Date is September 28, 2026…. yeah… feel better… but damn I am late…
So what is the new project that sent the “cruel puppy” to the back seat…
Unexpectable, huh… well this is going to be one very long daydream…
Some may notice that this title illustration of mine really looks like one very old anime called “Magic Knight: Reyearth” (MKR), and they would be right, although I am not very happy because of that, but more on that later.
If I was trying to express the vibe of one key moment in those fascinating and unbelievable chain of events, I keep mentioning, in short, it would go like this:
Back in year of 2022, I wandered off in some old dusty archive, unfamiliar to me, with long forgotten files on various TV, gaming, etc. related stuff. Then started digging through it out of curiosity. It’s something I like to do (sort of like archaeology). Then once I was done and went toward the exit, from some nearby pile this cartoon fell before me, tripping me over to take a bath in the dust… After “What the hell?!” moment, I stood up, beat the dust out of me and picked package up from the floor, thinking “What is this…?”.
Yes, yes, while somewhat accurate, it was overall less atmospheric than this short description, but it fully captures my feelings on the matter. This turned out to be a final piece of the puzzle, I was looking for…
I will say right away that I am not fan of this cartoon. So this is not some fan related stuff. I was even reluctant to watch it, since I really didn’t want to watch anything at the time… but the whole package where someone went so far to prepare it with incredible care, then curious 13+ ESRB rating on the box art that the person scanned for the pack, and IMDB score (from the time when it actually meant something, I believe) convinced me to take a look.
The first impression was that the show was everything why I didn’t like anime even as kid. But… I also noticed right away something that will turn out to be a rather big — catch. It was “The Neverending Story” (TNES) type of plot or at least I recognized it as such, which was… surprising, particularly because I never saw important elements of that concept outside of the original movie. It’s not something from my childhood, so no rose glasses here, actually I don’t remember ever watching it as child, but a number of years ago I did watch this movie and found it… interesting in several ways. And now this anime was borrowing important elements of that plot. Thus, I got curious to find out where the authors were going with that.
Overall core plot of the first part wasn’t actually bad, but it was totally ruined on operational level, sometimes so typical for Japanese… I mean, who the hell though that the mechs make sense in the story like that to begin with. Because of them I couldn’t even appreciate otherwise conceptually nice ending of the first part (solid twist and all)… frankly, it was just stupid with mechs.
Then I proceeded to the second part. And well… it was even worse. BUT with just as much, even better — catch. If in the first part I recognized TNES, in the second part I saw… “Planescape: Torment” (PST). Now that was one good WTF moment! Of all things, this was maybe the last place where I was going to expect that narrative. For the record, PST is one of mine all time favorite stories (wish I could say the same for the game as whole). So naturally I got very interested to see where they were now going with that, tolerating vast amount of all kind of stuff that was stupid to me. For a long time I considered PST story unique and original, but considering that MKR is five years older than PST itself, it also got me wondering… Anyway, the wrap up of PST element in the plot was solid.
So in the end I asked myself, what did I actually watch? Something that resembles to me TNES + PST. An odd combination, or so I thought at first. Then soon I realized that the reason why I found it odd was probably because TNES was story aimed for kids, while PST was story aimed for (very) mature audience. Stories are in fact kindred, as they share the same genre of dark fantasy and both have trouble of philosophical nature in their foundation, with blind search and decay among main motives.
Prior to some years I was searching for a type of plot that relied purely on my imagination gone wild. Realism, science and particularly physics, be damned. Something where I could write and especially design whatever was on my mind at the moment, and where only requirement was, that it was “cool” (whatever that truly means). Soon I realized I would end up with something weird as “Alice in Wonderland” or works of David Lynch (as a kid I used to say — one day I’ll beat this guy in senselessness, ha!). This cartoon reminded me however on something notably less abstract but still abstract enough and that would be TNES. Plus, MKR did upgrade the concept of TNES with some good ideas (…that then they barely put to use…) like “monsters being fears of people”, which is particularly good for an arcade aspect of the game. As designer, it gives me free hands to spawn whatever monster I want, wherever I want, at whatever time I want, in however number I need and I don’t have to justify anything in the plot.
Overall, MKR did very little with such a good idea of TNES + PST (well, latter didn’t even exist at the time). So I decided to claim it for myself. I wish I came up with this idea myself, but I didn’t, and I am not gonna pretend that it is (fully) mine, as I consider it really lame when someone does that. Also, the cartoon was from 1994, so 30 years old and somewhat forgotten which is very good as I wouldn’t like to deal with the fresh baggage especially if it was popular, in this context. Thus I asked myself, what happens if in a hypothetical plot of mine according to that idea, I combine… more serious TNES with less serious PST (after all, heavy metaphysical philosophy isn’t really for a cartoony game I have in mind)? …Something rather fascinating, I’d say.
Starting from here, I’m gonna break monotony of all this text with the illustrations. All of them I designed as screenshots taken from hypothetical ongoing in-game cutscenes. Unpredictable in-game cutscenes in form of quality animated movie are meant to be important aspect of this game’s design. Where “unpredictable” means that player can expect cutscene to trigger at any moment during the game, not just where those are usually expected (intro, end of chapters, outro, etc.), which I consider a piece of good game design.
Coming up with how I wanted game to look like and all the needed code for it, were an easy part. It was like a perfect storm. I already had a bunch of gameplay mechanics that I came up with in the past, which I have never seen in any game, so those made me itchy to try them somewhere, but never found the correct context. Such as, special melee combat mechanics and what I call advanced tag team mechanics. This was perfect opportunity to try those and overall opportunity to build the game in one of my top favorite game genres, which would be… eh… lets call it arcade-adventure (I have my own word for it, based on one old game magazine); where arcade part this time is classic platform game, and adventure part with P&C adventure game-grade puzzles, the ones that can seriously stuck player and make him lose up his mind or give up and peak into the walkthrough, and therefore — cheat. And regarding code, thanks to Godot, most if not all code requirements are in domain of my coding skills. Really haven’t had any major issues so far with the code and hopefully it will remain that way.
Then came good ol’ king of the problems — graphics. Add to that my ambition of Don Bluth quality of animation and yep, everything looked totally impossible. However, I once made a grave mistake believing that something about game development is impossible for me. Namely, coding, yet as a total miracle that problem completely solved itself with engines like Unity or even better Godot. Who would say that all I actually needed to do was to patiently wait for Godot to arrive (in-your-faces, Vladimir and Estragon!). So in spirit of “I ain’t gonna repeat that mistake again!”, started pushing ahead, according with my full vision, with hope that a new miracle related to the problem with graphics will catch-up with me somewhere on the road, so… que sera, sera.
At first I was thinking to change all the characters but quickly got hard lesson in that my fresh art skills are not really on the level of (serious) concept art… On the other hand I discovered a treasure trove of all production sketches from the MKR series and also an old Sega Saturn game, full of additional useful graphic stuff. In other words, plenty of material to work with, and tangibly ease the “impossible” part, if I only give up on changing characters. Anyway, since cartoon is old enough and dormant, and since Red, Blue and Green, as traditional archetypes, also fit very good in my vision too, along with some other characters, I decided to keep them… at least for now. That’s the reason why I refer to them as Red, Blue and Green (although I’ll change her identifying color to White), or Toon0001, Toon0002 and Toon0003 in the game code. Since I don’t know if I am truly going to keep them or not, for whatever reason that may come up, I’m avoiding using their names as names tend to get under the skin and form a habit that is later annoying to break. I’m also keeping the Red’s dog (or Toon0004) who is going to have quite a role and conveniently will also be of use to me in learning how to draw and animate that other WW2 dog. In general, keeping some characters I also see as a token of respect to original authors for giving me this idea.
When it comes to the plot, what I am going to keep from TNES is two-layered narrative that is going in parallel. One layer is the Red reading the mysterious book and the other layer is actual events in the story she reads, and where the game takes the place. There are multiple benefits of this two-layer narrative for story-writing. For example, it’s good for offsetting some of the cringe that is sometimes inevitable to happen. Apart from that I’m also keeping plot’s core motive of MKR in the first chapter, as well as some locations in the setting. Most of narrative, geography and lore should be of my own imagination, which, apart from TNES and PST, is primarily guided with various other non-Tolkin fantasy classics (since it doesn’t really fit in this setting).
“Deliverance” is the working title of the project, but I grew fond of it in the past years and will probably keep it as part of the title. This word has that just right foreboding, eerie feeling to it.
All in all, in the last three years I made much of the game and nearly closed the base construction, just not combat mechanics, which is rather big “just”… Tedious thing is that I actually laid foundations even for combat in the code, but now everything depends on sprite animations and that’s… not gonna be naive at all… so once again graphics are serious trouble for my progress…
Main control scheme is mouse and keyboard. Due to combat mechanics and adventure part, it is unlikely that it can be played with joypad. As for game’s difficulty, I am definitely not going to nanny the player in any way. In particularly, I don’t like selection of difficulty level that nearly all games have. I consider it a cheap way for game designer to “wash his hands”. A true game designer with true dignity sets the difficulty according to the inner feel and takes full responsibility for it. “Rayman 1” is probably one of the brightest examples of this, in platform genre.
And last but not least, this (as well as that commando dog) is supposed to be an open-source game. Yeah, that’s right, developed using open-source tools (and non-open ones if I really have no choice, but then firmly quarantined to prevent them to let their tentacles into development ecosystem and taint it). So far those have been primarily Godot, Gimp, Krita and above all else Linux of course, accompanied with Linux friendly hardware. However, I’ll keep everything for myself for now. Like I mentioned before, I didn’t even want to come out with all this, but certain ugly turn of events forced me to…
With that said, I am two more illustrations away from closing this composition of images, where I just wasn’t able to do them in time, and I am already very late… so, I will keep them for the next daydream on this topic…
