Mersia Muses - Monster Taming Rhythm Game - Godot Devlog #1: Inspiration

Hi all, and welcome to the first Devlog for my indie rpg Mersia Muses. Muses is a pixel art monster taming / rhythm game mash up where you explore the land of Merisa and collect inspiration in the form of Muses - creatures powered by your imagination.

When I decided to develop a video game during the summer of 2020, I had no development experience and learnt most of what I know from Youtube videos and online resources. My background is in photo/video production and real world game making so my understanding of editing software and how the mechanics of games work was solid. I decided the best thing to do was create a pixel art game for both ease and aesthetic reasons.

I was born in ‘93 so my childhood was heavily influenced by the anime boom of the 00’s with Pokemon and Yugioh consistently falling in my top 10 so when I looked at what game I wanted to make, a monster taming jrpg was top of the list. I also has a few caveats that I 100% needed to be in my game:

• Could be developed on a 5 year old chromebook
• Playable on mobile - I know usually when people think of mobile gaming they instantly think of a dip in quality. Since Muses is going to be a 2d pixel art game it should be fully playable on any modern device and there is a huge berth in mobile games that are not ad based or freemium. I wanted to develop a complete game experience that could be ported to any device but with mobile in mind. 
• Set in my hometown of Liverpool - I wanted to present a story rich game that explores the lore that I am familiar with - after moving to Toronto in 2018 I realised the importance of a place and how it can culturally impact someone and coming from the Music capital of the world I wanted to spread the love and culture of the city through Muses.

So with all this in mind, I set about coming up with ideas. One of the first things that comes up when learning game development is basic rhythm games. They get you used to all of the basic concepts while introducing the audio to visual connection that is so important in gaming. Most monster taming games like Pokemon feature state machines which include the overworld your character explores but when you enter a battle or contest for example, what is essentially a different game replaces the original and the player controls work differently. I decided to play around with the idea of using other mechanics than just the simple battle 1v1 like pokemon and include a fully featured rhythm game as one of the core elements of muses.

I enjoy the turn based battle mechanics of Pokemon, Final Fantasy and Shining Force as they allow you to get easily distracted and are not reliant on constant player focus in the same way a rhythm game is for example. So battles stay as the other main mechanic of progression in the game, however I did have a problem with these types of games. Violence. I am a complete pacifist and even as a child found it unusual that all the games we encounter as children have this level of violence that is not healthy. I’m not going to be going on any large moral tangents here but tldr, I wanted the battles in my game to be as non violent as possible. 

After playing a few jrpgs again to whet my beak, I decided that an active time battle system - where each muse got has its turn determined by a combination of its initial speed, modifiers and their move on any given turn - was the system I found the most fun and with my non violent battles I came up with an idea. What if your creatures were summoned like in yugioh, where even to the characters of the story they aren’t real? This led to an adventure where you as an up and coming musician have to travel around the land to collect musestones, which when used with your equipment summons realistic holograms in a battle of the bands!

So after a little bit of brainstorming, I had the concept, I was creating a:

• Monster taming/ Rhythm Game mashup
• 96 unique creatures each with its own song
• Full explorable overworld with companions following you
• Story driven narrative inspired by the music capital of the world and celtic lore
• Multiple character save slots
• Character customization
• Quests

I know it’s one thing to talk about scope creep and lack of knowledge but over the past 9 months I have been honing my development skills and now have an alpha demo available to play. The demo doesn’t have all of the features mentioned yet but I am working to finish everything off before polishing and buffing the art and audio.

So why am I making devlogs now? Well the game is in a semi-playable state and while every day I’m adding more and more and know what needs to be done, I don’t know what aspects of the game are even any good to an objective audience. A few dozen people have already played but feedback has been minimal so I wanted to develop a community around the game while I continue to develop it.

My next major aim for the game is to complete the demo to a standard I am happy with but the demo I have now was made while I was still very fresh to game development and is now just a tangle of superfluous code and resources that have long since gone out of date. After spending a couple of weeks debugging, I have decided that the ‘bad code’ as it were will need to be addressed but since I am reworking every aspect of the demo, it would make sense to create this devlog series now as over the next few weeks I will be retouching almost every aspect of the game. 

I hope you’ll follow along this journey with me and please play the demo and leave feedback. I only have a twitter atm but more socials to come.