I Wrote Lore Instead of Studying Godot

I wasn't meaning to, but I ended up writing lore for one of my game ideas.

I won't give much away, but I was trying to figure out why the world was the way that it was.

The premise is that you're a group of monks in a small cliffside town that was built on the grave of the hermit who founded it. The town is famous for its shrine, which is said to inhabit a higher being, so pilgrimages to the town are common. Your group is responsible for serving the community (i.e. quests), purifying evil spirits, and other such things, which really amount to dungeon crawling and exploring nooks and crannies in the hub town while shooting the breeze with NPCs and getting closer to your party members.

Oh and your ultimate goal is to become the vessels for different angels. Dunno if one or seven or more than that. I'm not sure yet. But the town is really into these angels coming down and dwelling among them.

I want the game to mostly take place in the town, with maybe one or two nearby areas. But the idea is that the town is dense with interactable objects, and it changes over the course of the game. Since the city is a famous pilgrimage destination, there could be events surrounding important visitors. Also, since the supernatural is involved, I thought about dungeons appearing out of thin space, in unusual places, like someone's house, for a limited amount of time.

Based on this premise, I've been looking to Radiata Stories and Tales of Zestiria for inspiration. They both have huge towns with a lot to interact with and discover.

Radiata Stories is surprisingly massive and beautifully crafted. I like that it's not a huge game, but still manages to feel huge by how much detail they cram into their environments. It's hard to find anything to do this game justice, and I don't want to ramble on about it, so I strongly recommend skimming through a playthrough or watching a review or something.

Tales of Zestiria has towns that are so huge that they have full-sized dungeons in them. I have no idea if this is old hat or not, but when I saw this I was blown away. There's also this cute little segment in a town called Marlind that's filled with so much bad energy that you can walk up to these evil clouds and purify them with your field effect. I thought it was a fun way to engage with the town while you explored it, even if simple.

I definitely want some horror elements in there too, what with unexplored areas and a general feeling of unease despite being in what should be a peaceful town. I figure this could be done by having unsettling details hidden in plain sight, and contrasting the dungeons with the hub area, like with Vagrant Story and the oppressive atmosphere of their underground areas.

As far as story goes, I wanted for there to be some mystery surrounding the hermit's burial site, the shrine, and the angels. That's how my session of writing lore happened. I think I managed to tie it all together in a pretty simple way, and I hope that it can make for a satisfying conclusion.

I don't want to give away too much, in the case that this idea sees the light of day, but there would be a loss mechanic, where you end up losing party members throughout the course of the game, and the game would need to be played through multiple times, with story reasons for why that happens. That being said, though, I'm hoping for the base game to be pretty short.

And that' pretty much it. Here are some things I thought about/was reminded of while writing this:

The campsite in Pyschonauts is a good example of an environment changing as the game progresses. At the beginning of the game, it's a pretty normal hub world, and as long you didn't go into caves or obviously dangerous areas, you wouldn't have to worry about psychic bears and saber-tooth cats. But later on in the game, when it gets dark, the campsite also becomes much more dangerous, and you're no longer as free to explore at your own leisure. I think it's a neat way to take away the feeling of safety that I usually associate with hub areas. Plus, it totally fits the tone of where you're at in the story, once you find out that the campers are getting kidnapped and discover... a place across the lake.

The entire setting, in fact, excels at "normal facility hiding questionable things". Apparently, there's this entire timeline that I completely overlooked during my playthough, yet it's easily accessible in the hub area. It has lore about a town called the Shaky Claim that I don't think is ever explicitly mentioned in the game, and yet it holds up the foundation of the setting through its connection to a significant location that you access late in the game. It even explains the arrowheads that you collect from the ground. I'm just now finding out about this and it gives me the creeps. This is a perfect case study for hiding information in plain sight.

And on matters of purification, that's a thing you sort of do in the Valkyrie Profile series. It's a cool mechanic where, instead of random encounters, you have these evil spirits that you can either sort of crystallize to turn into platforms, or engage in battle with in order to purify them.