DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

This is going to be a long game, and I can't promise that nothing could ever come up that would prevent me from completing it, but barring sudden death I can at least promise that if I stop actively working on it, I'll say so.

If you want an extra way to interact with NPCs that's not strictly necessary, you could try deciphering this update's Gudyushika dialogue.



I tried to put in enough clues and cues to make it possible to work out a lot of the vocabulary from context. There are absolutely no rewards in gameplay for figuring any of this out, just a bunch of extra dialogue hidden behind a language barrier. The sentence structure is mostly the same as English, if anyone wants to take a stab at it. That's not just to make things easier on players, I am not an expert conlanger, so if I tried to make the process more complicated I'd never have been able to get it all done. It was fun to experiment with, but let's just say putting it all in didn't exactly help me get the release out faster, so this is not a challenge I'm likely to return to for later updates.

You could also make a lot of the map objects events with different pages triggered by switches, and have the switches change as you more through the room, changing which events appear. If you want to actually see the map objects move, rather than just suddenly change in appearance, you could give them custom move routes.

author=Scourge
That does help clarify things. It sounds like you weren't planning it from the outset, so maybe allegory isn't the right word, but it does have some strong undertones of examining racism and it would be easy to apply that lens to the game (as I did). Honestly, it is difficult to play through the game and not draw those conclusions about events being a metaphor for racism. It does come off a little strong and ham-fisted, but I think that's because everybody, short of Serena and Luke, seems to loath dark mages. It would have been nice to see a handful of other NPCs, even inconsequential ones, express some doubts about whether all dark mages are truly evil.

Personally, I never had a hard time buying the discrimination against dark mages in-story, in large part because if a group of people actually did draw magical powers, which tended to be dangerous and destructive in nature, from emotions like hatred and grief and rage, so that they became more and more powerful the more antisocial they were, I think viewing them with distrust would be an entirely reasonable reaction.

I generally find fictional allegories for racism tired and overplayed, but as a result, if a story looks like it might be trying to do something different, I'll give it the credit of trying to look at it from that other perspective rather than trying to frame it as another allegory about racism.

What I thought was particularly interesting in Umbral Soul was that, unlike all the stories with some pat moral about how love and understanding can overcome hatred, Umbral Soul puts together a setting where it's clear that the hatred underlying the conflict is self-reinforcing. People who try to show dark mages compassion and understanding almost always come to bad ends, because they can't just unilaterally withdraw from the conflict. That means that ordinary people have little incentive to show compassion and understanding for dark mages (because it'll probably come back to bite them,) which means that dark mages have little reason to expect understanding or compassion from ordinary people.

The whole narrative presents a much more interesting and nuanced concept of a balance between good and evil than most works, in my opinion. Both good and evil are at once self-reinforcing and inherently unstable.

Good is self-reinforcing because doing good, and living among good people, is rewarding and makes people happier and more inclined to do good things. It's inherently vulnerable because the more a community runs on goodness, the more vulnerable it becomes to bad actors. The more easily people trust, offer forgiveness and second chances, and assume the best of others, the easier they are to take advantage of.

Evil is self-reinforcing because the more people treat each other badly, the less anyone can afford to unilaterally stop treating others badly. It turns altruism into a coordination problem where it's in nobody's interests to make the first move of showing trust or kindness. It's inherently vulnerable because the more a community runs on evil, the more miserable everyone is and the more they want things to change so they can stop spending all their time being unhappy. Give enough people at once a guarantee that they'll back each other up in a bid to get rid of the evil status quo and they'll probably take it.

In a way, Umbral Soul kind of ends up as an emotional and character driven story about Decision Theory. Which is a lot more novel and interesting in my opinion than another story about how Racism Is Bad.

Of course, I don't expect everyone else to enjoy that aspect of it as much as I did. I gave it a five star review because my reviews aren't averages of everything a game did right or wrong, they're summaries of how much I enjoyed the strongest elements minus how much I felt the weakest ones detracted from the experience. I wasn't really expecting when I wrote it that there would be so many other full-score reviews following it up.

There are anti-lag scripts for that, but they come with issues of their own and need to be handled carefully.