Afterthoughts (spoilers)

The reason this project came about was mostly that I learned about peb's nswengine, and it seemed cool and I wanted to create something with it.

My initial idea was to make something more Yume Nikki-like, a game where you can wander around a space and the rooms don't quite connect in fully logical ways. That wasn't what I ended up making, because as it turns out, I am a very literal-minded person and kind of struggle to come up with interesting or evocative imagery! But you can definitely still see that intent in the final version. Nier is also a pretty obvious inspiration for the zone with the glass statues.

For a setting, I thought that if it was going to be a dream-like landscape, it made sense to wander around someone's dreams or memories. And as I tried to come up with a group whose memories would be interesting to explore, I got struck by the inspiration of "an RPG party that lost against the dark lord".

A complete loss ended up looking a bit too bleak, so I eventually reworked it so that they didn't die, they were just knocked out and would eventually get back up and fight again.

Anyways, for the actual gameplay, it's pretty obvious that this game was made with nswengine specifically in mind, because all of the memories are about trying to do interesting things with the format.

• For the monk, it's a linear hallway, but you turn back the way you came and things are different
• For the witch, you have to wander around aimlessly until you find something (you traverse a fixed number of rooms, the direction you pick doesn't matter)
• For the cleric, you're in a building with nonsensical structure where the rooms connect in seemingly random ways (this would have hit harder if I had enough creative juice to come up with more than 8 rooms)
• For the knight, I actually struggled for a long time to come up with a reasonable gimmick before I settled for circular looping, and tried to tie it into the game's larger theme

I also tried to give each of them a distinct voice:

• The monk is optimistic and sees the good in everything, pointing out the beauty in the world even as it comes apart
• The witch is quiet and understated, hence speaking in lowercase, and won't easily share her true feelings
• The cleric is inquisitive and has struggled with their own faith, shown by ending every message with a question
• The knight is direct and determined, so all his messages are short, and there's usually no verb in the sentence

In the end, these are less about matching some imagined character I had in my head, and more about making them feel different from each other.