Hey everyone,

Welcome back to another NIRAVASI Devlog. Last time, I spoke about some pretty exciting news regarding the project’s release and other additional goodies. I should also mention that I made a little bit of a mistake with the release date announcement for the game, in that it would be released on July 9th 2022. This was a mistake, and I meant to say July 6th 2022. But don’t worry, I’ll make a more official announcement for that when the time comes, so with that said, let’s get straight into today’s topic.





An End To Things

As of this moment, I am happy to announce that the majority of the seventh level is finally complete. Players are now able to fully explore the Palace of Nira Ishan, as well as face the horrors of AEON’s work in the form of the Imagos. But as you might expect, simply finishing the palace itself is not enough to conclude the story I have been working on for almost two years. Instead, I believe it’s time to start talking about what the final areas of the game will be like.

After lighting one (or all, if you’re eager for a more complete ending) of the beacons within the Palace of Nira Ishan, AEON will welcome you into the very final room of the game. Taking a trip by elevator, Mura and AEON make their way to the darkest depths of the mountain the city was built on top on, eventually reaching a great chamber hidden from all. There, they’ll find the Heart of Niravasi, the city’s greatest treasure and the object that is responsible for keeping the malevolent AI tethered to the city. It’s also this treasure that Willow Eugenics originally hired the teams that Mura and Clovis worked to find. I don’t want to spoil any details specifically, but know that it’ll be unlike anything you’ll have seen before in-game (with the exception being a certain relic found at the end of the Stepwell level).

It is at this point where the player holds one final conversation with AEON, which ultimately will decide the fate of the player going forward. These will be given to the player in the form of three endings.

Normal Ending: Escape

True Ending: Acceptance

Secret Ending: Reincarnation



Normal Ending

This is the default ending for NIRAVASI, and the one you’ll get if you simply play the game from start-to-finish. Here, AEON will continue his plan of showing Mura the Heart of Niravasi, before a great disaster strikes. In the ensuing chaos, Mura finds himself in contact again with Clovis and Lynx, who warn the Antherian that things within the city are going crazy. In the chaos, all of AEON’s machines begin to shut down and the Harvester itself becomes prone to glitches.

Wasting no time at all, Mura grabs the treasure and makes a mad dash towards the elevator. This in turn will result in a final escape sequence, where Mura must escape the Harvester one last time before making it to Clovis and Lynx’s ship safely. In the final confrontation, Mura and his friends escape the city of Niravasi, resulting in AEON being trapped once more within the lost city.

Sounds like an ideal situation, right? Well, that’s because it is. One of the main design philosophies I wanted for the endings of NIRAVASI was to not punish the player in how they chose to play the game. I’ve seen a lot of other RPG Maker Games that penalise the player at the climax, just because they didn’t go out of their way to pick up some additional details/items. NIRAVASI’s goal has always been simple and I wanted to reinforce that with this ending; find your friends and escape the city of Niravasi. Now if you’re more of a completionist, you’ll be instead focusing on the True Ending of the game.



True Ending

Following the same path as the Normal Ending, Mura will have a final confrontation with AEON. But instead of going through with the AI’s plans, Mura instead will have the option to ask a very simple question of the great machine.

Scattered throughout each of NIRAVASI’s levels are a specific set of areas that I call the Tragedy Rooms. Each of these rooms contain a rather sad story involving the tragic end of a former citizen living in Niravasi. For example, the first level contained a sad fate regarding a group of survivors trying to escape the chaos of a dying city. These rooms play a pivotal role in the ending of the game, as they highlight the key concept behind the game’s narrative that there is no such thing as a Good Human or a Bad Antherian. There are good and bad people in the world, and the Antherians themselves are no different from the humans they co-exist with. Mura will come to this understanding only by experiencing all of the tragedies within these rooms, before posing a very important question towards AEON.

The results of this conversation surprisingly will lead to a fairly peaceful resolution between Mura and the machine, resulting in a end of all hostile encounters within the game. After which, the player is free to collect the treasure of the city unopposed, resulting in a very similar ending to that of the Normal one. However, if you truly are a masochistic individual, you may perhaps be interested in the game’s Secret Ending instead.



Secret Ending

Now I should warn you beforehand that this ending in particular will be vastly different than the other two. I don’t really want to give away too much about it, so instead I’ll just throw a few little teaser points here and there.

During previous demo releases, some of you may have noticed some very ominous looking doors in each of the game’s levels. While seemingly unimportant at the time, these doors play an important role into how the Secret Ending of the game will work, resulting in some very bad stuff happening. My hope for this ending is that it’ll completely break any semblance of realism or solid footing in terms of the narrative, resulting in an experience that’ll be truly out of place.



That’s it for this Devlog for NIRAVASI. I know it wasn’t as significant as the last one’s was, but a big part of the work that’s gone into the game now has been with wrapping things up before its release on July 6th 2022. I’ll have to admit that I’m getting quite nervous about this on my end, but I’m certain that as long as I keep my head in the game, NIRAVASI’s launch will be a great success. With that said, thank you all so very much for reading and I’ll speak to you again next time.

Kind regards,
Angus (Sangos)

Hey everyone,

It's me again, back with another NIRAVASI Devlog that you all enjoy so much. Last time, I spoke about the Palace of Nira Ishan and what you'll find wandering its halls. To that end, I'm happy to report that a majority of the outdoor sections of that level are finally complete (with additional tweaking to be followed should the need arise). With that said, I wanted to bring things back a little bit for this week and instead talk about the concepts behind NIRAVASI and how they evolved into what they are today. With that said, let's get straight into it.



The Lost City

At the end of 2017, I was preoccupied with working on The Spirits Within Expansion for my first RPG Maker Game, BLANK (which I ended up cancelling later on for personal reasons). But during my time on its development, I was batting around ideas for another video game project that I held interest on creating. One of them was a reimaging of a much older project I was worked on called "OSIRIS", a story about a crew of survivors discovering an ancient human civilisation deep within the deserts of a distant planet. While there, they would be hunted one-by-one by nightmarish creatures living within the ruins. While I ended up scrapping the project early on due to a lack of experience in my part as a content creator, the idea of a lost city buried beneath the sands was something I still really wanted to create.

But the Lost City I had initially envisioned back then is a far cry from the city of Niravasi today. In fact, I seem to recall that the style of the city of old featured a much heavier influence Egyptian/Mesoamerican architecture, with the story behind it being a place created by an alien race that worshipped a dark god that later ended up wiping them all out, leaving only a legion monstrous husks that would continually hunt the player down. Fun fact: A large part of the assets I made for this early prototype would end up being used for the Temples within Old Hanirr. But as I worked on this idea more and more, I felt that this idea had lost a lot of the impact I had initially envisioned for the project. I wanted the city of Niravasi to be a character of its own, and not just some ancient ruin created by a nameless alien race. To this end, I looked towards the ancient histories of both the country of India and the religions of both Hinduism and Buddhism.

Almost two years later since that decision, the setting of the game has definitely taken a dramatic turn (one I believe resulted in a more impactful environment for the player to interact with). Also, speaking of maladaptive machines, let's talk a little about the concept behind A.E.O.N. and his blood-thirsty robots.



The Overseer

Unlike the city of Niravasi itself, the conception stage behind A.E.O.N. is a bit of a mixed bag. I don't want to spoil anything too much, but the primary idea behind this character was a result of a conversation I had with my brother in regards to something called "Instrumental Convergence". For those of you that don't know, Instrumental Convergence posits that an intelligent agent with unbounded but apparently harmless goals can act in surprisingly harmful ways. Or in layman's terms, a machine or artificial intelligence can potentially endanger human lives as a consequence of being given simple tasks. To give you an example, let's say that you create a machine that's only purpose is to create paperclips. Sounds good, right? Well, let's say that the AI runs out of metal to use. It still wants to make paperclips, so it looks for other materials to use instead. And as this cycle continues, you eventually figure out that the AI may in fact look towards biomatter like skin and bones to use in the future. That would obviously be very bad for humanity as a whole, so it's time to shut this machine down. Well, the AI figures out that if it's shut off prematurely, it can't make paperclips, which would be in violation of the directive it was given. Therefore, the AI has no choice, but to eradicate all human life on the planet to keep making more paperclips.

Using this idea as a basis and reading up on the story of Frictional Games' SOMA and its approach to artificial intelligence, I wanted to create a machine that was built for one purpose; protecting and perfecting humanity. How would the machine interpret this directive? How does this machine know what it means to perfect people? How does something that was created by imperfect beings know what it means to be perfect? From this concept, A.E.O.N. was born; the Artificial Ecological Overseer Network of the city of Niravasi.



The Survivor

Now we get to our adorable little protagonist, Mura. Antherian Archaeologist and Explorer Extraordinaire. So what was the founding basis behind this little guy? Well, that's a little harder to explain clearly, so I'll try my best to summarise it up as best as I can.

So before Mura was, well, Mura, I wanted to create a character that was significantly out of place within the Lost City, but still intelligent enough to rationally get himself out of some nasty situations. While working on BLANK, my intention was to create a young girl that was largely naïve and eager to protect her hometown of Finima, but still strong enough to face some of Transech's more horrific opponents. But when BLANK was released to the general public, one of the biggest points people made was that Veta as a character was surprisingly short-sighted and dim-witted at times (with Let's Players often calling her "not very smart" or "very, very dumb"). While this did initially end up working well with the setting of the game, I really wanted to avoid making another character like this, so I got to work on drafting up a character design that would fit better with the new narrative I wanted to create.

I knew I wanted the character to be skilled enough in their craft that they could still get around, despite being put in such a horrible situation. I also wanted them not to be human to better reinforce the concept behind wanting to explore an ancient city in the first place. If you were an explorer and discovered some alien ruins, wouldn't you want to explore them to your heart's content? Also, they needed to have both a recognisable and charming design that would contrast against the darker environments that the game would explore. One of my earliest concepts was a Jackal-like human that could run long distances. I ended up scrapping this design as it looked too goofy compared to the rest of the game's setting. Unfortunately, my solution behind Mura's design would come from the tragic passing of a Cat I absolutely adored; an adorable ball of fluff called Pooka. Thinking back on it, a cat was the perfect candidate to use as a basis for Mura's character. cats are naturally agile and perceptive creatures and hold the ability to walk across large stretches of land, all of which I wanted my game's protagonist to have. Plus they're a cat, and most people love cats.



That's about it for this Devlog for NIRAVASI. It was a lot of fun writing this one and I'll definitely be talking a bit more about some other concepts/designs I had for the project in the next Devlog. But with that said, thank you all so very much for reading and I hope you all have a pleasant day.

Kind regards,
Angus (Sangos)

Hey everyone,

At long last, I've finally updated the last Demo build to that of the game's 6th Level, the Perfection Complex. As always, you can find the update demo link on the Downloads page. As a friendly reminder, this is only a playable demo for the sixth level of the game ONLY.

There's no additional video to go along with this release, as a lot of work went into both the visual and narrative design of this demo. Please let me know what you think as you play along this build.

Kind regards,
Angus (Sangos)

Hey everyone,

Welcome back to another Devlog for NIRAVASI. This time (and for the forseeable future), these update posts will no longer be Weekly, but Bi-Weekly, meaning that there will be a new Devlog post every two weeks instead. I'm also happy to announce that a significant amount of progress has been made since the last Devlog and everything is looking absolutely grand going forward. But enough about that, let's get straight into it.





Twice As Long

So yeah, the Bi-Weekly Devlogs. What's that about, you ask? Well, I think it's pretty clear in the message itself. From this point going forward, the Devlogs for NIRAVASI will be released on a Bi-Weekly basis instead of a Weekly one. The primary reason for this decision is that it's difficult to find stuff to talk about for the game's development every single week. I know I often used those content-dry updates to talk a little about the concept/goals of the game, but at this point, I think I've already established what it is I'm looking for with this project's release. Not only that, but writing these Devlogs does take a lot of my time (uploading to the different Social Media sites) and it's getting to the point where it's burning me out a little bit.

That's why from this point on, the Devlogs will be released every second week. This is far more manageable for my schedule (and mental health), and it also means that I'll have more content to show and talk about each time I release a new Devlog. As an example, I have quite a few things I'd like to talk about in regards to the 6th Level of the game, which I'll be happily discussing underneath. That being said, I apologise to anyone who enjoyed reading these updates every Tuesday, but I hope that you can understand that this will be better for everyone in the long run.



Twisted Motives

Since the previous Devlog, I have made a significant amount of progress with working on the 6th Level and I definitely foresee it being complete soon, either sometime at the end of February, or in the beginning of March. For those of you wondering why it's taken less time to work on this level, you'll have to remember the statements I made in the previous Devlogs. In terms of scale, the Aruvi District was by far the biggest level in the game. From the entry streets to the TEKMO Tower itself, there was a lot of stuff to work on for that level. With the Perfection Complex, however, it's much smaller in scale and size, but requires a lot more visual assets as it's the one level where the big reveal comes along in regards to AEON's endgame plan. I don't want to spoil anything here, but you may have caught a flew glimpses of it in the form of the Imagos.

My only big worry for the Perfection Complex level is maintaining player interest. As this is the second-last level of the game, it serves as a big climax point for NIRAVASI's narrative. As such, a lot more work will be going into the presentation of the level, as well working on the atmosphere I want the players to be invested in. However, the gameplay loop of this level is fairly simple and does not involve as many enemy encounters as the previous levels (save maybe for the big escape sequence I have planned out in the end). I've tried my best to offset this potential hiccup with both disturbing visuals and a plethora of lore bits to indulge in, but rest assured, my central narrative design philosophy remains the same. You do not have to look at the story of these optional terminals to understand just what it is that AEON is after.



Horrific Direction

The Perfection Complex is also perhaps the first real big demonstration I have for the players in regards to following up with the really dark narrative direction I talked about in previous Devlogs. Here, in AEON's central base of operations, you'll find not only how the malevolent AI treats its guests, but also understand the nature of the horrific experiments of which both him (and the Synergeni company in the past) conduct on their subjects. In fact, my good friend (ZeeMadMaverick) has recently sent me two facial sprite frames of a certain character you may remember suffering a horrible fate. It's an extremely gruesome image, and I have to be careful about how I present it to the audience (I want to shock them, yes, but I don't want it to be overtly gruesome that it turns them off completely). Nevertheless, I'm really proud of the work he's done here, and I hope you will be too.

On the flip side, I've recently gotten into contact with Adam Halpin (NIRAVASI's composer) and have begun requesting/commissioning the next batch of tunes that will be used for NIRAVASI. As the game nears its completion (excluding the Endings), I feel that it's important to get everything on the supporting side of the game's development done before its inevitable release. Unlike the Title Screen music, I do not wish to reveal the tunes that'll be used publicly until the next batch of demos (and Full game) are released. Nevertheless, this is all just very early talk and we'll have to see what happens in the next few weeks/months.



Thank you once again for joining me for another NIRAVASI Devlog session. This one was a lot more different in terms of the style of writing as compared to the previous Devlogs, but I suppose that's just the nature of the beast. From here on out, you're going to be seeing a lot more progress in both the work and my excitement for the game's upcoming release. There's also still many things I need to get sorted out before then, but the fact that it's in-sight and coming quite soon is a little nerve-wrecking. Nevertheless, I'm really excited to see how it all pans out, and I want to thank everyone that's supported the project so far. NIRAVASI wouldn't be where it is today if it wasn't for the support you have all given me and the project. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading this Devlog and I'll see you again in two weeks.

Kind regards,
Angus (Sangos)

Hey everyone,

As promised, I've finally released a playable build for the Aruvi District demo for all of you to enjoy. You can find it updated on the Downloads page. As a friendly reminder, this is only a playable demo for the fifth level of the game ONLY.

Also, if you haven't seen it yet, I've also finally released that Analog Horror Promotional Video for the game. Take a look at it here:



I'll still be following through with my plans I listed last week, but have no fear, as I'll still be keeping an eye on things if there's any cataclysmic faults that occur. Anyway, I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Kind regards,
Angus (Sangos)