Well here we are. There isn’t much to talk about game-wise from this week since everything we’ve been doing has been social media page creation, but I want to use this first post to maybe dive a little deeper on the origin and overall design goals of our project. I’ll touch a little on my experiences setting up all these social media pages as well. In the future, these posts will focus more on new developments and announcements, but I’d like to occasionally talk a little inside-baseball when there isn’t anything exciting happening.
Origins
Fujiwara Phoenix was honestly born as a story concept. Imperishable Night is my favorite Touhou game and the dynamic between Kaguya and Mokou has always fascinated me. I thought about Mokou’s backstory and how a character arc could be developed out of it. I started to get really into it and decided to make a game, since that’s the medium I know. Recently having played Touhou Luna Nights, I decided to try making it a metroidvania, which is a genre I love and wanted to try myself anyway. Youmu is my favorite character, but I couldn’t think of a good way to have a punchy hook with her abilities. Like Sakuya’s time powers from Luna Nights. Mokou, on the other hand, has a very interesting set of abilities that lend themselves to interesting game mechanics. And so the game mechanics were born from Mokou’s canon abilities.
Though, to be fair, my affinity for the recent DOOM games and the games that have built on them (looking at you, ULTRAKILL) definitely played a role.
Goals
We want a full metroidvania experience with combat that feels like DOOM or ULTRAKILL. It’s actually quite tricky to pull off, since the movement is limited to 2D. I think one of the biggest obstacles, though, is simply getting people to understand. In playtesting, we’ve seen that our mechanics work. When someone engages in the way that we’ve designed for (aggressive, reckless fighting), they have fun and succeed. The problem that we’ve run into is people not engaging in that way. There’s some game design wisdom about protecting the player from themselves. If the most effective strategy in your game is extremely unfun, people are going to do it and not have any fun. Your game should naturally lead the player into the most fun state it has to offer, as frequently as possible.
In our game, it is definitely most effective to play in the “fun” way; I think the issue is on the other side. I think we don’t punish “unfun” strategies enough. It’s currently too easy to find a safe spot and hide out. Look at DOOM Eternal; if you stand still or try to hide anywhere, you will die very quickly. This is because of how aggressive the enemies are, hunting down the player no matter where they go with a relentless fury. I mean, they are demons.
Currently, the enemies in Fujiwara Phoenix are pretty “dumb.” The crawling enemies are completely dumb, just moving back and forth with no regard for the player. They’ll stick around since they’re a platformer staple; it’d be like an FPS without a shotgun. But even our more unique enemies are a little too passive. The yin yang orbs are pretty great, but they get stale if I spam them in level design.
There is also the issue of leading the player into the game. It plays pretty differently to a lot of other platformers, so we are also planning a whole tutorial section to help guide the player into the kind of habits that will work well and also be fun to execute.
Social Media Stuff
Ugh. Social media is one of those things that you just have to do even though it sucks. That’s why people with money hire interns to do it for them. Unfortunately, I am not one of those people. So far, we have a bunch of pages with nothing on them :D. We’ve had the issue for a while of lacking environmental art, which is pretty crucial to the game’s look overall. Like, in any of our screenshots, you can see we’re still using placeholder background assets from Urban Legend in Limbo. Really, we need an environment artist (https://twinphoenixinteractive.com/contact/ hey it’s a long shot, but you never know), but for now we’ll just have to make do.
The problem for social media is that our game still looks kinda crappy, and it’s because of the environments. The environment is the most important part of a screenshot that immediately starts forming someone’s opinion of what they’re seeing. And ours is basic, poorly laid out, and inconsistent. Quality screenshots are thus a little tricky to find. I have been pretty happy with the engagement we’ve generated so far, and I am looking forward to doing some streams since it seems like an pretty chill way to do this stuff. I’ll also get to work on the game at the same time, so it’s efficient too. Anyway, to be effective at this stuff, you have to leave your self-respect at the door. On that note, follow us on Twitter, join our Discord, and subscribe/follow us on YouTube/Twitch.
The End
This ended up being kinda long and ramble-y but thanks for sticking with it. Future posts will again be more focused and have some pictures and stuff to help make it a little more digestible. I need to buy a new microphone, but I’ll probably do a stream or two as soon as I have it.
See you next Thursday
-S