Hello everyone!
Long time since my last post in here.
This time fortunately is to introduce you my new game: A Punishment for Mai.
First thing first is not a game we (my team; Fatbros) started right now, we’ve been some time working on it by now.
We were updating it through indiedb but then i decided to bring it here too. The good news are is that for everyone interested there’s not much time left to be able to play the chapter 1 because it’s almost ready to launch :)
I’ll be keeping you updated with every piece of info i already posted on indiedb so you can watch it here or there, it’s up to you ;D.
Let’s get started:
STORY / PROLOGUE
For those of you wondering about A Punishment for Mai’s scenario, here you have a bit of it:
Prologue: Mai is a 28 years old young woman with a sad and dark past from which she remember almost nothing but a deep pain.
Without knowing how, or why, Mai wake up one day in a motel room, wondering, she comes out only to find that she’s in a place that she never saw on her life and which has nothing to do with her usual reality.
The girl, who initially thought she was alone in this city, ends up discovering that there is more life than she thought: monsters, demons, strange people and, last but not least, a kind of** sect of people in cassocks who seem to be the ‘lords of the place ‘. Under such conditions, Mai, plucks up courage and starts to seek for a way to get out of there, but unfortunately for her, after several** months of searching she finds nothing.
However, someone** has been watching Mai most of this time, a mysterious man who appears infront of her. He calls himself the ‘Driver’ and hides his face behind a mask.
Despite the initial distrust, Mai has no choice but to accept the help of the ‘Driver’, which, promises he will help her get out of the town.
Time passes and Mai begins to lose patience, strange dreams beset her, surviving in the town is becoming **more dangerous, the doubts of what the town is and why is she **there and above all that, a deep sense** of sadness, are making the she starts to doubt on his sanity and to top places of her previous life started to appear in **the town, including the house where she lived before appearing here.
All seems lost, but one day the ‘Driver’ appears and tells her it’s time to leave the town, but first she shall pass a test…**
And this is where our journey begins with Mai in the pursuit of a way out of this cursed town.
GAMEPLAY
Action-RPG: some people also call it Hack’n’Slash in 2D. This is the basic idea behind this game’s gameplay. Some examples in this same genre could be games like the classics “The Legend of Zelda” or The Adventures of Alundra. But of course, APFM is not one of these games, nor it is set in a fantasy world. APFM is a horror game, so although there exists all the classic elements of the Action-RPG, like Magic (yeah, there is magic, but the explanation for that will come later in another report), experience per enemy killed, which will make us gain levels, melee attacks, a shield to fend off enemy attacks or even Magic Points, which are called Mana (MN) here, APFM will have other elements, more survival-horror-like games. Examples of this could be a reduced number of battles compared to action-rpgs usual style, using firearms (which require ammunition), a targeting system, moving through smaller and darker maps (trying to cause a ‘claustrophobic’ feel and fear on the player), etc.
Puzzles: The thing we love uppermost in survival horror games are puzzles, hence this element was the only sure-one with a place in this game since the beggining of its design. So there are different kinds of puzzles; from lowering levers to restoring the power in some area to hitting spheres to ‘turn’ them… Said like this, it sounds rather easy, but this have to be seen while playing.
Growing-up system: Let’s take this little closer to the RPG-side of the game. In addition to levels, whose range from 1 to 10 and will serve to improve Mai and Lucy’s parameters, there is also a kind of ‘board’ for each character, from where they can upgrade even more their skills and even learn Magic. All that at the cost of Skill Points (SP). One thing to keep in mind as i don’t want to overlook it (although this system will be deeply explained in a later report too) is the fact that you can enable / disable the Magics and parameters’ ‘upgrades’ at will, so whenever you disable anything, you’ll recover any SP invested in the enabling process. This will let the player choose what he needs in each situation.
Exclamation: So in order to keep the player focused on the mos important things in the game we added a little system to inform the player about important “things” on the level. This tells the player about “things” he can interact with. For instance whether there is a book you can read or a key you can grab and so on. Every “thing” you can interact with has a range and when the player enters it, this symbol appears above the “thing”:
Also a sound plays whenever the symbol comes up.
And when the player leaves the range the symbol disappears of course.
Exceptions exists in this “dual indication” system, like some “things” the player can move in any way or another (we’ll discuss about this soon) or some other “things” that maybe are hidden (for instance in the darkness) or maybe there are some requirements we don’t meet up yet to get that “thing“…
This system will help the player to find the objects, etc. he needs in a more easily way without destroying the experience, the feeling or the complexity of the game itself due to that.
Main Characters
Mai
- Name: Mai Mitchell
Age: 28
Birthday: March-15-1987
Height: 1.64 m
Weight: 67 kg
Story:
Mai was the youngest of three sisters. She was living happily with them and with her parents also until one day, seven years old still, her parents decided to buy an abandoned hotel and went to live in there.
After a month living in the hotel, Mai’s mother found a strange book and, thereafter, everything changed. Her mother began to behave oddly, as if nothing mattered to her, except the book; Shortly afterwards, her father disappeared leaving no trace and, being not out quite, her two older sisters fell ill and died strangely. This left the poor Mai, 9 at that time, all alone, with her mother increasingly isolated in herself.
One day, while cleaning, Mai found her mother conducting a strange ritual. Her mother found Mai was ‘spying’ her and forced her to participate in the, increasingly more frequent, rituals.
At the age of 10, tired of the barbarism carried out by her mother and having to involve in it in silence, Mai denounced her mother to the authorities. Her mother was jailed but soon after that, disappeared from prison, inexplicably.
Mai, meanwhile, following the arrest and subsequent disappearance of his mother was completely alone and went to one hospice after another until she got full age. After leaving her last orphanagem she became a wanderer until she met a man with whom she established a relationship. After some time living together, Mai got pregnant.
It seemed that, Mai finally would be able to be happy again, but all shattered during the second month of pregnancy. Her partner disappeared and she, all alone again, sank completely in the darkest recesses of his mind.
Suddenly, a day like any other, Mai went off to sleep, but when she woke up, she wasn’t on her home anymore…
Lucy
Name: Lucy McVid
Age: 19
Birthday: August-3-1996
Height: 1.59 m
Weight: 62 kg
Story:
Since the death of his mother, Lucy became an introvert and lonely girl. This was also getting increased, due to her inferiority complex caused by her sluttering.
She had no friends, but she wasn’t alone, because her father supported her at all times.
Time went by, Lucy and her father were increasingly inseparable and this helped the girl to not be sad, but then everything changed.
Her father began to receive phone calls from an unknown woman and, from that moment on, everything went wrong. He became unfriendly and violent. He spent hours doing strange rituals and talking to that woman in phone.
Over time, Lucy, just like Mai, is forced to participate in the rituals, but unlike she, Lucy did not have nor has the power to bear with those and ends up suffering a lot.
In her eighteenth birthday, the girl finds, during an argument with her father, that she carries some kind of power in which the unknown woman from the phone is interested. The discussion rises increasingly in tone and ends with her father forcing her to participate in a human sacrifice.
During the grisly ritual, Lucy falls fainted. During hours she suffers overwhelming nightmares. When she finally wakes up, discovers that she is in a different reality, that she is all alone and that someone locked her in that place. Like so often throughout her life, Lucy huddles in a corner staring off at infinity and says nothing…
And so that’s all for now. In the next few days i’ll make sure to update everyone up to the point where is in the indiedb profile. If you can’t wait remember you can always take a deep look at its profile here: LINK
Also please take a look at the profile in here, gamejolt, to see more screenies and an small gameplay teaser.
With this said all that’s left for me to say is that every feedback and support is welcome so please don’t be shy and see you soon in the next news report (presumably tomorrow :D)
0 comments