MEWD'S PROFILE

Hey. I screwed up and nominated my game own game for Misasos before reading that I'm not supposed to do that. Someone fix it and smack me upside the head.

Okay. How about a real life discussion about an actual game in development? Our activity here is pretty minimal, so I am offering my own project up as a conversation piece. Mainly because I really need to get back into it and I have an easier time brainstorming when I have people to bounce ideas off of. Please allow me to exploit you all.

Actually, I'm wary of mentioning my project at all because I don't want to JINX my game before it actually has a backbone of content to back up any hype. So let me make it perfectly clear that this project is ENTIRELY in pre-production. There is no actual GAME yet. Just a laundry list of ideas, a time line of events, and a couple concept art pieces that were graciously provided by a friend who may or may not actually commit to working on the project with me.

(As a side note, I appreciate all feedback and suggestions very much, and will consider them, but I reserve the right to be a stubborn jackass about my artistic vision. Just a heads up. If I am dead set on making a game about collecting elemental crystals, sliding tile puzzles and bloated religious symbolism, no amount of criticism will deter me.)

My project is called Vanishing Hood. It is a story about a brother and sister, Aduin and Anna respectively, who live with their father in a earthy, isolated peasant village in your typical post-feudal world. The mother of the family has abandoned them, and has left them all emotionally unstable as a result. The father, guilting himself over her having left, is unable to contain his volatile emotions and acts out in anger frequently. Anna suppresses her insecurities by trying to take charge of everything, trying to grow up too quickly and trying to fix any imagined fault her mother might have taken with her. Aduin simply withdraws from life, unwilling to participate in anything. He becomes the object of teasing and bullying because his friends are frustrated with his refusing to participate in anything, and Anna becomes a dominating guardian for him.

Near the start of the game, there comes a point where Anna decides that she and Aduin need to run away from their volatile father and find their AWOL mother. Anna takes a hooded cloak that belonged to their mother, in spite of protest from Aduin who feels that Anna could vanish from his life in the way his mother did. Anna takes them and stealthily runs away from their village in the dead of night, without really knowing where they are going or how far it will be to get there. Snow begins to fall heavily, and as they travel for an undefined amount of time, Aduin falls deathly sick from the cold.

Lost deep within a forest, Anna finds an abandoned cottage, or alternatively a cave. A portion of the game begins where she tries to tend to the sickly Aduin; gathering firewood, food, herbs and dealing with whatever creatures she encounters deep in the forest.

Skipping some sequences I will save for the game itself, Aduin awakes much later revitalized, only to discover that Anna is nowhere to be found. Now alone and lost deep within a maze-like snowcapped woodland, Aduin has to overcome the elements and struggle to survive while searching for his vanished sister. His only clue for a long time being the hooded cloak, abandoned and half buried in a snow bank.

That's all I'll reveal, although I have much more of the story planned out. I'm really trying to go for a melancholic fairy tale air to this game. While not implied in the description, there will be a number of mischievous and dreadful creatures in the woodlands; primarily a favorite fantasy creature of mine, Goblins.

The game layout is shaky. I plan for this to have a sort of Metroidvania air to it. The cottage/cave you start out in is sort of a home base while the bulk of the game takes place in this forest that stretches in all directions and has paths blocked by obstacles that need to either be solved or require a tool or skill to surmount. I would like survival to be a big theme of the gameplay, but I'm not sure how much would be practical. If I require the player to gather food and maintain body warmth, it might be mostly frustrating in the long run.

My BIGGEST problem with this game concept is that I am not sure how to handle the gameplay exactly. I do NOT think this will work as a turn based battle RPG, not much of a traditional RPG either. Combat is not really the focus here so much as puzzle solving and exploration, but I imagine I am going to need some combat. I've considered Zelda like combat, but I've never found that to work well in RPG Maker and doubt I have the skills to pull it off well anyway. I'd like to conceive a half-decent inventory use system for the game so that puzzle solving is not handled primarily by dialog prompts. I've been really halted with production because I'm insecure about what to do for the meat of the gameplay. If I can't decide on THAT, it's really hard to weave story into the gameplay to make it relevant to what is going on.

Also, I have some delusions about recruiting people for graphics/music/programming. I would rather like to be able to have custom menus, charactersets, maybe even some custom tiles for puzzles or face set; a haunting soundtrack twinged with mystery, longing and uncertainty, and some custom systems to compliment gameplay that isn't primarily about combat.

Then again, that's kind of spoiled of me, since EVERYONE would like that sort of stuff for their project. I will probably have to make do with whatever I can manage myself. I really love this idea though, so I keep throwing hissy fits hoping to be able to do stuff outside my skill set.

I was fortunate enough to be graced with the following concept art by my friend Rose Cote. I am hoping I can maybe coax her to contribute face-sets or maybe a couple cutscene illustrations for the project, but it's looking ambiguous.

I've been putting together silly radio dramas off and on again this year and been posting them at my website. If you've got nine minutes to kill, you might take a gander at my most recent offering.


Commander Josh: The Terror of Doctor Volcano

Out-takes


Intentionally bad, Commander Josh is inspired by bad fan fiction and that dopey stage of adolescence where we have an inflated sense of self-importance (that we sometimes never outgrow.) Josh is an exceedingly nerdy kid with a ridiculous devotion to the Internet and a poor grasp on reality.

Cast:
Sungwon "ProZD" Cho as Commander Josh, Policemen, News Reporter, Mohandas Anand
Alex "Blue Boo" Mankin as Doctor Volcano, a juror
Anne "Cherri" Salter as Christina, a juror
Dustin "Wilco Blackflame" Wilcoxx as Professor Walton
"MGAW" as judge
And myself as the narrator.

Actually...

Things turned out about how I hoped they would.

VOTER APATHY WINS AGAIN.

(Although, I totally couldn't appreciate Sword and Fish's humor, like, at all. I never found time to give its rivals a shot, though.)

So, when you are thinking up the title for your game, do you draw some significance from the story line, be it a place, item, or symbol? Do you pick something that basically sums up the game in a couple words?

Or do you slap together a bunch of important sounding phrases and call it a day?

EVE OF FATED LEGACY DESTINY LEGEND: THE SAGA OF KINGDOM'S ETERNITY AWAKENING EXODUS.

2.

There are a lot of names out there that tell me ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the game I am looking at. There are also a great number of exceptions to this generalization, but I typically see a lot of games that try their best to sound epic and important but ultimately come off as forgettable because so many games use titles like that.

If your game sounds generic, than won't it probably be dismissed as generic too? Then again, there are only so many adjectives out there and sometimes what a game WANTS is a big, honkin' epic title.

This is just an observation. I don't mean to rag on anyone's game title, especially if they LIKE their game title. More power to you.