• Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS

Miscellaneous

Incoherence and Experience

I have been working on and off over the last several years on this project. It started with the creation of a character I named Shift and I placed him in a project that I'd use for working with new concepts. I eventually would place the character somewhere in all my future games and I started looking into making a game of his own. This is the history of his first game as an experience.

I started working on a project I codenamed LSD: NEW DREAM. I wanted to create a spiritual successor to LSD: Dream Emulator, but I wanted to build and RPG into it. I experimented with how such a thing could be made with RPG Maker, with a bit of success. This project was canceled due to severe lag.

I took the project and scrapped out large portions of it. I renamed it Pastlife: Shift's Saga and added a bizarre class system to it. The new class system involved fusing characters together to create an entirely new character. This project remained entirely incoherent and involved wandering through endless maps to find "pieces of mind." I overhauled this project and renamed it.

The project found new life as Pastlife: Shift's Awakening. This game was to be composed of four parts. The first part was similar to that of Shift's Saga, but smaller and more coherent. It had a central hub world and with three different styles of gameplay in each side. I added shops in the hub-world and a few dozen characters that moved the plot along. The second part was to be a sort of barrier world that would involve long and narrow maps and a revisit from former party members. The third part would occur after Shift woke up and would chronicle his escape from his prison. The fourth part would be Shift starting a new life in the world. I soon realized that the scope of this project was far too large.

I decided that the best way to continue would be to divide the game into a trilogy. The first, third, and fourth parts of Pastlife: Shift's Awakening would make up that trilogy after heavy editing. The second part was scrapped entirely. The project as a whole was always an esoteric endeavor. From the very beginning I built the game with symbols and with each overhaul the symbols grew greater in number and magnitude. I decided that the first part of the trilogy would be called Esoteric, so that people would have a better idea of what they are getting into.

For Esoteric, I expanded the hub world into an open world. I deleted a large amount of useless maps from the previous incarnation of the game and used others only for cut-scenes. Three more towns were added. Older portions of the game were quarantined away together into difficult to reach clusters. I added a journal to lay out fundamental objectives and to act as a guide. New intermediate cut-scene were created to act as rewards for exploration. The project became increasingly coherent on the surface while another layer of incoherence still lies beneath.

So, where does Esoteric stand today?

The primary purpose of Esoteric and it's predecessors is that of an experience rather than a mere game. As such, the RPG aspects have always had less priority and were originally included to be symbolic of ascension than. The class system makes traditional leveling worthless as new characters must replace the old ones. Balancing levels is similarly difficult. Currently, there are only three required battles in the game that are each 20 levels apart in strength. Each area is given a rating on a sign that gives a recommend tier and level. It is possible to purchase items that allow for automatic escape to avoid battles that may potentially be deadly and thus compensate to allow for freedom of exploration. Battles are sparse in most locations in order to not punish exploration and items are available in which to increase battle frequency for the sake of grinding. Chests are kept to a minimum, but wield good rewards.

Like it's predecessors, Esoteric keeps an endgame score and can be completed at any time. These two features work together. Since Esoteric is an experience, the player may "beat" the game at any time. When a player "beats the game, a score is decided based on accomplishments and the appropriate ending plays. Only the best ending is canon.

Esoteric is the end result of my attempt to portray incoherence in a media that traditionally requires coherence. Shift himself was designed as an incoherent character. However, as Shift's journey will eventually lead him to coherence, so to has his games flowed towards coherence. I started with a central theme of incoherence, by which I mean a series of unrelated events and themes that lack any kind oh unity or harmony. However, even the theme of incoherence is in itself a centralized theme.
Pages: first prev 12 last