DEVELOPMENT

8

1,397

Weekly Update - Should I Combine Elements And Runes Or Not?!?

2 years ago1,824 words

Inspiration is a double-edged sword! Should a seemingly good, new idea be pursued if it'd require some steps back to do so? Or should the current path be doggedly stuck to because that's the only way to reach the end??

I intended to write this on Friday evening so I'd have the whole weekend free to do some stuff I've been putting off (like replying to some messages, but what's new there!), but it looks like I'm writing it on Sunday afternoon instead because I spent the weekend doing stuff related to work! Pfft!

I started off the week by combing through the several digital pages of notes I've made and tried to address following the second Atonal Dreams alpha test, and combining them into a far neater list of discrete tasks I can rank and then tackle.

I ended up with about 70 tasks (I say 'about' because I kept adding more as I worked through them), some of which took two minutes, others two hours, as is usually the case. I managed to make good, satisfying progress with ticking them off.

But on Friday afternoon, the frustratingly fickle creativity muse decided to piece my mind with an inspiration arrow - or whatever - that I was completely unable to shake off, and I've spent the whole weekend playing around with some idea that could, I feel, improve Atonal Dreams... but which would also be a step backwards in some ways, at least in terms of time.

I already wrote a longer post on ∞ my Patreon ∞ on Friday - basically a stream of consciousness as I tried to work things out myself - but I'll 'summarise' (ha, as if I can do succinct!) here:



I've spent the past almost-a-decade-now playing around with variations of essentially the same idea, of a 'psychological' battle system with elements that represent facets of mind rather than just physical nature.

I think my earliest experiments with it were the unfinished Clarence RPG and Alora Fane: Creation, though what I had in Taming Dreams (from 2015, I think? And also unfinished, though slightly less so) is very similar to what I'm using in Atonal Dreams.



That is, there are 'elements', but characters also have personality 'runes', represented by a set of three letters - inspired by my deep but now outgrown love of psychological 'personality type' stuff like Myers-Briggs - and both elements and runes are used to determine damage.

Originally I had these elements:



And I reused those when I started Atonal (or then Divine) Dreams.

However, in February of this year, I revised them to these:



Which I feel are a big improvement, though they're only barely tweaked (basically just the names and ordering).

I haven't altered the runes (Real/Abstract, Tough/Feeling, Grave/Jolly) at all since I came up with them... though I've learned a lot more about personality since then (what with getting a Psychology degree and all; the Big Five is what the academics use). I've also refined my ideas about what I want to do with the Alora Fane world over the years.

Players - both actual and potential - have also responded with scepticism to the runes, and I'm not sure if that's due to perceived complexity or preexisting feelings about Myers-Briggs, but it's come up a lot.

There's also a lot of overlap between the runes and elements in terms of lore and gameplay anyway, plus skills in Atonal Dreams have both an element and a rune...



...but only elements get all this story/world involvement - the equivalent of elemental temples and such - while runes are just sort of sidelined, a gameplay mechanic only with no real influence on the outer world, which feels weird, lopsided.


So I had an idea:

What if I just combined elements and runes, so there are six 'elements', but characters have a balance/'concentration' of them (rather than a singular element), which are represented by the rune letters?


After many hours of frantic experimentation, I came up with these six possible elements that could play the role of both without disrupting any of my plans in a major way:




Like with the previous revision of the elements, they're in opposing pairs:

Viscereal (from visceral + real) and Abstral (from abstract + astral) represent base animalistic desires vs spiritual and mental transcendence, which are a huge theme and motif in much of my work. There was no 'official' equivalent to MARDEK's aether element before; now there is.

Harmony and Discord are the same as before - peaceful order vs domineering chaos - though they also incorporate the Feeling/Tough runes now (which were always about compassionate consideration vs aggressive self-interest anyway).

Levitality (from levity + vitality) and Gravitoom (from gravity + gloom + tomb + doom) are essentially the previous Viva and a combination of the old Languor + Fear; liveliness, growth, and positive emotion vs death, stagnation, and negative emotion.


I still see them as a work in progress - I feel 'Gravitoom' sounds particularly and inappropriately goofy, for example, though it's odd how many dark, miserable words end with a silly 'oom' sound! And it's weird that four names are portmanteaus but Harmony and Discord aren't - but I do like what I have here.

Whereas before, skills had an element and a rune, now they'd have two elements... though I want to give some context to an example I want to show of that.



I'm usually working on one or two 'personal projects' alongside my main 'work' one, for which I allow myself the freedom to get bored of and give up... which usually is what happens. I've written about a few in the past, but just kept quiet about others so then I didn't get anyone's hopes up or interest piqued only to get bored and add another dead idea to the disappointment pile.

Recently, one of these personal projects has been a revision/remake of Belief, the original version of which I wrote about in ∞ this late-2019 post ∞, and which I was able to produce this gameplay video of in a fairly short time:



While it mostly got absorbed into Atonal Dreams, my mind keeps going back to the silly, human-centric idea where you have absurd social battles of belief rather than physical fights.

I won't talk about my latest experimentation in too much detail here (yet?), but I'm mentioning it because I thought it'd be a good opportunity to test out these ideas before trying to change Atonal Dreams, only to realise it was a bad idea after all and then I'd have to revert everything. That's what I've spent the weekend doing.

A look at the (silly, social) skills I've now got as a part of this experimentation gives an idea of how skills with two elements/runes instead of an element and a rune would look:



There were some overlaps in the rune and element colours before that bothered me - both the Jolly rune and Harmony element were yellow, for example, and both Fear and Grave were purple - so this addresses that, I suppose... though at a glance I feel some of these colours are less appealing, more acrid; that neon greenish-yellow is quite aggressive! But for what it's representing - lively extroversion and positivity - it's not exactly unfitting?

Maybe the other colours would have felt the same to eyes not used to them, too.

One annoyance though is that since there are three pairs, they don't have a fixed left or right side, like the elements and runes did (element was always on the left, rune on the right). And none of the possible solutions are hugely aesthetically pleasing. I just decided to put a 'primary' element/rune/whatever on the left and a 'secondary' one on the right, though currently they have no difference in multiplication strength or anything. So some have a G on the left, others the right. Hmm.

Oh, and I've saved purple and yellow for the borders of these skills, where they represent some other quality which is in this game but not Atonal Dreams. If I were to adapt these new elements into Atonal Dreams, yellow and purple would represent the light/dark tamed-or-not thing, and positive/negative stat (de)buffs, and wouldn't overlap with any element colours, which might be better actually than them overlapping with the colours of Harmony, Jolly, Fear, and Grave!



I often wonder whether this kind of lore trivia matters to others like it matters to me, or whether they consider it a waste of time to focus too much on. I know I'm not the only person who cares about it, of course, otherwise people wouldn't buy T-shirts with Homestuck element (or whatever they were called in that) symbols on them! And people make a huge deal out of Pokemon types. But maybe it's one of many things that depends on temperamental traits.

I for one have always cared about this aesthetic/lore side of things. The elements in MARDEK were a really important part of their world and lore, and I want the Alora Fane world's elements to be similarly important.

Combining runes and elements would streamline some things and give more narrative weight to them instead of dividing it; visiting a Discord elemental temple (or equivalent) would mean more if element balance was the primary aspect of your characters' stats. It might also reduce a feeling of mechanics complexity that most people have commented on in some form or another, too.

But it's tricky, because I've spent the past few weeks basically polishing what I've already got to get every tutorial as perfect as possible... and I'd have to go back and redo a bunch of them were I to make these changes! But it might also be better and speed things up in the long run, so... bleh.

They wouldn't be huge revisions, since the new element ideas are just combinations that fit with what I already have rather than entirely new things... but they'd still be revisions.

I'm unsure what to do next. I'm thinking maybe I should just spend the next week playing around more with my Belief remake side project thing exclusively, to see how I feel about these combined elements and runes... but then I feel bad about delaying the next testing phase/milestone thing even further.

Bleh, I don't know. Creating things isn't a simple process! I mean look at that Batgirl film! Or don't, because it was cancelled! Even though that was more likely due to executives deeming it unprofitable for sociocultural reasons rather than any kind of artistic dissatisfaction! I don't know or particularly care!!