Alora Fane

My hope for this week was to get this latest project to the point where I could show a video demo of the main mechanics, like the old Belief one... and that's exactly what I have to show here! Gasp!

So I've actually achieved something I set out to do for once. What a shocker.

Here's the 8-minute-long video (much shorter than the Belief one from a few years ago), which covers the essential gameplay loop, mostly battles:

Watching a video of gameplay is never the same as playing it yourself, but hopefully if you took the time to watch that you'll have got more of an idea of what I'm going for here than I can communicate in just text.

I particularly like the switching back and forth because I find it funny, though I also have some qualms about some bits which I won't mention in case other people don't notice them or feel the same way.

I'm proud of the music, too... though I've been wondering about volume lately. I typically have YouTube at something like 20% volume because most videos are obnoxiously loud otherwise, but at that volume this sounds extremely quiet. I wonder why this is; do I just prefer (and therefore produce) quieter audio because I didn't grow up listening to ear-bleedingly loud popular music like most young people seemed to, and their ears have been calibrated to that or something? Or are there things I should be doing that I'm not aware of, like calibrating for some 'standard volume' somehow?

I was uncertain about the environments last week, but a pleasing (to me) colour palette and some additional props have brought it to the point of acceptability for me. Whether or not it'll be able to compete with other stuff out there is another matter though, of course. I hope so, as the way I've got everything set up, it'll be extremely easy to add additional areas. Making this tiny one only took a few minutes.

I definitely need to add something like animations or more visual effects to battles; they're currently too static. But those things take time; I was only intending to show off the basic idea here.

I've been calling this thing 'Belief Battles' because I needed to call the files something, but I've been hoping an idea for a better title would magically come to me at some point.

Something did pop into my mind last night: Frayth, from faith (as in beliefs) + fray (as in a battle). It's six letters and everything! (A motif I've been trying to stick to for Alora Fane stuff.)

What would a title like that make you think of, though? Makes me think of something aggressive and sci-fi that's trying to be cool. Not really the silly feel I want!

I've also been giving some thought to the kind of content I'd need to make to turn this from a demo to a finished game.

The plan is for there to be a small number of shortish dungeons full of battles, and you have to convince as many people as you can to join your (custom-named) religion in order to bring your (custom-named) deity into the world (or something).

I'm thinking of basing those dungeons around the six elements I have - makes sense - which led me to wondering whether to use factions I already have while developing some additional ones.

So the Discord area might be a Blight Wolves settlement, the Abstral one might be related to the Beyond Ponderers somehow, the Harmony one might be related to the Seraphim/Cherubim (not their main 'headquarters', more like colonies or something). So those concepts could be introduced here and elaborated on in other things like Atonal Dreams.

The types of human opponents you'd battle and recruit might blend together fantasy RPG roles with real human stereotypes/archetypes.

I'll need to do some concept stuff.

So what next?

I want to post something on Reddit, maybe about this game (to practice); I've been thinking of exactly what, and where. Maybe I'll mention I was the MARDEK dev somewhere first, to gauge if I could use that to stand out at all. Unsure.

There are also a couple of unrelated things I want to write blog posts about, but we'll see how that goes.

I suppose those will be my tasks for next week. Though I also enjoy working on this game, so I'll likely do something related to it, too!

If you watched the video, is it something that interests you at all? Anything you particularly like, or would prefer to be different?

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