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Collecting Archetypes or Bonding With Characters?

1 year ago1,426 words

This... still unnamed side project thing is a game about converting and collecting people, but to what degree should they be unique people rather than collectible types? Should it be about collecting a silly gang of archetypes, or about finding your ~soulmate~??

It's still Sunday, right?? Or Friday, or whenever I've decided I'll be writing weekly updates.

I've been distracted for the last few days, frustratingly. The same old mental health issues, combined with some circumstantial stuff I'll vaguely describe as 'family-related'.

Even before that came up, though, I was struggling with focusing on anything due to indecisiveness about what exactly I should be doing with my time. Because I felt so lost and stuck, I looked through some of my old blog posts, hoping for... I don't know, a spark of inspiration, or to make sense of some things that'd become unclear in my head.

...Which, as it turns out, is something I must have done before, as I wrote about it in a post from 3 months ago titled ∞ What am I even doing with my time? ∞ Frustratingly, everything in that post is still true now... though I suppose it wasn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things.

I wrote some long post about the steps that led me to where I am, but it all feels repetitive and irrelevant so I've decided to just scrap it. Instead, I'll focus on some uncertainty about specific design issues that I'm currently facing with this side project (which I've apparently been working on in some form or another since before Atonal Dreams, so clearly it's something I have a strong desire to finally get out in some form).



I also replayed Atonal Dreams last week for the first time in months hoping to either feel excited about returning to it, or inspired by decisions I made with it such that I could decide what to do with this other thing.

It's very narrative-driven! 'Story-rich', as people seem to say. And despite my efforts to avoid replicating the dialogue-heavy beginning of Divine Dreams, I ended up with exactly that in AD, in a way which makes it difficult to just dive in and play, and daunting to think of getting back to developing; I'm very aware of the mountain of work that needs doing to reach the end... which added weight to my desire to finally make this Belief project manifest into something more streamlined after years of going back and forth with it.

One of my intentions with this side project thing was to avoid getting too tangled in writing-related perfectionism, to basically do away with anything like a plot so I could finish the thing more quickly, but... While looking through my old blog posts, I watched (a bit of) this gameplay video of the original (unfinished) Belief for the umpteenth time:



And I'd say the bits that appeal to me most with that are the silly dialogue scenes before each encounter. Seems a shame to not have anything like that, especially for a game that's all about silly social interactions!



There's another concern I've had for a while about the way this game works. Currently, you have a party of up to six characters which is made up of the player-created avatar and archetypes you've recruited sort-of-Pokemon-style.

But switching sides is a big gameplay mechanic, and if your six slots are filled at the beginning of battle with fairly powerful characters, it's unlikely you'd ever lose any and the mechanic would rarely see any use.

It also means that if you're recruiting everyone, making bosses would be difficult since they'd join you afterwards, potentially trivialising later challenges if they were too powerful, or trivialising the challenge against them if they weren't powerful enough.

Some brainstorming has produced several possibilities:

Possibility 1 - Party of 3 Unique Characters

You create a single character, and can recruit allies, but only specific ones, with a max party size of 3. So for example you might encounter two named characters at the start (Cureah and Jane, or Zaffre and Cerise), who have their own looks and personalities and who take part in story scenes.

With those characters you might battle a party of, say, a Normie, a Hunk, and a Babe, and you'd be able to tame them over to your side - you'd have to to win - but after the battle they'd go back to their original positions on the map with maybe an icon over their heads to show they've been converted.

The named characters might mostly be the boss characters of each elemental area, who'd be named and designed like how Pokemon Gym Leaders are (when compared to trainers, who the regular opponents would be equivalent to).

Possibility 2 - Adam & Eve

You create two characters at the very beginning, who are an 'Adam and Eve', a couple. Not necessarily one male and one female; you could create two men or two women if you wanted. One would be 'you' and the other would be 'your partner'.

I particularly liked the silly effects of skills used by the Boyfriend and Girlfriend characters which go back to the very earliest experimentation with the game concept (Boyfriend using Flirt on a foe makes allied Girlfriends Angry), and this would basically be a way of focusing on that. Adding some extra dynamic of relationship drama which I feel would be particularly silly whenever your beloved partner switched sides.

You'd just have these two characters and no permanent allies, but opposing groups could be up to four people, meaning difficult battles would be more imbalanced than the 3 v 3 and potentially more satisfying to overcome.

I couldn't really do story scenes with fixed characters I'd designed, though.

Possibility 3 - Finding Your Soulmate

Essentially a combination of those two: there could be a bunch of characters that I'd make and write personalities and story scenes for, but you could only have one as an ally at a time instead of two.

I could even add elements reminiscent of dating sims (though I've never played one of those so I can't say I know the common tropes), and the whole thing could be about finding a compatible partner - your 'other half' - or something, which appeals to me as someone who's more comfortable with one-on-one interactions than group ones (and who aches from having no partner in the real world).

I'd probably approach it in a way that was more silly than heartfelt, but with enough depth to develop genuine attachments to the characters.



I'd also like to streamline some of the structural stuff I described in the previous post. Rather than having a hub that leads to six elemental worlds, instead maybe I'll just have you progress through the elemental areas sequentially but without any hub connecting them, perhaps with finding some place where the god can manifest being the goal of a linear journey.

A concern I've had about the central hub idea is where recruited people would go. In the old/current version, recruits not on your party are sent 'to the temple' (like how Pokemon are sent 'to the PC'), and I imagined them all being physically present in the temple area so you could see it becoming more crowded. It also seemed to invite ideas like having some of these recruits build buildings or run shops or things like that. All of which is more work. Having a linear adventure where most people you convince just go back to their original positions would address that.



I wrote much of this post days ago, and while finishing and editing it now I think the third possibility appeals to me most?

If I were to do that, most opponents would be the archetypes (Normie, Babe, etc), and they'd have fixed stats and skills. There'd only be a small number (six, maybe) of characters who you could recruit as a permanent ally, and they'd be able to level up and be customised and such. You could only have one at a time. The archetypes would still join your party for the remainder of the battle you encountered them in, and many battles would be designed such that converting certain opponents would make it easier to convert the others.

But then I'd be losing the Pokemon-like aspects (collecting silly archetypes), which feels like a shame and makes the decision more difficult.

Maybe I'll do some more brainstorming and dwell on it all a bit.