Ataraxia: Sins of the Obsidian Knights is the latest RPG Maker VX Ace project that I’ll cancel before I even announce it on my blog. Consider it cancelled, consider it announced. Lately I’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to undertake ambitious creative projects, especially with my current 12-hour, 6-days a week work schedule and my shift in focus from sitting on my laptop to physical fitness. Though I’ve cancelled Ataraxia, or at least temporarily placed it on the back-burner until things in my life settle down, I want to share what I’ve so far got on my blog for future reference. Let this post also serve as proof to my future self that even I, a washed-up novelist wannabe, am capable of creating original content rather than merely soaking up the content of others.
The title Ataraxia comes from the title of my novel, which is also on the back-burner, and the two are not at all related. I just like the word and what it signifies. While the novel is to be about drug addiction and mental illness, the RPG is to be about a man named Gerard, who is the captain of an elite fighting force called the Obsidian Knights. After a 7-year-long quest, he returns to his homeland (think Robin Hood coming back to England after the Crusades), and it’s at this point the player’s quest begins. The prologue is to be told to the player through a series of screens of character silhouettes, which represents the extent of my free-hand artistic ability. The prologue is the only part of this cancelled game I’ve completed, so for your viewing displeasure and my mild embarrassment, here are the first 9 screens of the game:
I don’t have the artistic ability to create detailed pixel art yet, so I settled on creating outlines of everything and blacking it all out to give audiences the general idea of the scene I’m trying to convey.
That’s my favorite screen, which is of two clashing armies in front of a blood red sky, if you couldn’t tell. Ever since I taught myself how to use the GIMP software (I’m a few years late, aren’t I?), I’ve been going crazy with pixel art. None of it’s good, but someday, if I can turn what’s in my head into what I see on the page, I might actually get somewhere with my art.
This screen of the “Starfont” being shattered into 13 pieces, I don’t like so much. It feels too busy and Bush league. My decision to learn basic image creating and editing techniques started with my previous cancelled WIP Half-Life: Nemesis, which required me to create a lot of original pixel art to replicate the feel of the Black Mesa Research Facility. I learned the basics of the software with that project, and with this project I feel I’ve taken the next step.
Here’s my second favorite screen, which is of the 13 Obsidian Knights all standing side-by-side, chilling in front of a setting sun. Like they’re a Christian rock band posing for a cover album. In Ataraxia, the Obsidian Knights are the elite fighting force of the Kingdom of Ataraxia. Their leader is Captain Gerard, whom the player controls throughout the game’s main storyline. During the prologue we learn that King Horace III sent Gerard and the Obsidian Knights on a quest to recover the fragments of a powerful ancient artifact called the “Starfont.”
This one’s pretty alright, if you don’t look too closely at it and realize how easy it is to create silhouettes of characters doing things. The quest of the Obsidian Knights takes 7 long years, but they eventually recover all 13 pieces of the Starfont. When Gerard returns home to Ataraxia, he is the sole survivor of the crusade. A lot of RPGs, I think, would’ve started where my prologue started and ended where my prologue ended, with a speechless, nameless hero who’s charged with recovering X number of items to accomplish Y. I want my story to take place after that, after the “quest” is already finished and the player is returning home triumphant. The player, when she opens my game, might initially think that her quest will be to collect those 13 shards, but she’ll soon find out that that bit’s already done, and her quest is something else entirely.
The heroic outline of our hero, Gerard, who can be renamed by the player. I’m a bit of a francophile ever since I lived in Montreal for six months, so a lot of the characters and locations in Ataraxia are going to be inspired by French names and French cities. Everyone knows Gérard Depardieu, right?
Ah, look at that moon. Maybe it’s a little too big, but it’s not meant to be realistic. Just pretty. I didn’t hand-draw it. I didn’t hand-draw the starry sky background, either. Don’t be silly. I stole those images from NASA. Well, maybe I didn’t steal them. Our tax dollars paid for the cameras, so the images are theoretically all of ours, one would imagine.
Now we come out of the pure silhouette segment of the prologue and see some of our in-game major characters that we’ll meet again and again throughout the story. From left to right: Magister Bont, Gerard (player), King Horace III, Prince Horace IV, and a random guard who’s just there for decoration. One of the greater advances I intend for this already-cancelled RPG over my previous game works, including Half-Life: Nemesis and Once Upon a Time in 1348, is that I learn how to do parallax mapping. With parallax mapping, you create the whole game map in an image editing software, using multiple layers including layers above and below the player-character. It’s amazingly superior to using the default VX Ace mapping methods because it allows for much more detailed worlds. See how there are two guard towers in the foreground of the previous image, blurred to give the effect of them being out of focus? See how the light from the lantern casts illumination over Bont and Gerard? See how details like the cracks in the bricks aren’t quite centered within a 32×32 grid? You can’t pull this kind of visual tomfoolery without parallax mapping, baby. I had a lot of fun learning how it’s done.
Another example of parallax mapping in action, here’s the front of Gerard’s house. My excitement over learning parallax was one of the driving factors during development: I was so eager to find out what I could and couldn’t pull off visually, given my very limited artistic abilities. I want Ataraxia to be HD when compared to 1348.
Planned features of Ataraxia: Sins of the Obsidian Knights:
- A 3-character party system, with 13 potential characters to choose from, each with a unique personality, voice, and set of skills.
- An upgradeable and customizable home base, which is where the non-partied characters you’ve recruited hang out and await command.
- A story with mature themes that takes place on a fully-realized continent called Ataraxia.
- Ten major cities to quest through, complete with side quests and hidden locations for the adept explorer.
- Traditional RPG XP-grinding and leveling system with traditional turn-based or free-turn combat, unlike my previous RPG, 1348.
- Hundreds of weapons and armor pieces to find, earn, and craft to customize your small army.
- Gameplay reminiscent of classic Super Nintendo RPGs, like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy IV and Earthbound.
- Every single area done with parallax techniques for maximum artistic detail.
I might return to this project at some point in the future. I’d worked myself into such an frenzy, planning it out like it was some homage to the Square RPGs of the SNES days. I planned out the entire story from start to finish and developed all of the main characters. But… the work! THE WORK! To realize the total vision of this game would require months and months of concentration and dedication, so many hours a day taken away from exercise, socializing, reading, going on adventures, meeting people, finding a girlfriend, all those moments lost in time like tears in the rain. And for what? So that two people could consume a product that took me six months to complete?
On the one hand I create because I love creation. I love the process. When I finished 1348 after months of work and it was only played by 2 of my friends (out of the 20-30 or so I sent it to), I didn’t despair, because I had fun creating the product. I’m not a savvy self-promoter or a marketer or a paid content creator. I’m just a hobbyist, so I do it for the love of the process. On the other hand, Ataraxia will inevitably turn out to be 15 times the size of 1348, which itself took me months to complete. These days I just don’t have the resources to invest in such an involved hobby as RPG design and creation and play-testing.
If only there were a team of amateur game designers out there who needed my extra hand in a collaborative project, then I could enjoy the act of creation without shouldering the burden of my grand ambitions by myself. Maybe one day I’ll meet such people, and it’ll be a glorious day.