A young anthro girl named Mira Levenor find herself in a strange realm full of monsters and ruins, with a few people stuck there trying to survive.
As each day passes the sourrounding get more and more corrupted.
Follow her day to day life exploring the lost realm, fighting in turn-based battles and getting to know new people as they try to find a way to the outside world and discover the truth before it's too late.
During her adventures, Mira will keep a journal, giving her thoughts on everything that happens on a day-to-day basis.
The game is still in early development, and all the work so far has been done by one person.
I've technically been making games since I was 9 on scratch, but who cares about that?
The only other real game I've made was a Pokemon fangame called "Pokemon Redder and Bluer", stupid name I know.
It was my interpretation as a 14 year old of what a Kanto game would look like 15 years after the events of the original.
I never finished it due to lack of motivation after a while, and it's now basically lost media to anyone but me since the Relic Castle website shut down.
Another game I have attempted to make was something I called "Project BZ". It mostly stayed as a concept, but it was a sci-fi RPG with a focus on action commands. I designed a lot of characters and locations for it, but having no real gamedev experience, the scope was way too high.
With Project BZ being such a dream project, I wanted to make a more down to earth RPG.
Of course any kind of RPG is still a huge project, and not what most people would recommend as a beginner game.
It was October of 2021 when I drew the first sketches of some of the character for Mira's Journal.
The first characters I made for this game were Mira, Daze and Alcine.
Mira was a young wolf girl with some fire powers who ends up getting mixed up in Daze's affairs.
Daze was meant to be a stereotypical hero, the usual leader of the party with a special destiny.
Alcine has changed a lot through development. What's stayed the same is that they're a spirit creature with a liquid body.
But originally they had a more mature look with something that resembles long hair. But I later decided to make them more like a child originally that grows along the journey.
These are some other early sketches related to the game:
In early 2022 I bought the RPG Maker MZ engine with the intention of using it to make this game.
The reason I picked it was simple:
I wanted to make a top down rpg that I thought was not too complex, and this seemed to be what this engine was designed for.
I worked on this version of the game for about 9 months, with some results.
However RPG Maker turned out to be quite limiting for what I wanted to do.
Working on a game on it feels more like modding an existing game rather than creating something new, as the pre-existing systems are designed for a very specific type of battle system. Creating mechanics and especially UI were pretty tedious, and working with plug-ins such as VizuStella was just annoying, so I ended up scrapping that version of the game.
Here are some screenshots of this version:
After I was done with my entrance exams in the 15th of July 2023, I instantly jumped into this engine I had never used before called Godot.
Why Godot? There are Plenty of reasons.
One was the fact that it was open source, which comes with the usual benefits like being completly free and independent from a company's dumb decisions.
Open source software also often works great on Linux, which I had started using as my main operating system around that time. Godot had also just released the 4.0 update back then, so it felt like a great chance to jump in.
I had absolutely no programming knowlegde at the time, but I felt like it was a perfect chance to learn.
So I just started working on this game again and I slowly learned how to use most things in the engine. This time I had to implement stuff like saving and inventories myself, which I had taken for granted in RPG Maker, but it's honestly more fun this way.
And that brings us to the present, thanks for reading!
I honestly have no idea. Game development is very complicated and I'm currently doing this myself entirely as a hobby. It'll probably take years.
Maybe some sort of demo release is closer, but don't hold your breath.
Well the main target during development is Linux and Windows, with it releasing on Steam.
Mac is probably possible but I would have nothing to test it on. An android release is also something I would want to do after launch, but it would need a seprate UI mode for it to work.
Consoles? I wish I had the budget for that.