Song Of The Fallen WIP: Yet another Codex Entry posted for opinion

What do these updates entail?

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roughly 20 000 more words and a few other tweaks.

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Coolio. I can’t wait to see the rest of the calling.

Can’t wait~ Can’t wait~ :relaxed::relaxed::relaxed::relaxed::relaxed:

Hurraaaaaay, can’t wait, can’t wait!

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Dear @Left4Bed you have awaken me from my sleep :sunglasses: I really cant wait, THIS will be awsome! gonna get some popcorn! :corn:

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So I’ve posted an update version, it’s not quite as far as I would have wanted it to be before showing you guys something more, but I want to keep myself to a monthly update cycle. I’ve added another Call event you can attend (Seaborn) however it’s not nearly complete yet and takes you down a bottleneck path. I’ve also moved the story further along, roughly doubling the average playthrough from the previous version. Anyway, hope you enjoy!

Edit: The transition features I mention in the WIP notes seem to get corrupted somehow during compiling, I’ll try to figure out a way to fix this, but for now I’ve disabled it.

Edit…again: Transitions preliminarily fixed, thanks to @Malebranche. Btw, if you haven’t already, I strongly recommend you try out his WIP Tempest Ten. It’s really well done.

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Holy shit. Still doing a playthrough but I have to say, that stabbing scene, especially if you choose to continue stabbing as long as possible, was really powerful. Well done.

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Why do I feel like there is more to this godmoon story than we are being told.
and godmoon wanted our love so she did evil.
If she can win me over she might get mines unless she’s evil completely and wholly.
Than me and bella will take her out.(unless bella is evil in which case I will join them as I swore to protect her…no exceptions)

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Thanks! That scene was actually a last minute addition, so I wasn’t sure if I’d captured the right tone or if it was over the top. I really wanted to drive home how cooly detached you become in that moment, like a numb robot acting on instinct, and emphasise the brutality of exactly what it is you’re doing. I also wanted to make it clear that killing her was a deliberate choice you made as the player character.

I’d been reading through a forum post from a while back (i’ll link it here) about tropes in the fantasy genre, and it got me thinking a lot more deeply about the things I was writing for this story as well as why I was writing them. Suffice it to say, while I want to pay homage all the things I love about this genre, I also want to subvert some of those tropes that have always needled at me. The reaction to death and loss is one of them, as well as the horror that comes with taking a life. I want these kinds of events to be more than snap decisions or just a means of moving the plot forward. They all have far reaching consequences and affect the development of your player character, who’s moulded not just by your choices but also by the results of those choices.

I also want you to be able to go through the game without having to directly take a single life, however doing so will get increasingly difficult as you move forward, and at times come with a high price. But then, virtue is good because it is good not because it is easy.

Haha! Oh yes, there is a whole lot more that you’re not being told. As Mark Twain once said, “The ink of history is fluid bias” (slightly paraphrased). That’s a concept that I really want to play around with, how easy it is to be deceived by the things we’ve been told to assume are true. I plan on planting little easter eggs within the codex as you gather books through the game, for the intrepid historian to comb through (if they feel the need), placing deliberate discrepancies and at times overt prejudice. This may allow you to piece together what really happened before it gets revealed by the plot. It could also end up being a colossal confusing failure! Oh well, reaching for the stars keeps you on your toes.

I’m really interested to hear what people think about Bella? Writing her was far harder than I imagined it would be. I wanted to highlight her innocence and her strange, off kilter perception of the world (the reason for that perception will become a bit more clear in my next update). I also wanted to cement a protective instinct, because hers will be another very important relationship for the player character.

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I think you have succeeded, as protecting her was one of the reasons I chose to kill (the other, of course, being vengeance for my mom).
Just one question, will we eventually be able to use magic ourselves or will that remain the sole provenance of Bella and possibly Ehren or are we doomed to remain the uneducated peasant forever?

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@Left4bed I am left flabber gasted from the update, it was beyond amazing. It was heart wrecking, the stabbing scen was so strong, i was tranfixed. And could feel how my characters mentality just snapped. I couldent stop stabbing, That scen was just so freaking strong that i have no words! Beside i loved it (I guess i am a killer now, not that i mind i had wanted to stab that women from the beginning) Just Great work!! :smiley:

I look forward to the next update, too just learn more overall and interact with the characters and of course also Bella. Just Loved it!:laughing::grin::grinning:

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What i’m worried about at the most right now is the after-math. We basically just murdered an agent of a god apparently this isn’t going to end well.

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Hmm…that’s actually really interesting, I hadn’t really intended for that to work into the reasoning at all! I’m glad it does though, I was concerned that the player might forget Bella was there as she doesn’t really say or do all that much in that scene, aside from the end.

Haha! Well, whether you remain “uneducated” will be up to you and how you chose to play. I haven’t really put much work into stats outside of the personality system, I’m having some balancing issues there as well as struggling to decide what those stats should even be. I have the rudimentary placeholders of strength, intelligence, charm and agility but all seem very basic and don’t have much nuance, so I’m open to any suggestions.

As for magic…I suppose you could say you’ve technically already used magic. As Bella might say, magic is all about making something that shouldn’t be able to happen, happen. That glowing blue dagger of yours seems pretty strange doesn’t it? Not to mention Heleana’s reaction

Haha! Really? You were able to pick up that something wasn’t quite right about her? That final scene is probably one of the only ones that I’m really satisfied with, it’s visceral intensity seems to have hit just the right notes. It’s strange, because it’s also a scene that probably took the least amount of time for me to write…I must have tapped into my inner psycho.

That’s a very prophetic statement. The consequences for this will be far reaching as many different forces scramble to react. However since no one but you, Marcus/Riley and Bella know what really happened there, they’ll all be making assumptions and acting based on those assumptions.

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So the dialogue system has been my biggest headache and the reason why it’s hard to make a lot of forward momentum while I’m writing. Each choice i give branches laterally so I end up with a lot of words that you wouldn’t see on a single playthrough. It would help me a great deal as I try to perfect this and smooth out the edges if you could answer a few of these questions.

  1. I’m interested to hear the kind of interactions and responses people had with Bella?

  2. Did the, albeit brief (promise I’ll be fleshing that out), conversations feel satisfying?

  3. More to the point, how about the responses you’re able to give throughout the game, did you feel like you were given the freedom to mould your character or did they feel cheap and relatively meaningless?

  4. Is the tone of the responses intuitive or are you going into each one just guessing the effect it’ll have on your personality?

  5. Would it help if it said in brackets what personality trait each response affects, or would that just be immersion breaking?

  6. Also, are the four traits enough variety, or should more be added, or perhaps be replaced?

I did like the reaction choices but that’s cause I like sarcastic and unpredictable. and I enjoyed my brief thing with bella. It was…interesting and cute too.
Also winter is the time of godsea did they replace godmoon with godsea because it would make more sense for godmoon to belong to winter as the nights get longer and longer.

That’s a great question and ties into what I said earlier about subverting history. The most common calendar and seasonal terminology used is the one devised by Adenus the Wise (as it says in the Codex). However, as is hinted towards the end of that entry, it is not the only calendar in use. The Adenean calendar was constructed to abide by the Rule of Four, which is the premise that all perfect things align in sequences of four. As there are four Boundgods, there are four seasons, and even the year and it’s months are divisible by four, but you might note that the months are also divisible by five… As the tale of the Moon suggests, there weren’t always four gods, so this is another case of historical bias accepted as fact.

The fact that there are five, changes everything and very effective attempts have been made to shroud the godMoon’s legacy in mystery. However these attempts are at times conflicting, and so you could uncover the truth if you look closely.

I honestly thought, Bella was doing that, and NOT the MC. I kind of thought that might have been one of the reasons why she’s so quiet during that scene.

Not all games need tons of stats and to offer less generic suggestions about stats I’d need to see more of the game. The absence of a mana/magic stat was one of the reasons I assumed the MC to be incapable of it.

That’s…actually not a bad way of looking at it. I think I’m going to incorporate that as a possible response once you wake up and begin to deal with and question what just happened.

That’s because certain aspects of the Stats page are tied to *if statements and are only revealed after certain points. If you want a clue for what actually happened, look at the page after Bella grabs your leg and time slows down.

That’s true, it’s also why I’ve been struggling to decide on what they should be since I haven’t yet reached a point in the story where those stats are really necessary or relevant.

  1. I like Bella, shes sweet as far as i think but i dont like her more then Ehren. And i wont hesitate to kill her if it suits me, to achive a evil path. xD

  2. YES!

  3. I think i was abel to mold my character, and i dont think anything was meaningless.

  4. Usually Im just picking the choices based om what i think my character would say. His personality just follows alone. But if i want my character to have a certain personality i try all The choices to see which one affects the personality i want.

  5. In a way i dont think it would be necessary but Im not against it.

  6. I think i like The personality traits as they are.

@Left4Bed yes haha she was giving me the bad vibes, And to kill her as revenge for my characters mother was great.

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