DEVELOPMENT

1

735

Beliefrayth - Story Stuff & Men

1 year ago2,502 words

I'm on a roll with this still-yet-unnamed project thing - or at least as much as I have been with anything lately - so again I've shirked other work to at least make some progress on it. Less than ideal, but better than wasting all my hours lost numbly scrolling through Reddit and half-watching YouTube videos I'll forget as soon as they're done.

I'm not calling it 'Beliefrayth', by the way. I just wish I had a less clunky way to refer to this 'Belief Battles or maybe Frayth or something else I haven't decided yet' project!

I've been planning story-related stuff this week. I don't want this thing to have some grand, perfectly-planned plot or anything - I want to finish it, and quickly, after all! - but an ostensible-RPG about people talking without even an excuse plot tying things together wouldn't really make any sense.

I intend for the game's world to be small, with a layout like this:



That is, seven 4x4 'screen-sized' areas (each a square/pixel here) either actually connected to form one open-world-like island, or they'd be conceptually connected even if you effectively warp between them (using flowerbeds or whatever). Depends on what's easiest to make.

The game would begin with a character creator where a deity speaks about creating an avatar to unite the world (I've already made this), then you'd wake up in your house in Villageville, the Viscereal area, which would be a quaint little hometown similar to the ones in my early RPGs (or the other generic RPGs that inspired those).

(Another thing I did this week was compose some music for that area! Or rather, a second attempt at it, as I'd done that a while back but didn't like the result. Rare; normally I do use my first attempt. Could be a symptom of my terrible indecisiveness lately.)

You'd then make your way to the temple at the centre of the island, which would serve as a hub from which you'd be able to visit the other areas in whatever order you chose. Each would have some basic problem of its own with probably minimal story-like scenes (probably about the same level of story-ness as something like the Spyro games' levels).

The overarching story scenes I've been planning basically just connect the beginning to the free-roaming bit. One of the main goals for this project was to keep any intro minimal so you can get quickly into freely exploring, but the mechanics are fairly novel so I feel they need at least a little bit of a tutorial. Though I'd like to avoid going as in-depth as I did in both Divine Dreams and - to a lesser extent, hopefully? - Atonal Dreams.



So I'm thinking of something like this:

You awaken in your bedroom, then leave your house, where you're greeted by your two friends: Jane (from 'Plain Jane'), who's down-to-earth and fairly forthright (Vdx), and Cureah (kyu-REE-uh; from curio(us) + cure(r)), who's curious, compassionate, and peculiar (Ahx).




They notice that you have a flower bud growing out of your head.

Jane thinks it's disgusting and you need to cut it off, get rid of it before anyone sees and judges you, while Cureah is curious about what it might grow into and thinks you should nurture it instead.

You then battle against them, and can use two skills: Attack, which deals Discord influence (damage), and Appeal, which deals Harmony influence.

When you tame one of them, the other believes you've chosen your side and leaves in a huff. That is, you're effectively able to choose your first ally, who you then go with to the temple to either remove or nurture the flower bud.

On your way to the temple, you encounter a pair of Blight Wolves: Zaffre, who's grumpy, sarcastic, and dutiful (vdG), and Cerise, who's curious, sweet, and scatterbrained (ahL). They refuse to let you pass - their leader has been eradicating any new religions that try to flare up - and you have a battle where again you can convince just one, which causes the other to leave.

With a team of three, you enter the core of the temple and the bud on your head blooms into a flower, perhaps at the sight of something there, and it starts talking to you, claiming to be the god you named in the character creator. It tells you that in order to reach its full potential and bring peace to the world once more, it needs followers, people who believe in it.

You then go off collecting followers to increase a global counter, and certain milestones (eg 20 followers, 100 followers) unlock different little dialogue scenes and/or rewards, with the last being some conclusion I won't spoil (and haven't fully planned anyway so there's not much yet to spoil).



So that's the sketch of an outline so far; obviously it needs a lot of fleshing out.

I wanted those two battles to have an element of 'choosing a starter (Pokemon)' while also serving as a tutorial for the mechanics and a brief introduction to the metaphors those mechanics are meant to be representing.

The disagreement between Jane and Cureah is similar to disagreements political sides might have about abortion, for example... though oddly it's flipped; Cureah would be the more left-wing one while Jane's more right, but they're representing pro-life and pro-choice (kind of) respectively here.

Which I've been trying to think through so then the player could potentially pick a partner whose views reflect their own on an issue they might have an opinion about, but I suppose the 'real' abortion issue is divided by rigid objective duty (always/never do x because that is what is written) vs fluid subjective freedom (circumstances must be considered), differences in trait Openness (which largely influences political affiliation), and both sides believe their stances are rooted in compassion (saving souls vs saving vulnerable mothers).

Here, the point was to have characters who represent Viscereal and Abstral - so keeping the status quo vs curiosity about the novel and unknown - to introduce those concepts, which are the ends of the Openness trait, but... it doesn't map properly here because there are other factors to the abortion debate like the harm caused to the mother.

To have it match, Cureah would have to show concern for the player's wellbeing and suggest she has it removed, while Jane would need to be devoted to Unisis or something and insists it's the gods' will you keep it, or something... but that clashes with the open- vs closed-minded aspect and... ehh.

Also, if you battle them to convert one to your side, what would that mean exactly? Your skills are basically "my religion is right and yours is wrong, join me", so would you be trying to convince the one you disagreed with...?

I may need to just completely rethink it all if I want something that makes sense with the mechanics and themes!

Something more surreal and absurdist with no real world parallels might work better... but the whole point of a flower/bud growing out of your head was that it makes the player character visually distinct and gives the deity a way of communicating with you, and it's just coincidence really that thinking how Abstral and Viscereal characters might react to that gave something similar to the abortion issue.

(I originally imagined the deity conveniently communicating with you via something like a necklace, but the head flower would work better with the themes - plus it'd be more visually obvious - in my opinion. It'd probably end up looking like the flowers on sindrels' heads (did I go with the name daemons? I should replay Sindrel Song!), though it's not one of those. Unless I should decide that it is??)

Also, Jane and Cureah represent Viscereal and Abstral respectively, but the player has Harmony and Discord skills available to tame them during the first battle. I felt this combination worked better in the long run than giving the player Abstral and Viscereal starting skills (not as easy to understand for new players) or focusing the two 'starter' characters around Harmony and Discord (I could do that, though I'd feel the need to add additional Viscereal and Abstral characters, which is more work). As it is, they still represent Harmony/Discord in their h and d runes.


If you ever played Miasmon, you might recognise the names of Zaffre and Cerise as belonging to these old characters of mine:




I started with the idea of just one Blight Wolf you'd face, or maybe they'd be accompanied by the Blight Wolves' boss who'd serve as The Villain throughout and you'd get your introduction to them here, though a second 'starter choice' seemed like a better way of continuing to introduce lore and battle mechanics concepts, the Gravitoom/Levitality pair here. I remembered these characters sort of randomly, and thought hey, that could save me some design work and give them a new home! I've been incorporating a bunch of other things from my old projects into this one (eg Yalortism), after all.

Cureah and Jane are both women because I only had a female model in the game, but Zaffre's not female, and adding a male body type was long overdue anyway, so I finally got around to making that:



Or at least I started on it on Friday, but I was running out of focus, which wasn't helped by getting this pop-up randomly:



It's something I've been having for a while now, randomly, sometimes multiple times a day and other times there are weeks between instances; I've written about it on this blog before, though I can't remember (and couldn't find) which post. It's frustrating because it crashes Unity and leaves lingering effects that require me to restart my PC (which it also seems to prevent, or at least severely delay, meaning I have to force a shut down by holding the power button).

It seems to be an issue with the GPU crashing, and I thought it was a Unity issue at first since googling it showed many other Unity users have got it, but it happened a couple of other times outside Unity - my screen just went black for a second, and things lagged for a few seconds after the image came back - which was concerning.

I wondered whether it might be heat-related, but the heat monitors I use didn't show anything higher than usual. Or maybe, I thought, it could be related to my second and/or third monitors? (The second's a graphics tablet while the third is at the other side of the room in front of my piano, which I use for sheet music.) I've turned them both off and haven't had the issue in the couple of days since doing that... but it's so unreliably random that I don't know if that means it's fixed or it'll just happen while I'm in the middle of work on some other day.

Frustratingly, I don't even know how to track down a cause. Google sources suggested Windows Event Viewer, though that shows nothing which seems relevant.

I just hope it's not some hardware thing, though I'm concerned it might be. Ugh.

Oh, and I updated my drivers and all that, which may also have been the solution, though I've done that before and the issue's come back sometime after anyway.

I ran like three antivirus programs too, all of which found nothing.

(I wouldn't care if it just crashed Unity, it's whatever lingering damage requires a Windows restart that concerns me.)



Regarding my mental health, since I always seem to append that to these dev posts these days instead of writing separate ones...

I've been trying to essentially stick to an ordinary work schedule, where I start at, say, 7am, then try to go until about 5pm, every Monday to Friday... but my productivity's been very poor over the last few weeks - like two or three hours a day if I'm lucky - which is why this fairly short project is dragging along much more slowly than it potentially could. There's not all that much work to do on it; I've just not even been doing 'not much' work for a while.

One thing I see a lot on Reddit is the idea of a four-day work week, often with links to studies which show it doesn't negatively affect productivity but does improve wellbeing. So I'm wondering whether to try that. Work harder Monday to Thursday, maybe use Friday to write a post here (I don't like that it eats into my weekends currently), then just completely relax on Saturday and Sunday.

I'll ask my boss if I can try that. He says yes. Because my boss is Our Graceful Lord in Heaven and he is very lenient, you see. Either that or it's me and he's too tired to tell me no.

Yawn.

I'm still waiting on counselling - which I certainly hope is actually pending - but the one friend who actually bothers to ring me regularly suggested we meet up again to try and address some of the many barriers holding me in place, so hopefully we actually will sometime in the next week or two... though the weather's hotter than I'd like so I'm not looking forward to being out all day in it after a prolonged period hiding in this cave (it'll be good for me, but I'm anxious about fainting or something, since a big part of my anxiety generally is a fear that my body will fail me, as it has in the past).

I'm also still sleeping poorly due to the hotter and brighter weather, so that's interfering with my ability to concentrate... but there's not really much I can do about that other than hope my body adapts or something.

(Damn! Every week I think "I should upload some more of my music to that channel I recently set up for that purpose and mention it in the blog post", but yet again I've forgotten! Maybe next week?? I'm finishing this off on Sunday evening and I can't be bothered.)