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Miscellaneous

Release As Is + Plot Reveal


Today, November 1st, I decided to release all the progress I had on this game, although it's incomplete. I'm not working on it anymore.

Here's a link to the download: http://rpgmaker.net/games/46/downloads/1530/ (It should be approved soon.)

To anyone who's curious about the story... I'll write here what I remember of it.
It was about a kid (main character) taken under the wing of a skilled enchanter, along with several other kids. Initially believed to be an orphan, he was actually kidnapped by the enchanter after breaking into the enchanter's house on a dare. His memory is modified to believe he is an orphan rescued by the enchanter. The enchanter needed an apprentice to continue his line of work, and he chose this kid (I never really named him, but I'll call him Peter, as that's the name I stuck on him for the release.) out of freak occurrence. Later on, two other kids, Amy and Henry, are also apprenticed under the enchanter, both of whom knew Peter before he was kidnapped--Henry was actually the one to dare Peter before he was kidnapped, and Amy warned him against going in. Anyways, both their memories are also modified to forget they knew Peter.
During their time with the enchanter, the three kids practice summoning various spirits. One day, Henry accidentally summons a spirit (Henry is more or less an arrogant idiot) while the master is away, and the very weak spirit possesses Peter. This goes unnoticed, as the possession is so weak that the master does not notice. However, this possession drives Peter to hold his own secret summoning rituals in the middle of the night--the demon inside him is trying to call out other demons into the world. Peter, in his inexperience, draws an imperfect circle, and instead of calling demons out under his command, they appear in his mind and begin to slowly take over. However, the enchanter notices Peter is awake in the middle of the night, and interrupts the spell, and so, the spirits only have a partial hold on Peter.
(This is about where the game starts, everything before would've been revealed in flashbacks as he retrieves his memory.)
Peter is kicked out by his angry master, as Peter had already attempted to summon in the middle of the night on other occasions. Running away, he hears voice telling him to stop at the nearby graveyard--a place where spiritual influence is heavy. He wanders into a large empty crypt with a trapped room, where the spirit he had just partially summoned, Orion, saves him by pulling him into the demon world.
There, he crosses a small swampish area to a town of demons, where he finds in the center, a perfect-looking tree with a shining fruit. Peters eats the fruit, after being convinced by Orion that if he eats he, he can return to his home world.
After eating it, Peter wakes up in the graveyard, and begins to wander into the streets, sometime in the morning. As people are now awake and around, he begins to notice a strange power he has--he is able to influence the actions of others, and even possess them for short periods of time. He also realized that he is able to summon Orion at will, as he had cast the binding spells to summon Orion the night before.
He takes his new powers back to his master's house to seek revenge against his master and Henry. Once he reaches the house, he sets Orion loose to hunt for Henry. Orion unleashes his demon side and begins to kill everything he sees, from a few servants to the innocent Amy (who was also Peter's only real friend) to the malicious Henry. As Orion does this, Peter sets off to try to find the master, in order to possess him and take control.
Peter finds his master ready for him, and is easily overwhelmed--he has become arrogant due to his anger and power, and forgotten that his master is a master enchanter. Orion arrives and is easily banished back to the demon world.
The police come to arrest Peter, who is knocked unconscious by his master, and is sentenced to hanging. However, at his execution, his master recalls that it is his own fault for messing up the lives of the three kids, and feeling ashamed, decides to give Peter another chance at life, in the demon world. As Peter is hung by a noose, his master summons Orion, who takes Peter's soul back into the demon world.
There, Peter, taught by Orion, eats more fruit of the tree, and realized that eating from it causes him to make a slow transformation into a demon, and thus Peter begins to assimilate into demon society... waiting for the next person to summon him back into the human realm.

Now... the original inspiration for his game was a completely different story idea. It was about a man who could talk to the dead, and he visited a graveyard and heard the stories of a wide variety of people who had faced oppression--from the Chinese immigants to enslaved blacks. However, that never really grew. =P

Anyways, if you read this, thanks. I hope you enjoy what there is.
-AznChipmunk

Please feel free to steal any resources or even plot ideas!

Miscellaneous

...Right. Read this please.

I haven't touched this project in ages. Initially, I started it I think back in... 2006 or 2007. Looking back, I don't really like how I initially did the lighting, and there are a lot of changes I would have made.

I'm just posting a blog to announce that this is cancelled. Sorry to disappoint anyone who was hoping for a full release, but this isn't going anywhere. I'm working on several other projects, like a small mini side project. And of course, there's Muse and Night Shift Noble. Muse is not intended to be that long of a game (NSN will be longer and more expansive) and hopefully will be out by winter.

Mindflare began as really... me experimenting with different effects in Photoshop. I made the title screen first, thought "Mindflare" sounded cool, and formed a basic plot around an idea I once had. (It was about a man who could hear the dead, visiting a graveyard and experiencing various "visions" of their lives.) The game's plot is actually... pretty different, but it has some foundation in that.

There are several major problems that lead me to choose to announce that it's cancelled:
1. No motivation. Honestly, I want to put more of my effort into Muse and Night Shift Noble, which I'm working on with a team, and welll, I don't really want to pour effort into this, because I think those games can be so much more.
2. I haven't touched it in ages. I started it for a Ghostlight Demo Day release sometime October 2006 I think, and I put out the original release in a matter of hours after starting. I worked at a pretty fast pace and hoped to have a completed game by the next summer. Unfortunately... several other things got in the way. I continued to produce random battle systems in my spare time and entered contests instead of working on Mindflare. (The result of these are... ABS Project, ~ABS, Linear Motion Battle System, Vanilla Villain.) Oh God, Vanilla Villain, I don't know if that will ever go up on RMN. >_> Perhaps someday, it had a pretty smooth shooting ABS. But yeah, getting a bit sidetracked... I probably haven't worked on this game since before Halloween of last year. (Which was when Muse was born.) Ironically, Muse was intented to be finished in a short span of time (by December) but my teammate procrastinated on mapping, and thus the whole project was delayed to a short contest demo release on New Year's, a few other updates in the spring, and a long period of not working on RM (until about a month ago) due to business with life and school. RM-wise, Muse more or less sort of took over.
3. I kept revamping stuff. I think my older work on the game looks horrible, and I'm pleased with what I have currently, but I never made any real progress on the game, because instead, I continuously went back to rework things, make things prettier, and generally improve the quality... but the second chapter of the game never went any further than few maps. Perhaps I'll release what I have now, because I think some parts of it are quite a visual treat, but who knows. I'm definitely no longer working on it anymore.
4. Mindflare has no solid foundation, plotwise. It was a game that was completely spawned out of me experimenting with special effects, atmosphere, various aspects of puzzles, lighting, fog, and basically what you see in the game. There was a plot in the works, but I myself didn't really know where it was going... I only had a vague idea. None of the characters I created really had any real personality, because the game was focused on shiny graphics. If I were to continue working on it, I don't really know exactly how to progress, because I'm not sure how the plot would go. All of my other current major projects do (or will) have a solid plot foundation, especially Muse. I know how the plot of that one is going to go, and many characters have been carefully laid out.

Anyways, I'm basically typing this to procrastinate on my school summer assignments. I rambled a lot here and said a lot of random stuff, and I really gotta get to work. In conclusion, if you liked Mindflare, hope for a potential "cancellation" release (just to show what I did have), play Muse when it comes out, and support our future projects. I hopefully have two releases soon, one being Muse by the end of the year, and if I get time before delving into college applications, I'll work on and release my small side project. Of course, I also gotta work on my AAG testing too... Haha, okay. Time to get to work on my homework that's due tomorrow.

Thanks for reading, if you read all of that.
-k.l.
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