I've just posted a trailer of my upcoming game being developed alone and now I'm going to tell you more about its features.
Fevercide is my fourth project where I am not solely responsible only for the music. The code, art, game design and everything else is on me. That was the case with Fearmonium, Catmaze, and Reflection of Mine.
Fevercide is mostly a metroidvania, but this time I wanted to blur the genre a bit. It was a very dreary feeling when I started working on this project after finishing Fearmonium. It seemed to me that I was not making “something new”, but making "something again”. That's why, first of all, I added horror elements to the game.
The childhood of the main character Sandra was not the most glorious, and when the plot brings us to her memories, the player is faced with the uncharacteristic metroidvania sections: darkness, helplessness and evil creatures all around. I have a peculiar attitude to horrors and I can't call a game horror when the player gets the role of a brave marine with a firearm. That's why I completely redrew all of Sandra's animations, rejuvenating her by 15 years and dressing her up in a nightie.
I feel that I really need to explain in the game that this is not a dress - but a nightie, for it is 1922 and sleepwear looked like this. These days, such clothing is actually called a "dress".
The main way of interacting with the world in this part of the game will be solving puzzles, finding places to hide from monsters and contemplating from around the corner all sorts of unpleasant scenes that took place in Sandra's home.
The main part of Fevercide will unfold on behalf of the grown up Sandra, who is able to fight. However, I still didn't want to write off the formula of classic metroidvania games again. This time I've divided the entire world map into separate biomes with separate maps for each. The number of interconnections between them is not so large. This means more linearity than in my previous games. If I were to draw an analogy of what it's like - from modern games I can remember the first part of Blasphemous, and from the classics - the delightful Monster World VI, the great Popful Mail and the perfect Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.
Of course, there will still be forks in Fevercide - I try to create levels in such a way that the player always has at least two options of where to go now. A lot of secrets inherent to the genre won't go anywhere either. I've already solved the problem that haunts every developer of a metroidvania game: it's not hard to create a bunch of passages that require either attentiveness or a certain skill to traverse. What's hard is to put rewards in those passages that will motivate the player to look for geocaches and be happy to find them.
My solution is a lot of small improvements to Sandra's arsenal. I didn't go deep into role-playing, but I piled on an unusual number of stats for the genre: in addition to HP, MP, and Physical Strength, the speed of each weapon; the strength and availability of special attacks for that weapon; how quickly melee attacks replenish mana; how ranged attacks use up mana; and so on. There really are a lot of characteristics, and I enjoyed playing with their math more than I expected. Literally every type of weapon has a separate screen with equipping special beads that change its properties and give sometimes unexpected results when combined. Sandra can easily be made fast and weak, slow and strong, reshaped into a sorceress, rely on blunt force or rely on critical hits, and so on.
The non-linearity will also hopefully be added by the large number of side quests, which I'm struggling to make smarter than “kill them/bring this”. Some parts of the locations will only be unlocked through various errands from a bunch of non-playable characters. These quests also help me experiment with gameplay by adding some mini-games. For example, this is how lock picking and pinball appeared, and the end of the game depends, of course, on collecting all the beads and completing quests.
Emphasis on the story - this is the thing that attracts me in other games, and I'm not going to get rid of it, so now I'll explain the plot. First of all, the time of action will be between 1922 and 1932, and the place will be the Russian Empire. There was no revolution in Fevercide universe, so religion still plays a big role, and the Empire is ruled by the Tsar. I'm not claiming to be historical, I'm just combining epochs and images I like and fantasizing about "what would it be like if...".
Sandra grew up in a very strange family in a huge, half-abandoned house. Her mother was constantly ill for no apparent reason, and her father - Victor - not only never paid any attention to her, but was always working with some monsters, disappeared for months and constantly attracted misfortune to the house, never explaining anything. As soon as Sandra's mother died, the girl hastily packed her things and left this slumbering mansion, going to St. Petersburg.
There she successfully hid from her problems, constantly woke up in a cold sweat from childhood memories and built a not very successful career as a dancer. But running away from the past is impossible, and at the very beginning of the game Victor makes himself known. He has chosen a method that is as dark and bizarre as he is: Sandra receives a letter addressed to him, and in the envelope is a ticket for a train leaving from a long-abandoned station at midnight. The ticket is followed by the appearance of all the evil spirits she encountered as a child, and she would have been killed instantly in her own apartment, but the second protagonist has remedied the situation: a ghost who has forgotten his name and calls himself Duke is the reason why in Fevercide all the weapons are trinkets like a cane and a hat pin.
The Count is a kind of poltergeist and can inhabit objects. Things that have a special meaning for Sandra are especially powerful. That is why beads from her mother's necklace give her additional abilities; the suitcase with which she ran away from home becomes a formidable weapon, and a hat pin becomes sharper than a knife.
The main goal is to finally deal with her past and why Victor was so crazy. Hiding your head in the sand forever is not going to work.
The visual style of Fearmonium was inspired by classic Disney cartoons: first of all, Pinocchio. The game was compared, of course, with another project, taking its stylistic roots from the same cartoons as me, only drawn by 40 artists from Disney - I'm talking about Cuphead, the comparison with which really came as a surprise to me at the time. We both drew ideas from the same sources, not each other. My love for the classics hasn't gone anywhere - Snow White, Black Cauldron, Sword in the Stone... oh, how much beauty there is there and how unattainable the level I aspire to. Nevertheless, I don't want to copy Disney 1 in 1, and I think that the choice of style with these costumes, hairstyles and overloaded with all sorts of effects gives my game a twist. What I will be compared to visually this time - I don't know yet, I just announced my project. So it will be even curious, what Fevercide evokes associations with - feel free to declare it in the comments!
I really hope I'm making a project that will interest a lot of people, and those who are already excited - I'm waiting on the page in Steam clicking on the "add to wishlist" button -
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3314140/Fevercide/