In this devlog, I showoff the first two Cutscenes for the game!
This is my first attempt at developing Cutscenes, and they are utilizing in-engine mechanisms to handle all of the dialogue and actions!
As these are a first pass at storyline integration, I would love to know your thoughts on them, and how I could improve them.
These cutscenes were essentially developed as a proof-of-concept, and will be integrated as part of the next major update to the game. In the future I would love to be able to really increase the production quality of these cutscenes, getting better cinematography, character action, voice acting, and so forth. But for now, I think these do quite well, and I quite enjoy them. They certainly have a feeling and pacing like an old JRPG title, which is what I'm going for.
As far as the storyline goes for the game, it follows the leader of the Mystic Race, Grandmaster Knulxevra. The Mystics are a proud race of spellcasters, formless beyond their long flowing robes and strong horns. The story starts off with the aftermath of one of Knulxevra's most tragic creations, the Fragment. This Fragment was created when Knulxevra split its soul in half; Knulxevra believed it was creating a pure Mystical essence, however that plan went awry and all that was left was destruction. After a failed attempt at destroying the Fragment, Knulxevra now has to wait 1,000 years for another opportunity to destroy it, and so is forced to lie dormant until the time is right. Upon awakening 1,000 years later, chaos has consumed the world, and its Knulxevra's task at fixing the wrongdoings of its past.
The two cutscenes shown in the blog above begin with the intro to the story, and then head into the part where Knulxevra attempts to destroy the Fragment. There's quite a lot of dialogue, and I'm certainly going for a rich philosophical approach to this storyline, so I hope that comes off as intended! I do certainly enjoy deep, well-thought out lore, and want to integrate that into the game in an interesting way. The introduction to the game is certainly being overhauled to be fairly cutscene-heavy, but I think that's okay- more storyline and lore is better than less, in my opinion. (Plus, well... there's always the skip button, LOL).
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Now, to update you all about the state of the game! Right now, I'm still in-progress developing the last handful of Cutscenes for the game (another devlog to come about that soon-ish!). Beyond that, I have a handful of extra major features to integrate (more to come soon!), and then of course plenty of clean up and rebalancing to do. So there's quite a lot of work to be done! But quite a lot that has been done as well. I'm really trying to get the introduction to the game greatly overhauled to be the exact experience I want first players to the game to, well, experience, and these cutscenes are probably the biggest overhaul that will be coming.
While I'd really like to give a more grounded release date, I still believe the next major update is a few months out. I feel like once I get these cutscenes completed, I'll be able to give a more solid time estimate, but I appreciate the patience of everyone who's enjoying the game!