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Weekly Update - Interiors and Archetypes

2 years ago1,595 words

I did some stuff on this Belief Battles/Frayth thing this week: buildings and the interior areas they link to, and some concept designs for types of people you'd encounter.

I only lost a chunk of the week to mental health issues this time!! I'm still waiting on therapy. I tried talking to some new people online in a mental health context in the meantime, which was... mixed, mostly negative really, though I probably should get out of the habit of oversharing on this blog so I'll leave it at that.

I'm still lost, unsure about what exactly to focus on, but I seemed to have something resembling enthusiasm for this side-project-turned-maybe-promotion-practice-shorter-game this week so I thought I'd try to make use of that. I still haven't decided on a title, though!

One thing I did was make a simple building, which is the sort of unexciting background thing players just take for granted but which takes maybe a surprising amount of time and effort. I'm no good at - or really interested in - architecture, so hopefully the super simple low-poly houses etc I'll come up with are inoffensively functional if not awe-inspiringly spectacular.



I also had to make these buildings connect to internal areas, which took a while because I wanted to try something new with it, where interiors would be created and stored in the data differently to the other areas (with interiors being sub-objects of building instances rather than separate areas), and where you'd be able to enter and exit buildings instantly, with no fade transition, like in... I think it was Octopath Traveler, which did that, maybe? (Of what I've seen; surely other games have done it too, but I've not played them.)



The interior areas can include battles, so they'll all have to be ridiculously huge and designed in a not-exactly-sensible way with empty space in the middle and any furniture around the edges.



There were a bunch of issues and limitations with it all though - particularly because your allies follow you on the map but pathfinding across maps is non-trivial - so I just decided to go with a far simpler method which is basically the same as what my old games did: a basic fade-to-black transition that loads out the old area and loads in a new one.

I think that was the last of the major mechanical things I needed to make. Now all that's left is content. (Meaning I'm at the same point with this project as I am with Atonal Dreams.)



I intend for there to be six islands, each home to a faction of sorts related to the elements. Each of the factions might represent different attitudes towards a dying world/impending apocalypse which could at least vaguely relate to current cultural fears.

In the past I've been excited with generating ideas relating to things like this, though honestly this time it was a bit half-hearted due to the recent mental fog. Here are the vague ideas I came up with anyway:


The Viscereal area would be an ordinary village occupied by commoners who just want to live their simple lives like they always have. You might start there, and it might be called Villageville, with music and aesthetics inspired by the 'ordinary villages' in my old RPGs.

The Abstral area might be occupied by eccentrics who worship a crashed flying saucer, essentially an elaborated version of the Saucer Cultists who you can find in MARDEK 3. They hope the aliens will come and take them away to greener pastures.

The Discord area would be a Blight Wolves settlement, and perhaps the Blight Wolves could play a Team Rocket (etc) sort of role in that you encounter them throughout all the areas, they have their own battle music, and their boss is a (or the) primary villain who wants to eradicate any new religions that begin to grow. Something like that. Still just in the brainstorming phase though.

The Harmony area would be a settlement established by the Seraphim, or at least one Seraph, as a kind of base distant from their main hub. They want to essentially maintain the Unisis idea that the Aolmna taught when they were around, and 'civilisation' with rules and order and enforced, rigid morality.

The Gravitoom area might be full of apocalyptic doomsayers, fearful of the world's decline.

The Levitality area might be occupied by performers and aficionados who distract themselves from it all with entertainment.


For the sake of keeping things manageable, I thought each area could be home to just six person archetypes, each of which could have male and female variants. After some brainstorming, I had these possibilities (though there aren't yet six for each element):

Viscereal:
- Normie (ordinary commoner)
- Merchant (shopkeeper type)
- Hottie (attractive, flirty narcissist; Babe, Hunk)
- Labourer (blue collar worker)
- Jock (fitness fanatic)
- Cook (obsessed with food)

Abstral:
- Mystic (collects magic crystals and believes they can talk to ghosts)
- Cultist (calling to the aliens is their life)
- Lunatic (conspiracy theorist with a tinfoil hat)
- Nerd (scientifically curious and socially inept)
- Magician (performs the seemingly impossible to wow and awe)
- Snowflake (they're unique and special and different)

Discord:
- Lout (common delinquent)
- Bandit (organised brigand)
- Karen (overly entitled and demanding customer)
- Punk (chaotic anarchist)
- Crook (sleazy conman)
- ????

Harmony:
- Counsellor (helps you feel better by listening to your woes)
- Priest (keeps Unisis alive)
- Cherub (Seraph in training; active peace-spreader)
- Bureaucrat (designs society's cogs and keeps them turning)
- ????
- ????

Gravitoom:
- Doomsayer (the end is niiiigh!)
- Emo (sensitive and sorrowful)
- Goth (dark and spooky)
- Artiste (creates to bare their tender soul; pretentious)
- Prepper (busy every day stocking their bunker)
- ????

Levitality:
- Clown (a jester, comedian, harlequin, fool, or jokester)
- Performer (acts to entertain an audience)
- Nudist (sheds all worry to live freely in nature)
- Hippie (laid-back, goes with the flow)
- Influencer (smash that like button)
- ????


I also did some basic concept art for the Viscereal and Abstral archetypes:



...which is apparently the third time all year I've drawn anything, disappointingly. I also ran out of steam and time before attempting the other four elements.

They'll all have at least one unique clothing item, but ideally a lot of those clothing items will be palette swaps of the same model to speed up development (eg brown basic pants and black pants would use the same model but just in different colours... though it doesn't take long to make clothing pieces for these low-poly models anyway).



I've talked about this general idea of using (sub)cultural archetypes/stereotypes a few times over the months (years?) that I've been playing around with it, and as I've said those times too, the aim is to come up with things that are recogniseable, familiar, and (mildly) amusing without being offensive.

Some of these here might not exactly meet those criteria. I'm imagining complaints about the 'Snowflake' one in particular, which is based on a combination of this old meme thing I might have mentioned in this blog in the distant past:



Plus a kind of over-designed "look at how unique I am!" look that image searching "mary sue oc" brings up some examples of, combined with certain fashion choices some real-world people wear to show how unconventional they are (like everyone else doing the same).

I'd say that having 'Karen' as one is more potentially offensive, though I'm concerned that one ('Snowflake') might be more uncomfortably resonant with people who'd read this blog or play the game eventually. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, though.

If you find any issues with these, I'd appreciate knowing what you might do instead. I'm also very open to ideas for what could go in the slots I've yet to fill, and I feel some are maybe too similar or they don't fit perfectly... Coming to final decisions is likely to happen gradually over development.

Each area would also have a unique boss character comparable to Pokemon's Gym Leaders (though they'd join your party, like every other person you convinced), but I only have the vaguest of ideas for them currently.

I don't want to strive for perfection with any of these designs; I'd rather have things that are functional so I can get the project out of the way quickly.



While I've been 'enjoying' working on this to the degree that I'm able to enjoy anything through the annoyingly prolonged anhedonic fog, I know my time might be better spent finally getting the ports of my old games on Steam - or CBC at the very least - so I might try to focus on those next week instead. Depends how well I'm able to focus on anything, though.

I might also try reaching out to an alternative therapy service, though that might just mean being put on another months-long waiting list.



Also, have you been playing Tears of the Kingdom? I've been spending much of my time since it came out doing that. I'd rather take my time, but I hate how some people rush through it so they can post findings from the later parts online to show off. I've already seen posts about it I wish I hadn't. Ugh. Grumble.

(And of course I don't want to talk about it yet!)