Hey everyone,

So quite a bit happened during my free-time, which ended up resulting in a cool personal achievement on my end. For those who don't know, I'm an avid Destiny fan, and have been really enjoying the Beyond Light expansion. In fact, my friends and I had spent many months working towards achieving the Day One for the Deep Stone Crypt raid. I can successfully say that this was accomplished after 13+ hours of pure gameplay. Much sleep was lost and my girlfriend was alarmed, but I would say it was all worth it in the end.

Anyway, Niravasi's development has been going well, and I have spent quite a bit of time working on the graphic design elements of the 2nd level. There's still many more pieces that need to be created, but once I'll be done with these, I'll begin working on the other sections of the 2nd level again.

Niravasi's pretty cool as a city, so let's talk about that for a bit.

The City of Horrors: NIRAVASI

"DISCIPLINE!"

So I've talked about what the city of Niravasi will be like for players to explore, but I didn't go into extra detail on why I decided to use an ancient city as the setting for a horror game. There have been many scenarios I've seen in different surreal-horror games, such as Brennenberg Castle from Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the Virtual Dream World of .flow and of course, the town of Silent Hill.

Yet for all of the memorable settings of horror games like this, I've noticed that many other RPG Maker Horror Games tend to stay contained within smaller environments. There's been plenty of abandoned mansions/manors/museums, but I didn't feel as interested in using locations like this as a setting for my game. With NIRAVASI, I wanted a setting that focused on exploring ancient ruins from a time-long passed, but still have elements of science-fiction and surreal-horror.

A good example of this would be the setting of the Bioshock games, in that they parody and juxtapose the values of a political/religious philosophy and twist it to its extremes. I wanted to do the same for Niravasi, but that was not always the case.

The Original Intent

"Shrouded in mystery."

I've explained before that the idea of NIRAVASI as a game originally came from a scrapped side-quest in Aetherside. Let's go a little more into that.

So in Aetherside, there was a quest near the end of the game where the player character would receive a strange signal from a hidden part of Aetherius' floating landmasses. You would go to this place, venture a little too deep and find yourself trapped inside an old, ruined facility. There, you would have had to hide from a singular machine that was trying to capture you and bring you to its creator. In essence, it was a horror story inside a game all about exploring human emotion and forging friendships. Not really two peas in a pod, I'd say.

The more I began working Aetherside, the more I started developing the history behind the lore of the planet itself. I needed a reason for the planet to explode, and a reason would be found with the humans that arrived on the planet. Eventually, I started looking into religious texts for inspiration of how the culture of the humans that lived there would be like and settled on strong themes of Hinduism. As more work got put in, the idea of the city of Niravasi was born.

However, Niravasi at this time was still tied as a setting for Aetherside. That would all change once I saw the amazing opportunities the MV3D plugin could provide. Being able to work with the Z-Axis literally opened up a new world for me, and my creative passion flared up massively. After drafting a few rough examples and pitching it to my friends, I decided to put my work on Aetherside on hold for the time being and focus everything into Niravasi. Now, almost 3 months after that decision was made, I'm incredibly happy with how this game is turning out.

Anyway, that's all I have to say for this week. Next week's Devlog will be talking about what my current plans are for releasing this game, and how that will impact you as the consumers.

For now though, thank you for reading this Devlog and I hope you have a lovely day.

Kind regards,
King Sangos