Battles

These would be very simple. One on one, Pokemon-like. Using skills would cost Energy and deplete the durability of the skillstone. If you had no skillstones, you'd be forced to flee (no 'Struggle' or 'Attack').

Fleeing would not be guaranteed without some 'smoke bomb' kind of expendable, depending on relative power levels.

The damage formula would be simple, something like:

(Attacker's elemental affinity matching the skill being used's element) * (power multiplier) * (Attacker's elemenal affinity / defender's 'strong against' elemental affinty)

To be refined.

Being reduced to 0 HP might mean the death of the figmon. This could be warded against in various ways, such as with 'Focus Band' style items that'd break after one use, or costly revive potions.

There might be simple stat buffs/debuffs and status effects, but nothing complicated like Atonal Dreams' Runes or Arousal.

Graveyard

When a figmon dies, it's added to a graveyard that you can visit at any time from the Home menu. The figmon's performance in life would determine the fanciness of its grave. Perhaps tapping graves would show the ghosts of the dead figmon, and you could also view its stats.

Encyclopedia / 'Figdex'

A Pokedex-like menu where you could view all the forms you've ever managed to evolve into (maybe like the growth chart viewer in Beast Signer).

The aim of the game would be to evolve into all forms over several lifetimes to fill this.

Shops

There might be a single Shopkeeper who appears each day, from a selection of ~quirky characters~ with their own designs and personalities. Perhaps you could get to know them through simple dialogue, and as your relationship with them developed they'd offer better prices or basic fetch quests.

Their inventories would be random each day. You could buy food items, skillstones, and eggs.

They could also sell potions, with effects like increasing life span or restoring energy, or increasing elemental affinities or XP, though these would be costly.

Currency

The main 'gold' currency would be gained by selling items you found in dungeons in the shop. There might also be a premium currency, since there usually is in such games.

Monetisation

The game would be free-to-play, with items like lifespan or revive potions costing some kind of premium currency, maybe. I wonder if anyone would bother being a whale in a game without multiplayer features, though? Something to look into if I bother to go any further with this.

Fan Design Contests

Something I intended/tried to do back with games like Beast Signer many years ago was a 'Design A Beast' contest, where people would submit ideas for a creature that would eventually be added to the game. This seems to be something that players like, and it's something that I like myself since it spares me having to come up with all the ideas myself.

A game like this would be perfect for that, since it'd be constantly updating and new monsters could be added regularly, so there could be regular contests. Or perhaps it'd be bound to payment in some way; "pay me £100 and I'll add your monster design to the game!!", ha...



I think that's everything! Or at least this first hour's-worth-of-brainstorming draft. Does what I've described interest you in the slightest???

As a player, it's something I can imagine checking on for five minutes two or three times a day, or delving into for longer if the mood took me. It wouldn't be something you'd immerse yourself in for a whole evening. The battles would be simplistic and very brief for this reason, and the dungeon floors small. There'd be a constant feeling of restarting, since the figmon would have finite lifespans; you wouldn't reach a peak and then stagnate there with nowhere left to go.

In my mind, something like this sounds simple, and familiar enough to be appealing to people... but I thought Atonal Dreams would be done in six months, which absolutely hasn't been the case. So maybe it wouldn't be as short and simple as I think.

If anyone's interested, I could refine these ideas a bit, or if not, maybe I'll just scrap it.

To be clear, it'd only be something I'd work on alongside Atonal Dreams, a hobby project I can spend a fun hour or two on in the evenings, not a replacement for that! For a while now I've been devoting the mornings/afternoons to Atonal Dreams, then doing some personal projects in the evenings, so I'd use that time slot for this and it wouldn't distract from AD.