Hey everyone,

It's been 3 days since I announced Niravasi (officially) and it's already gathered over 500 views on the GameJolt page alone. Honestly, for a title that hasn't even got an officially playable demo, that's a damn impressive feat.

But there's still a long way to go until the game is anywhere near completion. Looking at the estimates of what I've got for the game at the moment, Niravasi's still only about 15% complete. Heck, that's not even taking other aspects such as the soundtrack into consideration.

Yet that 15% I've completed is already looking damn fine and it's getting to the point where I'm really starting to feel that same enthusiasm for working on a title, just like I did for my previous game, BLANK, all those years ago.

In the meantime, I wanted to tide everyone over with a number of development logs between now and the game's eventual release. I don't have a set schedule for these, so expect them to come irregularly. But if there's enough interest in reading them, I'll start looking into making it a more consistent kind of deal. Anyway, let's focus on the main topic of this Devlog.

Why?

So it's been over 4 years since the release of my first project, BLANK, which was an Action/Surreal RPG that focused on the story of Veta, a young woman born without eyes on a quest to save her odd world from the threat of an ancient curse. As you continued throughout the story, however, you would begin to realise that not everything is as it seems and that things would begin to take a very dark and depressing turn.

Now BLANK actually started as a project heavily inspired by OFF, by Mortis Ghost, which was another RPG Maker game that had a very surrealist twist to things. Adopting many of the same tropes and systems that OFF had, BLANK was all about fighting the ancient curse known as Corruption, which was more or less an excuse for me to draw and design grotesque monsters that resembled Uboa, W.D. Gaster(?) and any other beasts I thought looked cool. Yet the more I worked on the game, the more it started to take a life of its own. This is a big part of why I went back to the game during Patch 1.3. and restructured all of the character's personal traits and importance in the narrative. What started OFF as an inspired game ended up becoming its own beast.

However, for those of you that aren't aware, the game had future plans for extra content that players would be able to experience, which you can read up on here:

https://gamejolt.com/p/blank-what-happened-part-1-b5ivykky

Now instead, let's focus on the story of Niravasi, the title that you're actually interested in finding more about.

So after completing BLANK and contemplating on what new projects I wanted to work on, Aetherside was (and still technically is) the most desired. Unfortunately, that game is probably not going to be complete feasibly until 3-4+ years. Yet the lore and narrative I've painted for that game is still so rich that I wanted to work on a project that adopted some parts of it, yet you didn't need to play it to understand the story of Aetherside. Not only that, but the incredibly talented RPG Maker Plugin creators, Cutievirus and CoopNinjask had created an amazing plugin for RPG Maker MV known as MV3D, which allows you to create 3D environments within the game.

Seeing this as a great opportunity, I decided to get to work on the project that would eventually be Niravasi. As I mentioned before in the BLANK Devlog, Niravasi was originally a side-quest in Aetherside that's ended up becoming its own monster, just like how BLANK did all those years ago.

With Niravasi, I wanted to create a game where the player would explore the ruins of an ancient human city, but still incorporate elements of Horror and Puzzle games within. But when I mean "ancient", I don't mean to say that all of the game's buildings will be generic rock/brick-work foundations. The humans that lived in the city before the game's events were highly advanced, and so a good comparison of how the city would look would be New Mombasa from Halo 3: ODST, with maybe some parts Mass Effect 2 thrown in.

As for the Horror elements, I wanted the threats in Niravasi to be strictly grounded within reality, but still monstrous enough that they deeply unsettle players. I won't get into too many spoilers, but the main threat that you'll find in the game is the very same one you see in the game's description. People said they loved the enemy designs in BLANK, where those enemies were designed with a fantasy-setting in mind. As for the enemies in Niravasi, I'm interested to see how people will react to them, considering that you can't just blast them away with sword attacks anymore.

That's about it from me. If you wanted to ask any questions about any of the topics here or just wanted to play that demo I'm keeping to myself, feel free to leave a response down here or contact me.

Kind regards,
King Sangos