2 Days

2 Days till deadline, I thought I wouldn't post anything here till my exercises tomorrow. But I've actually been thinking about something in relation to Amodos this whole time. Something that's really hard to get down.

I want to create some pretty hardcore dark themes in Amodos, but I've also got a weak spot for stunningly beautiful, and the thing is that the two aren't exactly compatible.

You can see Skyrim, all the people that live there are dark, gloomy, serious types while the world itself is beautiful, there are no "happy go lucky" people, not really, they managed to mix dark and beautiful, but they don't have a lot of bright.

Now in a 3D game it's easier (as it is less noticable) to go from a dark scene to a bright one quite seamlessly, but in a visual novel when backgrounds are represented with images it is a LOT harder.

A rule of thumb is not to throw it all at a time unless the story dictates it (for example like when exiting a cave, but in that case the atmosphere doesn't really change all that much after the cave has been exited, you must have been outside of the cave for a while before you can really say you're out)

Basically you want to transition, between dark and light, between colorful and dull, between serious and happy go lucky, even between death and life. If you want to include both.

Dumping a player from the disturbing remains of a corpse flooded battlefield straighti nto a crowded lively city would have a very strange effect, you cannot dictate what the player feels in that case, one player might have played too much of call of duty and is used to seeing corpse littered battlefields and doesn't bat an eye (hehe although I'll try to think of something to make these types flinch)

Or someone might not play too much video games or movies and thinks its really sad to see all these people dead, now dump them straight into a happy environment; as a writer, you're going to have to know what the player is feeling if you just JUMP from dark to bright all in one shot. You need to be able to justify it and you need to somehow make it feel right to the player, and this is just not as easy as transitioning over time from dark to bright.

If you're dumped from that battlefield into the ever so lively town, it will just feel weird how cheerful all these people are after so many people have died. So you instead walk through the corpse littered battlefield gradually seeing less and less corpses and more and more survivors. Maybe you end up in a conversation with a unit captain or a commander, the general even and he's all gloomy but the battle was won, and the casualties didn't sacrifice themselves in vain. Then from there you maybe take a horse carriage to that lively town, and enjoy a little scenery on the way while thinking about what you've just gone through, then you finally enter through the gates, you're in the outer edges of the town where things aren't so lively, and you may consciously avoid going to the center of town if you so please, but you're now in that lively town, still feeling a bit down perhaps, but it's going to feel a lot more natural than if you'd just fast travel to the center of town from the battlefield.

This is why I hate fast travel systems traditionally. The one and only game that did fast travel right was The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Where you had to go with Stilt Striders or Boats everywhere. You didn't just open up a map and "poof"

You could also get teleportation magic to teleport to specific places. But that was something that was so hard to get that it didn't break the immersion.

So the problem here is that Cestaria is a very beautiful place, but humans are very hideous creatures (don't even try to deny that) however it will depend very much on which human city you're in what you will see, there may be a good mayor or king ruling over one city, but a cruel one in the next, one city may have slaves working their asses off on every corner and another may have slaves living quite comfortably (like in Star Wars; Anakin and his mother didn't have it so bad.)

But the problem, like I said is that Cestaria itself is wonderfully beautiful. How do I transition from a beauty that really livens you up into a city where you'll find shit and filth flowing around the corner of every street and you're seeing slaves being driven with kicks, slaps and whips.

I can do that. I can do this, but up till now my thought process was to try to have one main theme for all npcs, they'd all have a max range of "lively" and no limit to "dark" basically, but I think that is the wrong approach for what I want to do. I want the humans to represent humans, all the good and ugly parts. Humans for example will often be opposed to LGBT. (What I mean here is actually LGBF, F for Futa but I'll use T)

The undeads will be sort of inspired by the formerly oppressed Jews, the stereotype of them anyways, they'll be really nice people, but everyone around them is torturing and killing them or making them work as slaves. They don't care much about LGBT.

The demons will be chaotically unpredictable, one demon may be lively and actually quite nice, the next will probably be wicked, evil and full of deception, and the third might just outright try to kill you or enslave you. They don't give a single fuck about LGBT.

The Garax will be the "orc" of this game so to speak, they're the least civilized but most straightforward race, meaning there's a lot of jungle law there. Theres one boss Garax in each village or town, they all hate what they hate, tolerate what they tolerate, they live by their own rules and tend not to give two shits about others. Everyone kind of fears them, but they're not necessarily evil, just the majority of them is. They tend to not even know what LGBT is. Everything is too simple for them, and Garax living in magdolon will not even have heard about same gender sex. Garax outside of it may have varying opinions of it. But they don't actually think much about relationships at all, they tend to live relatively free from one another.

The Fel'Du are going to be the happy go lucky bunch, most of them are nice, they absolutely love LGBT (so expect a lot of lesbians in Kalhiri, Fel'Du or other races, it's the safest haven for people who like their own gender, heaven for these people even) that's pretty much all there is to them. The rest of their culture is that they're going to be based off either hebrews or egyptians since they live in a desert.

The Faeries are going to be a pretty serious and dark bunch, they don't fool around and can usually fuck you up. They don't care much about LGBT either.

Sikruf are all for L (tentacle race lol) but not so much for G, they don't mind T(F) though. they're pretty similar to humans in many ways, but slightly less evil in general. They're more nice to the other major races but they tend to enslave merfolk.

Shif (Sikruf ancestor race which is nearly extinct) also still live, and I was thinking about converting Sikruf and Shif from squid-race to jellyfish-race :3 I also thought about the design a bit, the shif will hardly be recognizable as a human, they will have a human-like torso and face (the head will actually not be so much human on them) whereas the sikruf willl have a human torso and head, but tentacular legs and arms, similar to mermaids in fairy tales they can convert their legs and arms to human ones when they're on land.

That covers all the major races and a sort of high level personality description for them (I didn't go into various things though like laws, attitude towards slaves, etc. Kalhiri's government will turn anti-slavery in the first game, much thanks to our protagonist.)

But as you can see, these are VERY different cultures I'm aiming for, some fairy tale like level of awesome and ideal, others dark and gloomy like our very own. I need to fit them all together in a world which I want to look beautiful for the most part, but like... Kalhiri is a desert, how beautiful can you make a desert? or the mountains of Jokland? Then there's the matter of Necembel, one side is Tainted and the other is quite literally Dead. Both will be pretty damn dark.

So different landscape tones and atmospheres as well as different atmospheres depending on where you are and who you are talking to.

The really hard part is making some hardcore dark things happen in these lively places like Kalhiri. That is going to prove challenging but after this month of thinking quite a bit about this I feel like I'm coming ever closer to a solution.

It's just that I need to balance things, by this I don't mean balance the player to npcs, I need to balance the story elements and the characters. A lot more complicated than just balancing numbers >_<

Today I also gave armor designs a little thought.

Light Armor: Fabric based + (on more expensive sets) plates where needed
Medium Armor: Chain based or Layered light plate armor (expensive)
Heavy Armor: Plate + Chain (cheaper) or Plate + Layered(more expensive)

There we also have a nice price balance

Light = Cheapest (Fabric based) and (Fabric + Plates) <- these types of sets will be the cheapest types of armor

Medium: Chainmail is slightly more expensive than the cheap light armor, Layered + Chain is expensive

Heavy: Plate + Chain is cheaper than Layered + Chain, Fully Layered Plate armor is the most expensive armor type in the game.

Fabric and Fabric + Plates will be the most mobile armor.

Chainmail + Layered & Chained will be fairly mobile as well but just heavy.

Plate armor (+ chain layer underneath) will offer reduced mobility but a lot of armor for a reasonable price

Full Layered Plate armor will offer much more mobility than just plate armor and the same mount of protection but is heavier and the most expensive type of armor in the game.

Sound about right? I think this is cool. But I need to put some consideration into this, historically chainmail was sometimes more expensive than plate armor, and chainmail also feels heavier since it's weight is all on the shoulders rather than distributed between bodyparts as plate is usually attached to individual bodyparts.

I think I should keep chainmail cheaper, but I may want to keep chain armor as heavy rather than including it as medium. Alternatively I could re-design the chain armor so it doesn't rest all its weight on the shoulders for a balance. I think that may be what I should aim for instead :3