Hey again! I've had a number of people ask me recently, including donors, how Saorsa's coming along,
so let's cover that this week for the Q&A!
First off, very well! There's been some big leaps and bounds recently, especially in the
background lore and appearance of the various species. In particular, I've been studying
a lot of stuff about psychology, and mythology in particular.
Soooo... wait, what does that have to do with Saorsa?
Well, here's the thing - Saorsa is a tale of the individual's rise to greatness,
as well as their rise within the group. Even though you will be playing the individual,
there's a lot of tropes and archtypical concepts which are part of forming this path to be walked.
The idea of how a character goes from being like your stereotypical farmkid to taking
on literal gods is something that has been explored for thousands of years. From the
earliest of religions to mythological tales of fantasy, we see these things playing out
repeatedly over and over. Now, due to the fact that Saorsa is a role playing game,
and a fairly open one at that, with a world specifically designed to only
provide a framework so that the GM can do with it as they please, working concepts such
as the hero's journey into the underlying base game, both in the fluff such as the lore,
and the mechanics so that the players are directly rewarded for their accomplishments
towards these goals, is a pretty tricky thing to do.
To accomplish this, I've been listening through dozens of hours of university lectures upon
these concepts, and reading up on the classic epics and so on, because these were pretty
heavily distilled versions of the overarching concepts. What I've been doing is breaking
them down even further, parsing this vast amount of information and building it into
the very core of the game for... well, a few weeks straight now.
I was going to just finish writing up the v0.2 first alpha version of the game but...
well, I realized that if I did that, I might be stuck with some parts that I can't really
get rid of easily which may fundamentally break the game later on.
So I've had to go back to the theoretical modeling to prepare for the larger changes
which are going to occur. It's a bit more effort now, but it'll save headaches in the long run.
Now, you've seen the tip of this iceberg already
- the history of Saorsa series began a few months ago, yet it underwent some dramatic
changes through the course of such. You wouldn't have seen these changes if I hadn't spoken
with you specifically about where it had started from, nor seen my notes, but there's been
some really big shifts in how things have worked over the past two months or so.
One of these, for example, is the concept of the Omni War in the heavens amongst all
the different deities. The basic concept had always been present from pretty close to the
start of Saorsa's construction, though recently I've been reading up upon how religions absorb
one another historically. In particular, how a deity from one religion will end up taking
on the aspects of other deities from previous religions which have had their populations conquered.
Mesopotamia in particular, has been a very interesting example of this to
look into, where you can clearly see a snowballing effect of gods going to war with previous
gods and gaining their domains and traits over hundreds of years, eventually coming
to form the god Marduk as a particular example of this. The previous gods sometimes are killed
outright and removed as part of the story, others became part of a pantheon with a diverse
array of deities from all over the region eventually coming to rest under a single religion.
You can see this happen with early Jeudaism as well, how several deities got clumped together
or removed, merged and so on. The early assimilation of El and Ashera, for example, giving rise
to Jehovah (YVYH) as their child, and then the subsequent diminishment and removal of
the parents entirely to replace such with an always-present infinite version of the
god which had no origin but always was. So what does this have to do with the Omni War within Saorsa then?
Well... one of the key things that Saorsa's about is that of
personal choice, that there is no "true" morality that universally applies, and in particular,
that the individual's values are important to the individual - the very framework and
foundation of character design within Saorsa revolves around this as a concept. The concept
of a war amongst the heavens is one wherein each deity possesses various traits or properties
and acts as a representation of values. When these deities go to war, what is essentially
happening, is those values and morals come into conflict, and the "winner" of such is
the one which is held in highest regard by the people as a whole who worship them.
It's not the gods themselves that are dying, well, sort of, but rather what the gods represent,
their values, their morality and their culture, which are being assimilated and reformed hierarchally
into new pantheons to represent the new order of values, morality and culture.
You may recall if you listened to the video on the Omni War previously, that there was
no winner in the war, as such. There were a lot of losers, and some few who barely escaped
with their lives, but no clear "winner" as such. In fact, after the conclusion of the war,
what arose was a highly neutral form of values set in place, or more specifically,
it wasn't really values as such, but rather a set of logically derived ethics enforced
by the neutral Æserians. Which leads us into another part of the changes
which have been undertaken with the lore of Saorsa - the Æserians have always had an
angellic visual representation thing going on. Now though, there have been some minor,
but important changes to such - in particular is the removal of the face entirely.
This has been done for a few different reasons, which would take quite awhile to go into,
but some of the key ones are to remove their ability to be easily identified with, and
to make them seem far more neutral and alien. They don't overtly show emotion, and in particular,
it gives them both a feeling of being very homogenized and lacking of individuality,
despite preaching specifically about individuality. There's some other stuff which gets pretty
deep into psychological stuff about averaged facial features, how people react to certain
stimuli, and works into some of the specific characters within the game's setting and how
they react to them. Ah, that's another thing as well - I believe
I've mentioned this before, but I'm not sure if I ever really made a video about it,
and I'm not gonna go back and check because it'd take forever. =P
Basically, there will be a character which embodies each of the different playable species
worked into the game's manual. These characters will be able to provide a rough sense of what
a semi-typical individual of those species is like, their opinions on various concepts
and so on. These will show up as little aside comments with the character's facial expression,
maybe their upper body and such, where they can express thoughts and describe the concepts
on the page, such as game mechanics being explained in the character's own words as
an example showcase, or just what they think about the setting.
Now part of this, is that each of these characters will also embody different archtypes within
the game's definition thereof, namely individuals who value different concepts predominately
over others, but they'll also each provide different archetypes in the sense of their
role within classical literature and epic tales, standing out for what they do within
the context of a story. I've been working through making sure I build these characters
as good examples of all of these things so that they'll be able to help walk the players
through the game's manual, as well as the setting itself.
I need to make sure that these characters are very well-defined before I do the next
stage of writing up the book (again), since they'll be integral to how it's presented,
sooo that's taking a fair bit of time to get each of them fleshed out fully as well, so that
they feel different from one another. Different speech patterns take awhile to get done properly
so that you can tell exactly which character said something without even so much as seeing
a name or other indication beyond what is said. You need to be able to just look at
the text and go "Oh, yeah, I know who said that."
Anyway, uhm... another thing is the artwork, agaaaain. I've almost got it ready to ship
off to the artist. I know, I've been procrastinating badly on it. I wind up working intensely on
other stuff I need to do instead of that when I get the chance to work on the artwork... sooo yeah.
I mean, it's still productive and all, but I reaaaally need to get this last little
bit done because it's nearly ready. But anyway, uhm... there have been some changes
to how some mechanics work, such as illusionary magic, specifically fleshing out exactly how
the Nogitsune's illusions work, more tweaks to experience, the lifepath system and a minor
tweak to combo abilities where they gain a stacking bonus to hit which... I'm not sure
if I really want to keep as-is. I'm thinking about adjusting it to a skill rank bonus but
I don't want to minimize the effectiveness of counter-attacks and such. It's a neat idea
but how it's implemented will drastically alter gameplay so I want to be careful with
the change even though it's a fairly tiny tweak on paper and won't make up more than
a paragraph or two of the written book. It's amazing how such a small change can undo the
balance of a whole game, but that's what happens when you mess with core rules.
Even my not-really-directly-work stuff... erm, well my time off, I mean, I do rest occasionally,
if not very often, but yeah, that stuff is also being utilized towards working on Saorsa
in a way as well. In particular, I started pulling apart the guts of Diablo 2 as a modding
experiment to see how it works internally, the structure and organization of the rules,
and various aspects of mechanical effects. It's given me a lot of time to consider how
certain economies work in the process of fixing the problem of gold being worthless in the
default game, and I've been testing some of the specific concepts I have in mind for Saorsa
through such. I've also been doing some early experimentation between growth curves, linear
increases and diminishing returns utilizing simplified formulas which can be implemented
with text alone, as Saorsa won't have the ability to make use of the computational prowess
of a computer sadly. Basically, even in my spare time I'm still
thinking about ways to better improve Saorsa along the way.
But yeah, lots of good stuff still being done, the game's still coming along fine!
I've got a few more skills worked out and such, different concepts are now far closer to a finalized
state and so on! So anyway, with that, I think I'm out for now
sooooo I'll see you next time!
Procrastination is an amazing tool.
I realize that sounds weird, but it's true. =P
You'll do almost anything to avoid doing the thing you're supposed to be doing!
And that means you can cram A LOT of work into a short timespan just because you were avoiding that one thing.
Seriously, procrastinators are some of the hardest workers there are... as long as you're not picky about WHAT they're working on...
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