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Hub and Spokes? Linear Progression?? Dreamons???

1 year ago1,439 words

What should I do with this game??

Views on posts here are at an all-time low, but so is my productivity, so that's fair enough.

I've been lost and unfocused for a while now. Haven't touched Atonal Dreams in ages. Promotion is a barrier, due to mental trauma from the whole Fig Hunter stuff years ago.

There's some obstacle preventing me from working on ports of my old games, too, which I've been meaning to ask strangers about... but haven't yet due to the same mental blocks.

I've been at least getting more comfortable about posting on Reddit recently, though, which is something. Being able to do that and realising I won't be preyed upon by trolls is at least some forward progress.

I also contacted the counselling service to see if I was actually even on a waiting list, and was told progress is being made behind the scenes and I might be able to see someone for mental health help soon. Good!

I talked for more than 6 hours with my two remaining uni friends yesterday, too - 4 hours in a phone call and 2 in a video call - and the positive mental effects of that were so... like drinking a bottle of cold water after wandering for days in a desert, or something. I just wish it were easier to find people.





I've been trying to work on this still-unnamed Belief Battles/Frayth/whatever thing as a quick side project over the past few weeks or months, but it's been dragging on because I've barely been working on it. Partly due to depression and general distress about life stuff, partly because of uncertainty about what exactly to do with it.

I like the pixel-faced models and the battle system that I've made; those feel fixed. But what I'm uncertain about is exactly how to form a game around those things.

The working plan was to make what I suppose could technically be called an open world out of seven areas - one for each element plus a central temple - each of which was populated by silly archetypical characters you'd battle against to convince them to join your religion. The areas are made of a grid of rooms, and each room can contain a single battle. Some rooms can contain buildings which lead to sub-areas with more battles.

But I've made some progress on that, and it feels maybe too rigid and too... empty, simplistic, something like that. Is it actually fun wandering around just battling people over and over without much variety? The battles are predetermined too so there's no randomness, and being able to tackle the areas in any order makes it difficult to balance anything.

I keep wondering about other RPGs I've played, and what I've ever liked about those. And I've actually struggled to distill any reasons!

Is the forward progress of moving through setpieces towards an eventual destination crucial? Is a compelling story? Cast of characters?

What did I used to be driven to make in the past? I wish I could clearly remember. Though is what people want from games these days different anyway?

I'm really curious to hear what you might want from a game with battles and graphics like these!

Discussing possible directions with others would probably be beneficial, but few people read these posts and even fewer comment. Maybe I should go in my Discord (next week), or post on Reddit, though I'm not even sure where there exactly or whether anyone would care to discuss it.

Here are some possible ideas of my own that I've been playing around with:

Hub and Spokes

This is the direction I've been working along so far: a central hub (the temple) and six surrounding areas (effectively dungeons combined with towns) which you can tackle in any order. They're inhabited by silly human archetypes like Normie and Babe, and you have to convince people to join your religion devoted to a god you name in the character creator at the start. Follower count milestones would unlock story scenes, but you'd have to go to the centre of the hub to see/unlock them.

Linear Archepelago

Instead of giving you total freedom about the progression, you'd have something like a world map of nodes - like in the 2D Mario games and Crash Bandicoot (1 and 4) - each of which leads to a short island/dungeon and you have to complete them linearly. (MARDEK had a similar thing, actually.)

There'd be more room for a story, crafting little areas would be less daunting for me, and it'd be much easier to balance the content. Less player choice, though.

Closed Open World

Something like Pokemon games (other than the most recent at least), where there's a connected world you can wander around, but your path through it is directed by plot events and obstacles so you have to tackle things in an intended order.

Dreamons

A very different idea from earlier in development. You begin the game as a new member of an organisation that travels into people's minds - their psychepelagos - to tame their demons directly. The hub would be the mental-hospital-like HQ of this group, and you'd talk to NPCs to enter into their dreams (essentially), each of which would be its own dungeon/story. Perhaps there'd be three levels to the HQ with half a dozen or so short dreams you could tackle in whatever order; completing all the ones on a given level would unlock the next (Spyro-like progression), or perhaps you have goals within each dream and completing enough of them leads to progress (3D Mario platformer progression).

The battles would work the same, but the character designs could be more outlandish (within the restrictions of the humanoid models at least). You'd still tame them, but maybe you couldn't take them outside of the current dream? The aim would be to tame all the people in a given dream to heal the person.

There could also be the potential for players to make and share their own dreams (like AFC's quests).

This idea - and the title - were originally for more of a monster collector though, which would be far more work. I'm also not sure the nature of the skills (verbal quips) would make sense for this, and I'd lose some of the absurdist elements (social interactions as battles, people swapping sides fluidly).



I basically just want to decide on something that's quick to make but fun to play, and the uncertainty combined with all the mental health stuff has just left me feeling stuck.

So I'm very interested to hear some thoughts other than my own about this!!

Or maybe I should stop thinking about it and just get back to Atonal Dreams... Probably. This was only meant as a side distraction until I could break past some mental issues, anyway - a way of productively procrastinating - but it's dragged on for months because of how hard it is to find mental health help.

I'm intending to try some more social engagement stuff next week (by which I mean Reddit posting, mostly) which might hopefully allow me to progress further with the ports of old games, finally. Maybe I'll also try posting about Atonal Dreams or something?

Also, ∞ I've been uploading some piano compositions to my YouTube channel, as listed in this post ∞, if you missed that. Interest is low, as anticipated, but I've been meaning to upload those for ages so actually getting around to it is mentally beneficial for me at least. I've also been trying to play the pieces on my piano again, so that's been somewhat entertaining (though my performance skills aren't really any better since I composed them a decade ago, which is a shame!).





Remakes for Super Mario RPG and Star Ocean 2 - two games I played and liked many years ago - are coming out soon, apparently. Makes me wonder (not for the first time) about just doing a MARDEK remake... but that's what Divine Dreams is, and Atonal Dreams was meant as a prequel to that. These remakes seem to be direct recreations, but I just don't think I could do that.

Makes me wonder whether to just use what I've made for Atonal Dreams to make Divine Dreams as a MARDEK reimagining though rather than spending ages on Atonal Dreams, but... the whole point of Atonal Dreams was to have something self-contained so then it wouldn't feel unfinished if I had to give it up...

I don't know.