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Weekly Update - Story Refining, New Passion Glyph?

3 years ago1,471 words

Work on the gameplay mechanics/game loop is essentially done now, so I just need to refine the story a bit before doing the next alpha test! Does this new symbol for the Passion element look inappropriately lewd to you??

I still need to add some stuff like skill particle and sound effects, but that shouldn't take too long.

What I do need to decide on though is the story. I've had a plan since I started, but it's gone through several drafts since then as my ideas shift. I've been working on another one of those this week, because even though this demo section will only contain a small part of that story, I'd at least like what testers play to be mostly representative of the final experience.

I've had some key events locked in place since the beginning of development, but the trickier part is figuring out how to connect them. I've noticed that a lot of games have flimsy excuses - if any at all - for things happening (in Pokemon Legends: Arceus, for example, plot characters just showed up out of nowhere for no clear reason to say a few lines to you, then disappeared), and I suppose it doesn't really matter too much for most players? I know that I got a lot of enjoyment out of RPGs I played during my younger years despite probably not really understanding their convoluted stories at all. I've been playing the Chrono Cross remaster recently, and the story events and dialogue in that are hardly thought-provoking literature! MARDEK - being directly inspired by those sorts of games - was in the same vein.

These days, though, I care a lot more about lore consistency, why things happen and whether they make sense to do so in terms of character motivations. If a character needs to be here to give this monologue or MacGuffin, how did they get there, and what motivated their journey? That kind of thing. I'm trying to write something where everything's tied together in a way that'd be satisfying for other people who also care about that sort of stuff. Something YouTubers who make hour-long video essays could potentially sink their teeth into, in the miraculous case that this game achieves some notice.

I feel like every day I'm refining and improving what I've got, and when I compare what I have now to what I had at the start of the week, I'd definitely say it'd make for a better story! I'm not quite there yet though; I'll keep working at it!

Once I do decide on something, I'll likely only need to write a handful of scenes to tie things together. I'm intending to keep most of what I've already written into the game (the whole intro in Collie's Psychepelago in particular). Mostly I just want to add foreshadowing of later stuff, but I have to decide on what that stuff is, of course.



I wrote ∞ a post on my Patreon ∞ earlier in the week detailing a couple of changes I've been working on, one of which is the promotion of two previously-NPC characters to protagonists, giving six playable characters. Three of each gender, one of each element. I hoped to have some new concept art of them for this weekly update, but haven't found the time to make it; there are old images in that Patreon post at least.



One less important thing from that post that I want to talk a bit about here is a revision to the Passion elemental glyph, which has looked like this since I first came up with these elements way back in like 2013 (or earlier), when it was called Courage:



I never cared for that, because it looks too ill-defined, not really like anything. It's similar to MARDEK's fire element glyph, and was meant to represent flames and maybe a river or path moving forward or something, but... ehh. I'd been meaning to change it for ages, especially since I changed the Creation glyph to the new Viva one not too long ago.

Here's what I ended up with for the new Passion one, after many experimental iterations:



What do you see? Did you say "A BIG FAT THROBBING VEINY PORK POLE", verbatim, out loud at your computer??

When I asked on Patreon, people said those exact words in every comment. Of course. By which I mean that it did sound like a man sausage is what pretty much everyone saw straight away.

Which I'm not complaining about, because it was actually intentional! The symbol is meant to combine a candle, a heart, a sword to some degree (or a flaming sword in particular, though I'd say that got lost along the design process), and abstract impressions of both male and female genitalia without being explicitly representational (that is, it 'feels like' them - or brings them to mind - rather than being a literal picture of either), with the penis in particular being erect (or actually you could see two different peni, with one being the entire symbol, and another getting ready to penetrate). It is the element of passion, after all, which is in part associated with sex.

But how do you feel about the idea of a symbol of genitalia being used in this way? I would be surprised if it doesn't make you feel uncomfortable!

But why is that, exactly? Because genitals imply sex, which for whatever reason is forbidden for innocent child minds (which the game isn't made for) to even consider? Despite the fact that swords and guns, which imply brutal, gory violence, are fine to include in cartoons and toys? Depictions of appendages used to create life are more taboo than tools whose sole purpose is to end it. What a species we are.

...I say, but I've been watching Neon Genesis Evangelion lately, for some reason. I'm not a fan of anime, and I haven't seen many of them really - mainly my exposure has been through Ghibli films and dubbed adaptations of anime aimed at children that became big in the West like Pokemon, Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh - but everyone I've ever known has liked more obscure anime, and this seems like one of those particularly well-known and (maybe?) well-regarded ones - or at least I had that impression in my mind for whatever reason - so I was curious to see what the big deal was.

What I was expecting was something with giant fighting robots and a ton of tropes I'd find both mildly amusing in the brazenness of their usage, and fascinating in the context of seeing how long some had been around (it's from 1995, and comically set in the far-flung future of 2015), or how I recognise them from the JRPGs - and anime parodies - that I'm more familiar with.

What I didn't expect was for it to be so perverted! I'd heard that fanservice was a common trope in anime, but are they all like this?? The main characters are like 14, and literally every episode includes hilarious scenes of them stumbling in on one another naked or flashing each other or what-have-you, or pervy shots aimed at their sexy parts, and it all just makes me uncomfortable to the point where I'm wondering whether I could endure the series to the end! And whether I'm watching something I shouldn't be, though it's on Netflix so other people must have deemed it okay??

I find it all so creepy, and I can understand why people might have similar feelings about Collie making sex jokes, or an elemental glyph that looks like a... ∞ Flatwoods monster ∞, though I'd say neither of those are nearly as bad as the essentially pornographic stuff in (at least this particular) anime. The intentions behind them are certainly different, at any rate.

So I don't know whether I'll keep this symbol, or revise it again. I'm pleased with it because I think it's a clever combination of concepts, and the genital aspects are abstract rather than representational - you could argue that swords and guns are as abstractly phallic, so should they be blocked from children's eyes? - so it registers to me as more comical than concerning, but I can imagine other people would be... less open to the idea, let's say.



It also probably stands out to me among the more basic, less meaning-dense representational element symbols, though that could also just be a familiarity effect.

What do you think?


(I suppose this is similar to back when I wrote ∞ a post contemplating whether or not Memody registered as a naked furry! ∞)