The Mana World Forums

So I had this idea along with another member named Gonzo. How about a way to get into a Dark World with all the names of the towns reversed. Tulimshar would be Rahsmilut, Candor would be Rodnac etc. All passive enemies in the light world would be aggressive in the dark world such as Mouboos, Squirrels, and Fluffies and have a freakish makeover. In order to enter the Dark World you need Candor points to do so. Upon entering the Dark World there are no Soul Menhirs and any Soul Menhirs you touched in the Light World are not effective. You will always respawn at the Abyss. You need to be at least level 60 to get into The Dark World. In order to get back to the gateway to the light world, you need to obtain the world skill and the spell #grey which will take you back to the gateway where you can once again enter the light world. This area is a grey spot where the two worlds meet. Here there will be two bridges. A red one which will take you back to Candor and a black one which will take you to Rahsmilut. Trees will have faces, the grounds will look like they are seamlessly coming apart with areas of sky between the cracks, and some other tormented scenary. When you receive this skill and spell you can freely travel to rodnac and go between light and dark worlds as you please.

If you follow the dark path and Sagatha won't teach you any spells you can learn these spells that you're lacking in the dark world but its much harder to do so. Also in the shops everything is very expensive and overpriced. You can also use your Candor points in the Dark World in a dark version of the exotic trader and he would tell items from previous events.

What do you guys think?

Johnny wrote:Mouboos, Squirrels, and Fluffies have a freakish makeover.
[...]
Trees will have faces, the grounds will look like they are seamlessly coming apart with areas of sky between the cracks, and some other tormented scenary.
[...]
What do you guys think?

I think this sounds like it would be a very large and challenging project to make all the graphics for that. Do you think you and Gonzo are up to the task in regards to motivation and skill?

Crush wrote:

Johnny wrote:Mouboos, Squirrels, and Fluffies and have a freakish makeover.
[...]
Trees will have faces, the grounds will look like they are seamlessly coming apart with areas of sky between the cracks, and some other tormented scenary.
[...]
What do you guys think?

I think this sounds like it would be a very large and challenging project to make the graphics for that. Do you think you and Gonzo are up to the task in regards to motivation and skill?

I could try my hand at the pixel editing. It would take a really long time to do this. I wouldn't want to just do a pallette swap. I would actually want to do trial and error. If a graphic I make sucks I want to be able to go back to the drawing board. But yeah I would be up for trying it. Most likely I probably wouldn't do it completely from scratch. Dark versions of the world I would think would need to have some edits of the existing tileset and world. There are a lot of places in Mana World as it is. So to say if this is only a two person effort of me and Gonzo, it would take much longer than if we had a team doing this.

This are some interesting ideas, but as Crush already pointed out, it would require a lot of work on graphics. Seeing that the recent projects and most of the ones which are planned next are moving forward only slowly because of missing art, I think it'd be difficult to find enough contributors for this project.

From my point of view as storyteller and scripter, I see another problem. You mentioned some plans for NPCs in the dark world, altered versions of existing ones. But what about the rest of that dark world? I don't think it would make sense to copy over the existing NPCs from the existing world. So either the dark world would be very empty, or a lot of new NPCs with new quests would need to be created.
Overall, this sounds to me a bit like a reinvention of the entire content, in a darker theme. I personally think that completely new content might be more interesting.
What do you think of first creating only a very small part of the dark world, with some of those evil versions of the friendly monsters and one or two quests, and if this is successful, it can be expanded? This would still require quite some work on graphics, but it'd be reduced to the tilesets of one area and would avoid having an empty dark world.

Jenalya wrote: What do you think of first creating only a very small part of the dark world, with some of those evil versions of the friendly monsters and one or two quests, and if this is successful, it can be expanded? This would still require quite some work on graphics, but it'd be reduced to the tilesets of one area and would avoid having an empty dark world.

We never intended to make it all on one time we were just brainstorming and we posted it here because we wanted to know if it sounded like a good idea or not. (I was mostly concerned with the geography of the game to be honest)

But we have already talked about what to focus on - and for starters- we decided that it would be best if we could finish this part:

Johnny wrote:Trees will have faces, the grounds will look like they are seamlessly coming apart with areas of sky between the cracks, and some other tormented scenary.

We also have some funny ideas for the story itself, but we would not like to spoil it all yet.

But basically we want to give those who took the dark path a second chance, as they can get those skills that they did not attain with Sagatha in the Dark World, while still making it so hard that they still will feel that they are being punished, and we want to create this new area that will be like a 2D version of the landscape in Dragon Hunters:



We hope that someone also will get exited about this and help us at some point, perhaps after we have finished the first part. (or during the process)

EDIT: I will/or Johnny will draw a map or something like that to illustrate what we are thinking. (later on)

Johnny wrote:Trees will have faces, the grounds will look like they are seamlessly coming apart with areas of sky between the cracks, and some other tormented scenary.

Fother_J made a tree with face, afaik it's still in WIP but may you could look at this. Last time that I checked it was in the art repo.

Jenalya wrote:This are some interesting ideas, but as Crush already pointed out, it would require a lot of work on graphics. Seeing that the recent projects and most of the ones which are planned next are moving forward only slowly because of missing art, I think it'd be difficult to find enough contributors for this project.

From my point of view as storyteller and scripter, I see another problem. You mentioned some plans for NPCs in the dark world, altered versions of existing ones. But what about the rest of that dark world? I don't think it would make sense to copy over the existing NPCs from the existing world. So either the dark world would be very empty, or a lot of new NPCs with new quests would need to be created.
Overall, this sounds to me a bit like a reinvention of the entire content, in a darker theme. I personally think that completely new content might be more interesting.
What do you think of first creating only a very small part of the dark world, with some of those evil versions of the friendly monsters and one or two quests, and if this is successful, it can be expanded? This would still require quite some work on graphics, but it'd be reduced to the tilesets of one area and would avoid having an empty dark world.

The maps actually could work out to be smaller in a matter of speaking. Regarding the NPCs, we're not planning on recycling any NPCs from the Light World in the way you're thinking. They will have negative counterparts. These counterparts will reflect the nature of who their light world counterparts are. For example, Hasan is known to be nasty in the Light World, but in the Dark World, Nasah his counterpart, is very kind and helps you out and is probably one of the few kind people you'll find in Rahsmilut.

Also yes its a reinvention of existing content but as I said it will be done in a different way. See with the dark world seams coming apart, some original map designs may be chopped up and altered into creating different map layouts entirely. You may find some sky barriers where there were none before or obstacles where there were none before. For example, the Wizards House in Hurnscald may not be a Wizard House, it could be a Temple for Monsters. Think about Zelda 3 and the Dark World. It sort of resembles the Light World but with a huge twist. Things are located in different places and some areas are changed around, added and subtracted. Think about how in the light world the desert you go through becomes a goopy weird monster swamp called Misery Mire in the Dark World. You may find some twists in the Dark World here as well.

Keep in mind this is all just reletively speaking and brainstorming. We're forming a blueprint as we go. As far as starting off small this is exactly what we planned to do if this pans out at all. The idea is for us to start off first with Rodnac and the Abyss. Candor in and of itself isn't too large of an area so twisting it around to create Rodnac shouldn't be anything huge to start off with. The Abyss also isn't a very large area. Its really more or less a transitional area with two paths, one which will take you back to Candor in the Light World and the other to Rahsmilut in the Dark World.

I love this idea. As was pointed out, it would probably take a lot of work... but then, you can accomplish a lot with minor changes. For instance, instead of a full copied dark world, you could have it only be limited important locations - Tulimshar/Rahsmilut, Hurnscald/Dlacsnruh?(LOL, try pronouncing that!), and maybe a custom "dungeon" map or two (even a more dangerous modified map, such as the north mines, would probably work).

As for NPCs, you could just tweak them to be a bit more sinister without much work. I would probably go with "mean" faces, or maybe demonic/animal additions, such as horns, ears - NPCs don't take much artwork unless they are animated, so this seems easy enough. Scripting is rather easy too, it's just a matter of how much time and effort you'd wanna put into a project like this.

I'm a fan of "other worlds", similar to the easter island, so this sounds like a lot of fun if done right.

Sounds a little bit like my halloween town idea ive mentioned several times. Would be a nice project. Good luck

Regards,

mistergrey wrote:I love this idea. As was pointed out, it would probably take a lot of work... but then, you can accomplish a lot with minor changes. For instance, instead of a full copied dark world, you could have it only be limited important locations - Tulimshar/Rahsmilut, Hurnscald/Dlacsnruh?(LOL, try pronouncing that!), and maybe a custom "dungeon" map or two (even a more dangerous modified map, such as the north mines, would probably work).

As for NPCs, you could just tweak them to be a bit more sinister without much work. I would probably go with "mean" faces, or maybe demonic/animal additions, such as horns, ears - NPCs don't take much artwork unless they are animated, so this seems easy enough. Scripting is rather easy too, it's just a matter of how much time and effort you'd wanna put into a project like this.

I'm a fan of "other worlds", similar to the easter island, so this sounds like a lot of fun if done right.

I really love where this is going. Like making some of the NPCs Minotaurs, a succubus here and there, other demons and such. This idea is getting better and better the more people add to it and thank you for that mistergrey . Yeah custom dungeons will exist. One idea I had was based off of the Floating Catacombs from Symphony of the Night:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... PGQ#t=308s

Basically an upside down catacombs dungeon with all sorts of weird enemies. Instead of say statues sticking out of the ground you may have ceiling decor sticking out of the floor hanging upward.

I also like your suggestion of scaling down the Dark World at first and just including the major areas. mistergrey your vision of this matches exactly what I had in mind pretty much. Glad to see we're on the same page

I mean to get a good concept of a Dark World one could even take a look at the game Darkseed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... Yk#t=2261s

Or most other games with an overhead view which has a Dark World.

Ideas are great, but unless you acquire the skills and the time to actually get stuff done (either yourself or in form of other people), they won't ever become reality.

Maybe Silavin is there no Snowland but an Vulcanoarea XD

Nice Idea, interesting - i hope it is doable. Good luck!!

im gonna help too (:

ImNotPirate wrote:im gonna help too (:

In what way?

ImNotPirate wrote:im gonna help too (:

Cool thank you . We need any and all help we can get.

Crush wrote:Ideas are great, but unless you acquire the skills and the time to actually get stuff done (either yourself or in form of other people), they won't ever become reality.

Crush I am not an expert in pixel art so yeah I can see all the points you're making about the skill to do this. The work I undertake may not be the greatest but I could try. An example of what I could do is here:

http://s269.photobucket.com/albums/jj47 ... 20Sprites/

Those are just sprites, but I could also do tiling. If it has to be top notch and heavy duty eyecandy, it will likely take me a very long time to achieve that. Though I have nothing else going on due to not having a job at the moment, so I suppose I could start small and attempt to make a couple of tiles in either Gimp or Inkscape.