well

i guess that “Infidemia” is going to continue development, because i have been working on a new version of the plot, battle system, and even adding map designs…

I prefer not to share screenshots or any evidence that Infidemia exists because of reasons though I was considering showing an example of the battle flow in the game.

I won’t get too in-depth about mechanics here, though I made the combo system a little bit easier to tell what’s going on (you can now track combo levels during the battle, which means you know how many turns each character has), and I was considering adding multiple stages of ultimate abilities in the game.

Because the story had to be restarted, the plot’s going to go in a different direction and I might limit myself to only telling the story within one area the game takes place in. While that’s more boring than what I wanted to do originally, it helps me maintain scope and keep the map design manageable, as well as making it easier for the player to navigate a smaller in-game world.

I will probably add more areas from later in the game eventually, though after a breakthrough in figuring out how to fix the story and motivation to fix the combo system, things might go better.

I’m still revising the main battle theme, though my priority right now is getting the story ready to a point where things are looking playable.

This game has been in development since late 2019, so, I guess it’s been through at least a year of development by now, though, my usual timeline is one hour of work on the game per month. (Game development is not considered my job.)

If I were a full-time independent developer, you’d probably see a demo here by now and tons of screenshots, though, you would still see posts here where I randomly give up on the project only to talk about it again.

I’ll try to think twice before I post updates about the game from now on.

…

Well, I suppose that’s all there is to mention.

It’s kind of a personal game for me to talk about because there are some elements in which I wanted to talk about… personal stuff… though that’s another excuse for me to talk vaguely about it. After all, the base plot for the story was based on a series of 14 dreams I had that were all telling a story together, and that kind of thing is not something I’d randomly post to the Internet. (Though I did, and it is the kind of thing I’d randomly post to the Internet, because this is my blog, and I can be really random sometimes.) At least… not something I’d mention without giving context to the game.

Surprisingly, a lot has stayed the same in development.

The seven main characters (who you play as a group and individually at various points in the story) have stayed the same, although their dialogues and personalities have changed along the way, as they’re supposed to be dynamic characters while you’re playing the game. There is one character who you begin the game as and they don’t have any dialogue, but, I wouldn’t really consider them the “main” character. Part of the story involves them, but, in their own story, they meet six other characters and each one of them has additional stories, so maybe this character is the “protagonist” because you make choices for them, but, there are seven main characters. Maybe there is one character who you decide choices for, but, I’m not willing to give away the entire plot right now.

Part of the plot’s themes have stayed the same, but how I’m dealing with them has changed. I’m not sure who the audience of the game would be, though I’m making it a game that I find interesting, and if anyone plays it then they’re the audience and hopefully they’ll find it interesting. If someone plays it and they don’t like the game, that’s fine too, although I just hope that anyone who plays the game enjoys it. I’m not sure if “enjoy” would be the right word for this game, though based on how things go in the game I think it was the right word to use.

Oh, yeah, the final boss for the game has been constantly changing… There are at least four times as many “final bosses” as there were when I started planning, and now that means that most of the final bosses are just regular bosses. Every boss fight is supposed to have a different main mechanic that you use, maybe it’s one of the combat system techniques, something that you’re told about early on in the game or towards the end.

The music for the game has been… tricky to work on.

I’ll end up making everything consistent later, though it’s just… tricky… because there’s not a consistent feel to this game.

I tried to make “Infidemia” feel like playing another game that I played, though going for that atmosphere felt like the game just wasn’t suited to that.

The feel of the game now is supposed to be, at least, how I put it, “intense, like every decision you make in the game world might do something, with some uncertainty, though you know that you have a potential to change the game world.”

For the game’s difficulty level, I’m trying to focus on making the puzzles and the battles the hardest parts of the game. Doing multiple battles in a row when you’re stuck at low health isn’t something I’m going for, because each battle is supposed to have its own difficulty, and instead of getting a game over for a boss fight and starting over at your last save file, you’ll have to listen to the introduction dialogue again, reset some things, and the only punishment there is just having to start over, though you still get a chance to save your game if you decide to stop playing or need to exit the dungeon.

Oh, yeah, and I’ve purposely added punishing battle rewards… that’s right, battles aren’t exactly rewarding all the time. I’ve found ways to figure this out, and it’s not exactly with cursed items that you get or anything, it’s more that… …hmm, might spoil something.

There are rewards and stuff in the game, though balancing rewards with difficulty has been tricky because I have to balance the multiple ways to play the game which makes it harder to decide the balance…

…To effectively do this, I decide the balance in the game is how long something takes in a battle, if we’re talking about the combat system. Trying to make multiple things take up the same amount of turns or the same amount of time is all I’m doing – maybe there’s an ultimate attack, though you’d have to go through a certain amount of turns first – though it’s a design mechanic I personally find useful for turn-based role playing games.

And about the music, I considered adding character themes, and then a battle theme for each character, though… …I was mostly concerned with “who would have the better theme” and decided that because favoritism might get in the way (as a developer, though, each character has been interesting to work on and I can’t decide a favorite character. That’s probably why each character has stayed throughout the whole game and there are only seven characters who have been the same characters when they were added… …of course, their personalities change and I self-insert dialogue at various points for each character, though they’re all easy for me to remember, still relevant to the story, and still challenging to write dialogue for.) If there were character themes and battle themes, oh, wait, there’s one midboss who actually has a character theme… …whoops… …I’d probably say that each theme would have been combined to create a final boss fight theme where the music for that fight is literally just the final battle theme as it’s all the protagonists working together…).

Oh, also…

…there are some references to things like Capsule Dragons, Super Speedy Laser Cats, and more, though I’ll leave those for the player to discover.

I hope this was interesting.

I’m not sure why I still want to work on this game, after repeatedly claiming to delay it (don’t worry – my game development is based entirely on my mood! well, not entirely, but, there are implications for whatever I’m writing here based on my mood). I think it’s been good to continue working on. I’m glad to work on the game and I find it interesting, so, maybe I shouldn’t have asked that question 🤔.

In my opinion, this has been the most interesting game for me to work on, and I would like to continue it.

To be honest, there have been delays, but, mostly just for things like the art and animation, because I still have to learn about that.

Anyway, thanks for reading this.

It was a longer article than usual and I hope it provided entertainment value. Maybe some value for learning about my development plan, as well.

Remember when I posted “Infidemia’s not delayed” and then immediately posted “Infidemia’s delayed forever”?

This is another one of those cases where I’ll be posting updates based on fluctuations in mood.

For now, I’ll try to become more aware of my mood while I’m writing or doing anything, and I’ll try to post updates that are somewhat useful and indicative of development progress.

also, since you have read this far…

…there is a secret, hidden character, who you can only unlock by following these rumors that I made up:

(Secret rumors not found. Please try again later.)

Oh, looks like that wasn’t working. Hmm… I wonder how much save file editing would be required for secret characters to be added in?

oh, also, I’ll stop using the keywords/tags feature on this website. I don’t want to wrongly inform anyone that this website is more than just being a blog.

Hi there

today I’m here to announce the infinitely infinite delay on Infidemia.

Due to some issues in development, I will likely come back to this in an alternate timeline.

For now, here’s what development looks like:

[Planning Process] –> Complete. Story, characters, all bosses, main gameplay mechanics, done. Every revision is mostly consistent, with some features being redone upon each development cycle.

[Combat System] –> what…? I have redone the combat system at least once for each development cycle. The only things that have stayed the same are the usage of some dialogue-based actions, and combo-based ultimate attacks.

[Map Design] –> Upon my most recent revision of the game, I’ve started redoing map design for overworld areas (outdoors mostly). I designed a full dungeon for use as a tutorial within the story, but now it’s an optional area you can go to at any time, with the story content removed. Most maps have stayed consistent, and so far the game takes place within one city that was not meant to be as large as it is, but, considering how much story goes on there… …maps will likely remain boring and repetitive. I was hoping to go for a more diverse set of landscapes across multiple environments, though I was planning to do that for another game and Infidemia was sort of like that game to begin with, so, map design is a bit tricky here. Dungeons and puzzles take the most time to make.

[Story] –> A combination of pretty much everything… the game itself… is the story.

[Dialogue] –> Dialogue is revised even during writing “finalized” dialogue. The game also has to account for alternate dialogue (sometimes I like to use my alternate revisions for alternate dialogue) based on some specific things (or not so specific… I wanted to keep this a development secret, though players will likely discover this anyway, so…). Rewriting dialogue and writing dialogue in the first place takes probably the most time to do, because I also have to work on the next thing, eventing.

[Eventing] –> Making events that move the player, transition between rooms, characters with icons over their heads as reactions, dialogue, adding character portraits next to dialogue boxes, showing different versions of dialogue boxes… …it’s actually really fast because I’m using an engine that I’m used to developing in and requires minimal programming on my part, though it just takes time, because of the next thing, bugfixing.

[Bugfixing & Playtests] –> This game is probably the glitchiest I have ever played. I played a 3D platformer game and liked how the glitches could be used as mechanics (then, when I actually played the game, I complained about everything being broken… …and sometimes used the glitches to cheat, though sometimes accidental cheating is possible, and… yeah, an option to turn all the glitches in the game on or off would have been fun, but, that’s not how it works.) Unfortunately, Infidemia’s mechanics of characters staring into walls, jumping on tables, sliding (moving across the screen while looking frozen), battles with broken dialogue or with various other game-breaking things that literally make the game unplayable (sometimes failing to load a resource), which can all freeze the game. By playtesting, I’ve been able to fix many bugs, add new quality changes, and test things out on paper before I playtest the game to make sure eventing works right, and, although it takes more time, the game is slightly… slightly getting there. To being less buggy (sort of). I’ve kept records of every glitch and bug in the game, mostly as video captures, and intend to create a compilation later.

[Battle Eventing] –> Sort of like dialogue + eventing + combat system. Every battle requires some eventing from me, though boss fights require a lot more (only the tutorial boss is fully evented) and the game’s battle eventing is why battles are currently unplayable. Sometimes story is done through battle eventing, though this is mostly just to use the dialogue-based mechanics that you can use during battle.

[Development Cycle] –> Everything noted above is part of one development cycle. Infidemia’s development cycle goes from a loop of this (to whatever part of the story. One version of the game is at the beginning with a few minutes of gameplay, another is all the way until the next chapter, and one is halfway through a chapter, while another is stuck at a boss fight… actually, that’s the one until the next chapter…) until I decide to restart development (keeping the resources I used/made before, often restarting all dialogue and eventing though, except for map design travel events that swap the player’s location). The game has gone through multiple development cycles so far and none of them are past the prototype stage. I will be pausing development until my mindset improves enough to actually go with something I have started and not restart it for each time I notice something went wrong.

I have a demo version of the game that is [sort of] ready, and will probably release it within the next 10 years.

Thank you for your interest and support,

-ZoruaAl

Oh, yeah, forgot to mention…

Infidemia’s still being developed right now.

I just don’t know when I’ll be done.

I hope to get the main battle theme redone soon also.

I worked on doing custom instruments for the main battle theme for a month, though was unhappy with it every time, so, might redo everything for music as well, at least, everything for main battle music.

Please note that I am inexperienced when it comes to making games and even if/when I finish Infidemia, it will likely be a very low quality game with badly scripted dialogue, a boring combat system, and the worst story ever made. I am expecting to make a terrible game because of reasons and because I know I’m overambitious. The game might be two hours long, but, after only having less than two minutes completed across one year of development, I will likely return to the project in an alternate timeline.

Thanks for reading this, though.

Disclaimer: This is an opinionated article meant to acknowledge an event, although it lacks the proper citations, research, and does not have evidence-based claims. If you are interested in the topic, I strongly advise to learn about the topic on your own time from more reliable sources that take an in-depth analysis with cited sources. Thank you for your understanding about the lack of professional journalism. This is a blog and not meant to be a reputable news source.

Hello, Capsule Dragons website readers,

Today is a holiday that celebrates and honors the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had a legacy of fighting against systemic injustice, bringing people together, and taking action to establish social equity (changes that would benefit racial equity and individual rights), economic equity, and I am going to talk a bit here about why I believe this holiday is important, and still today, as well.

In the 1960s, in the United States, there were many civil rights movements going on, which all had a common goal of fixing the issue of a system that had constantly been harming minority groups, which is still a present-day issue. Today, there’s still a system in the United States that does not respect individuals for who they are and for what they have faced, a system that tells the majority to continue oppressing, and a system that tells the minority to stay oppressed.

This is why MLK Day is important to me, because it recognizes the work of more than half a century ago when social activism was beginning to influence the United States, although it also recognizes that there is still a lot of work left unfinished that we must contribute to today to prevent history from repeating itself, and to also fix this harmful cycle of injustice that plagues the United States… …And internationally, across the world, there are protests going on, there is injustice, but, there can still be progress, as long as people continue to support social activism and get involved.

Some companies claim to be supporting social activism by putting out a message on a social media that they stand up for communities that face this injustice, however, a lot of companies that have done this are actually ones that have been continuing to harm underrepresented communities. Not all companies are “evil”, and not all are “good”, but, the systems in place treat the concept of a company in the US as being higher than a person, allowing companies to create more oppression or create more change… …there are companies that were founded upon beliefs of being able to fix issues with companies as well, and some companies that are founded upon beliefs of supporting injustice have been starting to slightly change as well, so, there is still some hope.

Being someone who has the privilege of not relating to or facing systemic injustice is something I am aware of, and that is why I have focused more on getting people to know about injustices going on, especially when people in my position are mostly ignorant, and when I had been ignorant before, I’ve noticed that there are things I can do to make a difference, trying to get more people who are given too much power to understand why they need to stop supporting systemic oppression, to understand the histories of underrepresented people, understanding both their accomplishments (often these accomplishments are removed from history, but, they are still possible to find and learn about) and what they had to face and why.

I’ve heard of the concept of virtue signaling before and it’s not a concept to follow on this website, any company, though it’s still one I would like to address.

The Capsule Dragons website is not a website for social activism, change, or oppression. It’s just a blog about random games that I work on and it was never founded with the idea of being a suitable place to discuss things that I feel are relevant. It’s not like someone who plays a Capsule Dragons game is magically contributing to justice at the same time, and even if there was a donate button to a charity or movement for justice, those monetary donations would not be recognized by enough people to make a significant economic difference. I’ve noticed that by writing articles about my opinions of things going on, there may be the slight misunderstanding that I am actively involved in supporting justice and social change. The truth is, I’m not doing anything at all, and I can’t accomplish anything by writing these articles on a blog that people might accidentally know of because they wanted to hear about science or popular culture.

However, as a blog, I like to take time to discuss things that I feel are important to mention on a blog and mention my opinions and discussions about. These articles aren’t going to contribute anything to social change, however, my goal is to inform, even if I’m really bad at it.

I am using this post as a place to summarize what I have learned about the legacy of MLK Jr. and to talk about something that I feel is relevant. That is all.

I will try to get more involved in supporting social change, but, just realize that I am not doing anything to help anyone right now and it is better to consider me an ignorant person doing nothing rather than how I may have portrayed myself through these posts.

taking an aside about ignorance, I’ve noticed that there isn’t really a such thing as “innocence” when it comes to being innocent about issues going on, or other similar examples, like not knowing of injustice, or having the idea that everything is currently fair and just in this world and nothing needs to be done (why would someone think that, though – although I disagree with the world being okay right now, I would like to know why this approach is considered.), all of those things that I used to define “innocence” are actually “ignorance”, therefore, it’s my opinion that innocence does not exist, but ignorance does, and it is often confused for innocence.

In my opinion, there’s no reason to censor out any descriptions of anything harmful going on in a news article or to write everything in a positive, happy mood, as the importance of what’s going on is lost, and replaced with a false understanding that nothing bad is going on.

Even if the truth is hard to admit or it is not what you want to hear, it’s better to know of it than to ignore it. This article has some inconsistencies in it that continue to hide truth and I’d like to acknowledge that before uploading it, because, as I said, while these are opinions I’m talking about, I’m not a reputable source of facts. (Unless we’re talking about my game development posts, those might be reputable if you want to know about how my games are going.)

Imagining the idea of if children should be exposed to hearing about injustices in the world, I think that it’s important that children face truth rather than living without knowing it, because there are children who face these issues at young ages that many children simply don’t know of because of whatever reason, though having an approach where difficult truths are accounted for is important in my opinion as it might lead to more growth and understanding.

A fear of knowing the truth is often what creates ignorance as well, and it’s what also leads to histories being incomplete, leaving out details, and it feels incomplete.

Overall, I’ve messed up quite a bit on this website and I want to at least admit it. Trying to seek forgiveness for the incomplete understandings and assumptions that plague this website would be a foolish task, as it would not undo the harm in the past that this has already created. I can’t use a magical item of justice to instantly say that what I did was okay, because it was not okay, and there’s no reason to be forgiven for something that I can’t be forgiven for as it was unjustified. Trying to say that Capsule Dragons is a website talking about news that people might not know about would be as foolish as making an official news article about an event without being present at that event or even learning about it. I personally do not think highly of myself and do not mind extending my self-criticism sections of this website to however long I see fit, however the statement I made about being a self-deprecating person who sometimes works on games is at least a true one.

The reason the Capsule Dragons’ website’s tagline was changed was because that tagline was literally just virtue signaling the whole website as if it were about that.

No, this website is not about social justice, and I cannot claim it is.

It has a few opinion pieces where I talk about my opinion that things should change, because I believe that, but, it is unfair to label the whole website as that.

I searched up my own website and saw that the tagline was right next to the website name, which resulted in a prompt removal of that tagline that portrayed the website incorrectly.

This website has some serious issues (and really buggy ones, like the “⚠Not secure” sign) that I am trying to fix a little bit at a time, or, whenever I make a post here.

This page did not appear as the primary section of the “Main Page” because it would be unfair to the reader to have a page filled with all this text but it would also be unfair to make the first thing the reader views be something that may be misunderstood as an attempt to make the whole website seem this way.

I will be changing the “Main Page” to describe the website and link to an about page and pages about recent projects, however, I will make sure to keep sharing my opinions, because this is a blog and I’m not sure where else I should share my opinions on.

You might have noticed that I frequently talk about the United States. That is where my Scratch account talks about the location of where ZoruaAl supposedly resides, so I find it suitable to discuss my opinion of that country.

Because I do not have a personal life to talk about my opinions of on this website, I focus on just talking about my opinions of how society’s doing in the United States (by the way: masking up is important! the pandemic is still going on, it’s possible to help each other by staying safe). It would be fun to have a personal life to talk about, but, because I don’t, I prefer to just talk about things that I feel might be important to share my opinions about because somehow I think that for some reason I might should do that.

Maybe I do have a personal life, but that’s mostly just working on games and you already might have heard of that (even from this article, where I refer to myself as someone who makes games). Game development is not my job so I call myself “an independent video game developer in my free time”. I personally believe that my opinions have more relevance than how far I am in a video game I am playing.

it is also my opinion that whomever read all of this was interested and thanks for reading (regardless of my opinion).

For now, I’ll probably be updating the website a little bit, though I don’t have a schedule of when I update this website. sorry about that

Disclaimer: This is an opinionated post that does not take any time to analyze the issue, and I strongly advise in finding accurate sources from multiple opinions to take your own perspective on the issue. Please note that this is not a proper news source and should not be used as such.

A lot of recent news in the past few days has been discussed, and I would like to ask a question, somewhat relating to what I heard about, after checking my information…

Why?

In all of the delusional comments that have led people to a riot for an unjust cause, why would someone immediately follow what they were told by someone who’s just trying to control them?

Why would anyone, or a group, join for an unjust cause that they might not actually believe in if they had more details from different perspectives?

There’s a difference between protesting, rioting, activism, and anti-activism. There are actually a lot of differences.

Protesting, regardless of what you’re protesting for or against, is generally a nonviolent, peaceful way to get an argument across.

Rioting is different, because while some people may be interested in a cause, it’s mostly used to create violence, or to continue conflict, and the difference is that the true intent is gone.

Then, there’s activism and anti-activism. Activism is about supporting change for something usually beneficial (for instance, individual rights, equitable change, etc.). Anti-activism is usually created by false assumptions about activism and often tries to undo beneficial change, as we’ve seen recently…

…It also depends on what someone is advocating for or against and why they are doing that. This is why false assumptions that all protests are bad are made, and also why activism and anti-activism are used instead of just using only activism.

It’s disheartening to see what was once considered dystopian become reality, but, this was predicted to some extent, as well.

People following a path they are told to just because they believe any one thing might be true… …but, why not first research what you’re getting yourself into, regardless of if you think it’s good or bad?

I was doing some research about topics myself, though I only had a good understanding when I found multiple perspectives – not just one in support or one against.

I feel that if more people did that about something like what recently happened, instead of following a path without questioning it, they’d be able to find out it was a delusion after all.

This is just my question and commentary, and it’s not politicalized or turned into a “good versus bad” issue.

A few years ago, or maybe about 6 years ago, I heard someone talking about a lot of things I didn’t understand or hear of before, agreeing with anything they said, pretending to know what was being talked about.

After looking up what those topics really were, I found it best to question anything the first time if I don’t know, because it turns out these were similarly sadistic things that the person was talking about.

On the other hand, there have been a lot of people who have inspired me to open my perspective more, and even for something like this, I was able to try and see other sides of the issue, and was able to think of a more universal question, “Why?”.

There are a lot of questions that have multiple answers, from different sources, and it’s important to have good research habits to figure out what’s reputable, and what’s not. Finding multiple reputable sources about anything is always a good idea, and it just takes a bit more time, but, from there it’s possible to find the truth, only by examining everything that claims to be the truth. Sometimes there are half-truths, but, always question whatever it is and try to find the answer yourself.

Even from this page that I wrote, there’s a lot of missing information, though I may have left that out on purpose, to ask more of a question to lead to further discussion about what’s going on.

And the pandemic’s still going on, in a lot of places around the world, and where recent events have happened, too.

Well…

Thanks for reading this, and I hope you have a nice day.