MV - And Remember Tomorrow [Surrealistic][Action][RPG]

*Very much work in progress, so the is just minor summaries that will be updated later*

They say a picture's worth a thousand words... So here's the storyboard for the game's intro with a few extra words tossed in... It starts off with Miranda. A young woman living with her mother in their estate by the lake. As per usual her father is out of town on business, and typically doesn't return for weeks. Though when he does, he always brings Miranda gadgets. Miranda's a bit off, and honestly scares guys away more than entices them. But on the other hand, it's not like there are many guys in the countryside for her to entice anyway.


Late one night Miranda sneaks out to catch a meteor shower. Sure her mother says the forests are dangerous and full of malevolent spirits. But hey she's got her gadgets, some silly ghosts or whatever aren't going to keep her from seeing it.


Thankfully her disobedience keeps her away from the house while it's ransacked by unknown assailants. Let's just say there are no survivors... Well except Miranda of course. What she sees here will haunt her for a very long time to come.


Escaping the blaze, Miranda reaches an overlook and finds temporary safety from the fire. Realizing she'll die alone in the wilderness, she resolves to try to travel around the lake to the safety of the nearby town.


She really doesn't get very far though as the rocks give way, and she plummets into the darkness.


At this point she falls and the puzzle pieces in the background hint at what she saw in that house...


But alas, her memories are cut short before revealing much by a very sudden stop at the bottom of the chasm... Miranda dying, fades into unconsciousness.


A beating heart causes her to waken, but instead of being in a pool of her own blood in dark chasm... She's in a vibrant world she'll later come to learn is Omnia. A bright and perfect world holding a very sinister secret.


From this point on, you must guide Miranda through worlds themed around denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance as she comes to terms with what happened. All while being chased by the dark specter of the Nihil. A massive wall of darkness slowly eating the world behind her. If it catches her, she'll be eaten too and then they'll be nobody left to remember tomorrow.

It's probably better than you start running now. :LZSwink:

The basic premise of the level is to collect all the puzzle pieces by getting them to the portal and assemble an image of the next area, then make it through the portal before it's eaten by the Nihil. Which is that darkness that's slowly consuming the map from the left. (I've got it coded to come from other directions as well, but that's not shown here).

The Nihil will also hurt the player and send them flying away from it. However you can combat it by bringing a hourglass to the portal. Doing so will return it to it's starting point, and regrow the map. There is of course a limited number of hourglasses on a map. So it's very possible to render a level impossible by using them all up too fast.

At this point, people probably know about the paths... They pull objects along them towards the player, and they also hurt stuff. However a path explodes if it is touched by an enemy, and thus anything it's pulling is no longer being pulled. So you'll have to loop back to reclaim control of whatever you're collecting. There's also a path power up that increases your maximum number of paths for the map by one per power up.

Finally I'll mention the "Denial" power which is the glowing ball of light. It has limited use, but is regained over time. Using it destroys all of your current paths, however you ignore all terrain, hurt mobs you touch and can kind of pull objects though not as well as you can with the paths. It's also twice the movement speed. However if it runs out and you're over an impassable area, you're thrown back to whenever you first initiated it. Which can be quite the time waster.

As a bonus here's a screenshot of a later combat area...

As there are five stages of grief, there are also five imaginary worlds...

I fully expect "Denial" or chapter 1 to be the demo, a lot of it is being planned, but I'll be definitely post it here so people can give it a shot, along with Itch.io, and Steam (eventually). So everybody should get a chance to test it. Though I might have a smaller prototype demo available earlier just to get people's impressions/ideas on stuff. I don't have a great timeline for any of this though. Hoping to release this year, but it takes as long as it takes, all I'll promise is the demo is coming out sometime this year. So just keep an eye on the thread, or my YouTube.

Just did a bunch of work updating the graphics of the entire game. Definitely a lot more go though, updating all the new hitboxes, reworking the movement system to better handle the larger objects. It's been quite the party. :LZSexcite:

New area! And I've been working on gameplay along the way, though that's still got a ways to go.

Updated my swamp area, added "Comet Mode", made weird floating masks that chat numbers. o_O (Blame 3am ideas.) Also I recorded this one video on a larger potato than last time, so the quality should be better. :LZSexcite:

Was working on a map that has an identity crisis and keeps changing what it is every handful of seconds. Still early on so the assets will likely be changed. But it represents a new technology I dreamed up. Now the game generates around the player themselves. So I can generate lots of pieces of maps dynamically around the player. :LZSexcite:

@SpaceBot See I mostly just wrote the major stuff. So I'd have to go back through and write all the inbetween stuff. Also er... the book actually starts right after where this game ends. Would be one hell of a spoiler. If this turns into a series then I'll end up likely just putting the story in the next game. Don't worry though, this game will have it's own standalone conclusion.

Most of Lumina's stuff is pulled from it though, and expanded upon. She really was never intended to be the main character. Though she does make a fun main character. I enjoy writing for her. So if I do end up just producing a book, she's going to have a much larger role.

I've been hard at work on a better map generator. The new generator supports literally thousands of events, produces 200x200 maps and doesn't need regular map transfers to deal with CPU/Memory issues.

As a consequence, I have done serious work to improve the first area. Larger maps allow me to add more exploration and "wonder" to the game. So expect to see a lot more unique stuff just show up randomly, as you're wandering the map.

Also I'm still working on additional graphics, but I should have an updated video in a few days showcasing the new generator in action.

And the new video highlighting the new map generator. =D

I decided to rework Lumina, along with play around with a new logo.