Disclaimer: I decided to write this without editing or proofreading. I will likely come back to correct my correction notice in the distant future.

Capsule Dragons is a website that is meant to be an independent blog about independent video game development.

I post news about browser games and link to an account where anyone can play any games I make there. (I plan on uploading a few tech demos, with detailed notes, if anyone is interested in learning about how/why I coded something.)

However, in 2020, after acknowledging real-world situations, the website started to take a virtue-signaling approach that went rapidly downhill, to the point where opinions and bias ruined everything.

This is not a website meant to take action in any community to support any cause. I have specifically added a disclaimer on the about page that this is an “unofficial, opinionated blog” (or something along those lines).

As someone who is describing a need to take action for issues that I view myself responsible for, I don’t think making this website into what I wanted to talk about for taking action is the way to go. I can encourage developers to be generally respectful and at least think twice before you act, but, political reform and community reform isn’t something this website was meant for, and it’s actually the wrong place to post it here.

So… why use all this virtue signaling?

The purpose was just one thing, to hold myself accountable for supporting some things I wanted to get involved in later, so that I would come back here and remember what standards I hold myself accountable to. Upon finding out that there were no more standards or notes, I began to cringe at failing to do anything useful.

On the outside, Capsule Dragons’ change in the description you see next to the website (there’s a reason I fixed that) made it sound like it would appeal to public relations, though my goal is not to become more popular or to virtue-signal anyone. (That is also the reason why I am not describing anything “about” myself).

It started with “I’m aware of what’s going on in the world.” to “I would like to help” to “You must take action if you read this” to changing that to the website’s mini description you see if you look it up, and now I’ve regretted all of this, because it’s not holding true to my point or values.

…And about Infidemia… Instead of a virtue-signaling game, it’s… literally just a video game. I noticed it didn’t feel genuine and that’s why I revised it (again). Doing some work on it today, and remembering what work I did, I feel like those changes have felt genuine.

That’s the important thing for this website, is being genuine. I’m honest that I don’t really like the games I make because I’m expecting a more professional result but I don’t follow through with my expectations. I’m honest that I care about people (even if I seem without emotion in real life), though this went way too far. It made it stressful to work on this website as well, as I felt that I had to portray the values I wanted to show, but then that just became what I didn’t want it to become – a huge virtue signal move.

What exactly is virtue signaling, though?

According to Oxford Dictionaries (citation needed), it means “the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue”.

That’s exactly what the website became, even if I had the intent of showing that I care (caring in general), it became filled with speculation and guesses as to why my opinions were right or wrong, and honestly, this is not the intention.

This is a website about games development and random things going on in my personal life that I sometimes discuss but don’t usually, mostly not discussing those things because I don’t want those things to gain attention or to be listed here.

Ironically, the changes in my personality to view my opinions as right or wrong (a personal event) had made their way to this website and now I’m talking about that event, but, I guess the focus here is that I started to become a pseudo-activist.

I don’t think social activism is bad, I think it actually might lead to more discussions (as long as it’s not just people virtue signaling each other. If it’s people being open to discussing topics that they deem societally inappropriate, that’s what I would like to hear). Though… the issue about all this is that it doesn’t get the point across.

And even getting across the point wouldn’t be appropriate to do here. Maybe on a political opinion blog, or maybe on another website altogether, but, we have to remember that Capsule Dragons is a website about the game series I made, and even if it’s changing to become a better place, this is, in my opinion, the cringy way of improving the website.

There are some changes I need to make to the Capsule Dragons video game series, actually, though this is just me having a moment where I realized I messed up. The renaming of the main enemies in the game will change, and I had a plan of what to change the enemy name to, though I don’t think I wrote it down. I think it was supposed to be something along the lines of “poison slimes” (though that doesn’t sound good) because the reason the enemies were purple was because that was like a poison element, maybe it was like a shadow/darkness element, though based on how it was used in the first game’s lore, it’s more of a poisonous element, as it damaged the game world (poison, toxicity, just like my toxic approaches that I talked about making me cringe…)

On an unrelated note, the dragons themselves need more creative names, as “Red”, “Blue”, “Pink”, etc., just aren’t good enough.

I mean, maybe if they have unique attacks (“This is the power of ‘Blue Fire’!! This flame shall deal 9,000 damage to the boss!”) there was a use in that, though it just didn’t feel creative enough. Still naming the dragons based on the colors of the rainbow, mostly (Blue should have been Indigo if Icey was named Blue… just a side note), is still possible in more creative names – Fredrick could be Red’s full name, as an example, or maybe alternate spellings are used in creative ways to add a pun to each name.

I’m not saying that this has some political association with it, I’m just unhappy with a naming convention.

The point of this correction is to apologize, but also to improve.

Around the time I finished one of the more ingenuine articles, I sent a letter to some people, telling them kind of the same thing, but it was too demanding and it was actually insensitive to the current condition of these people – assuming they were well off was a bad way to go, especially when I remembered that I ended up sending this message of demanding to help out when someone who would need this help was told that instead. …That was a huge learning experience for me, because when I got direct feedback on a message like that, that’s when I realized I was being told that I was virtue-signaling.

The term “virtue-signaling” might have some political connotation with it, but let’s just ignore that. In fact, let’s come up with a new term, of “subjective morality”, since that’s technically slightly more or less creative.

Adding a subjective morality to opinions is not really a good way to open up discussion about them – I’m writing this section mostly to keep myself accountable, where I remember what not to do – though since this article would be irrelevant if I wasn’t talking to the reader, I would like to tell the audience that I will try to keep things on this website clearer.

If I’m describing opinions about current events, I’ll label the article as opinion, and not making up a tag to tell the readers this has to be right or wrong.

If I am describing current events, I promise to cite any resources I use for analysis, and to actually provide some analysis of the situation, as practice for decent journalism. I had some complaints myself after reading pieces that either supported or went against my perspective, and in my perspective I think both needed more analysis of the issue and less opinion (maybe opinion, but at least label it opinion, or have a part where you analyze the issue and then talk about your opinion of it…)

Additionally, I will continue to add corrections, disclaimers, and anything else that I need to do to keep this website updated. (There should be one at the top of the page, telling the reader that this page will be updated should I find inconsistencies, although it’s currently low on my list of priorities, so please check back later if there are updates)

I have yet to fix my profile.

It would be easier for me to issue a simple apology statement, and that’s what I view this as, the easy option of a simple apology, though even if there’s not a point in doing this, remaining silent about my mistakes wouldn’t help me, as it would make this website less accountable than it already is.

I have some standards I’ll hold myself accountable to, but I won’t list them off here, because I think that trying to change the reader’s opinion is not what this website is about. If it were to be argumentative, sure, but, this is meant to be a list of posts about myself complaining that I never make a decent game (see the About page).

One of my major issues about all of the things I started to do was that I started to do them wrong.

That’s the purpose of this correction, to point out that I messed up, not because I want someone to forgive me, but because I want to remember that I messed up here.

When I started talking about all the things I wanted to do, I made it sound like I was demanding that the readers of this site go out and do that themselves. Though… I also didn’t know what I was talking about.

Now that I’ve done (barely any research) on topics of interest, I’ve come to the conclusion that my research is not done yet, and that it takes time to actually get involved in all this, and that this website is not the right place to get involved, and I was explaining everything the wrong way.

This page is also a chance for a correction at several other mistakes I made.

Infidemia’s description in one of my posts called the heroes of the story “activists”, though during that time, I was trying to add a subjective morality to the game, and make it seem like the characters were doing what I thought was right and what had to be right. I don’t agree with calling out specific opinions right or wrong (…that’s actually the premise of another project I have…) though the game is not designed around giving the player “right choices” or “wrong choices”. Upon playing some games that appeared to have “right” or “wrong” choices, I wasn’t happy with how the other choices didn’t help to make gameplay interesting, though instead I was glad to see story-driven games that allowed players to experiment with choices and determine their own opinions about the game world.

That’s the kind of thing Infidemia is supposed to be, where you can experiment with “what-ifs” (the one concept that started the game), and I decided to change the endings of the game to make the player learn something however they decide to play the game. The idea of a “good ending” and a “bad ending” I didn’t like, although it might be good for a platformer game to encourage the player to play through the whole game and experiment with all the offered mechanics, it’s not really suitable for a role-playing game. Maybe rewarding the player’s experimentation would be interesting, so then the player’s encouraged to try out different playstyles, though that’s my opinion.

Another thing to note – Infidemia is probably not going to be as friendly as the Capsule Dragons games, based on the content of the game so far. All what this means is that for players who may not like the presence of such content should at least check back for news on the content rating and listed content in the game, and maybe play the demo (check back for a demo, too) to see how that content’s represented exactly. I’m putting this out there to inform potential players interested in the game that you may want to review the demo first if you are interested.

Also… a big part of Infidemia’s story is the surprise, not one surprise or multiple, just adding an element of surprise, so I won’t go in-depth about story, game content, or how gameplay mechanics are involved in the story.

Sorry for those previous 2 paragraphs, kind of ended up talking about development instead of corrections to make.

I’ll talk about a correction to the modding policy, though I’ll also talk about development a bit more (sorry for including development info in an article about corrections)

Oh, yeah, the modding policy will be corrected at various points. That’s also another thing I wanted to correct, is that although there’s the potential to add mods to Infidemia, people could do potentially anything with a modification, and it’s impossible to control what people do with the game through modifications. Sure, I’d generally like modifications to be acceptable for anyone to download and use, but I can’t stop people from making modifications that could be potentially disrespectful or that damage the functionality of the game. That’s why there’s a loose policy, because trying to enforce uncontrolled modifications would not change much, though I do encourage players to modify the game with whatever beneficial enhancements or additions they find interesting.

Some fun things about modifying Infidemia:

–> Language Patches (Speculation – a possibility, but as of right now this would probably be a pain to do with the current system)

I’m not sure how many people would be interested in Infidemia, though I am interested in hearing responses about the game from a larger audience, and by allowing semi-open modifications, additional resources that can be added to the “mods” folder means that the Infidemia script might be able to be translated… but I’m not sure what tools would be needed. As this isn’t something I know much about, please note that it might actually be a pain to make language patches to the game using the mods options available and that this may not be a fun thing if that’s how it works.

–> Difficulty Options

I haven’t decided whether or not to include difficulty options or to leave everything at a default setting. Level scaling for enemies wasn’t going well when I playtested, so maybe letting the players decide what new options to adjust could make Infidemia’s combat more interesting.

–> Useful Stuff!

Minimaps, clocks, and a lot of UI (user interface) elements are a standard in many games now, though Infidemia’s UI is only on the menus and battle screens, so the potential for more UI stuff on the overworld could be really useful.

Another thing that might be cool to add would be a progress tracker kind of thing; while I had plans to do a quest tracker, I felt that I still need to consider that option more and I think letting the player add this option if they want could be an interesting thing to see.

Anything to make the game more accessible (maybe adjusting window sizes, UI elements, scaling settings – those kinds of things I find useful whenever playing a game, though that’s just what I find more accessible) Every player will have their own things they may want to add or remove, so anything you consider useful could be added!

–> Cheats

There are a few cheat codes in Infidemia already, though the way to activate them would currently require savefile editing. Luckily, mods may be the way to add cheat codes. Unlimited currency, items, levels, etc., would be fun to mess around with, though until I decide on using a cheatcode database for my game or not, it would be interesting to see players come up with a cheat system.

Anyway, I’ll hold myself more accountable in the future, and will try to fix things I notice that are going badly on this website. There may be more articles like this one (or not), just note that the purpose of these kinds of articles are for accountability and reliability.

Thanks for reading!

-ZoruaAl

…Also, if the website is not secure, try going to

welcome to the capsule dragons website

(Adding that “www” helps to go to the secure version; I’m not sure what certificate issues are going on behind the scenes, though I hope to figure those out to eventually fix the website on my own, when these kinds of things happen)

Update: Renamed the article, it sounded confusing to have two posts named “Infidemia Development Update”. This is the second one. After more than two weeks, it seems.

Hi there, just wanted to announce some upcoming details for Infidemia.

This game has been a challenge to work on, mostly due to the issue in development where I restart scriptwriting and end up writing several variants of the same intro, without getting to the significant parts of the plot… (even though the intro is significant, as it’s what gives the first impression, but also may have some plot to it as well)

Anyway, challenges aside, here’s how development’s going:

–> Intro #? – Redoing the game’s introduction again (Chapter 1’s development has slowed down a lot due to this).

–> Battle System – New abilities added. Haven’t playtested much recently, though it’s easier to build up the Heart Gauge without waiting ten turns or spamming the Guard command, and now I fixed the combo system and have temporary status conditions added to Wagers. (More info on that later.)

–> Maps – Dungeons 1, 2, and 3 are fully complete. 2 was a bit rushed, so I might finish adding content to it. Currently, there’s a bug with Dungeon 2 where you can hold the dash toggle button while running to count as running… …instead of counting as walking. The overworld is getting there… …at least, trying to work on the main city of the game, as it’s where most of the story will take place…

–> Characters – Last names to school faculty have been added, and more of the faculty members will be added to the game (finally). This means academics should be more interesting. Dialogue has been modified, but I am currently keeping the line that involves “…a demon in the shape of a cat” because I removed it earlier and decided it sounds better in the actual context of the game. Renaming the main characters has been tricky, although I will go for a better naming convention and I am working on coming up with names that will work well (sorry… I’m not very good at explaining things.)

–> User Interface – I figured out how to do the battle UI a while ago by making a prototype in another application. I was really happy with how it turned out, so battles will have a custom interface… …for now, everything in the engine is represented by default resources, except for a customized window texture.

–> Story – I made up an ending to the game a while ago. Then I started thinking about it. Then this started distracting me in daily life. So I got an idea to improve the ending to make more sense and also fit better with the game. I’m not saying what it is.
Other story stuff – Figured out multiple characters’ backstories, and I’m now working on making characters dynamic. Although you can’t change your friends’ actions, your decisions affect the story, and your friends’ personalities will change as well… …just don’t make anyone mad.
Character relationships – Friendship levels between friends and family members have been considered to impact some battles. Just know that the game has a friendship system… …even if it doesn’t do much yet.
Cats – There was a cat who seemed to be unfriendly. That cat is still in the game, but, it’s hard to tell if the cat will be a friend or an enemy.

–> Boss Fights – The first midboss and the first boss have been added. I won’t say if they’re optional or not, if they’re part of the main story or not, though there are some tough foes out there in Infidemia.

–> Dialogue – Considered adding character portraits and backgrounds to style the game like a visual novel, just because I noticed writing lengthy dialogue in somewhat empty areas felt like it could use at least different character expressions and more detailed scenery. However, I don’t consider myself good at drawing, I haven’t made much concept art for this game, and… …just know that this is a consideration in development…
Dialogue choices – Added a few more options to some things… Added a new option that should appear in (most) scenarios.

–> Glitches – Still putting together a compilation of various bugs. Well, at least characters no longer jump on the table instead of attempting to sit in a chair. Also fixed an issue where characters would jump onto the same tile and stand there when attempting to use a bed to rest. Now characters should be able to have their own space and resting areas.

–> Secret things – (??? was found.)

–> Fixing some things – Screen flashes will not happen anymore. Applying a filter to the screen is still possible, and fading the screen in and out is still possible as well. However, that was from an update a while ago. The font size has been hard to work on, as I have to make sure characters’ dialogue fits inside text boxes (regardless of how much they’re talking or not) though it should be better off than where I was before. I’m making adjustments to the game to fit anything that would make it user-friendly for me, although in a later feedback survey after the demo to be released in some time, I will see what I can do to add features of interest.

–> Mods – I considered allowing players to modify the game without having to open up the executable file or mess with data structures inside the game. (While you may have to do that to modify the game anyway…) I’ll see what I can do to modify the base engine of the game to allow players to easily modify the game, without causing issues in playability. However, I’ll be testing this myself, it may be a demo feature, and the feature will only be used if it is considered safe. (More details on that at a later time.) I’ll test this feature quickly then report on my findings. Oh, it looks like it works! (*Game crashes twice in a row before working*)

–> Platforms – So far, this game has been tested to run on the Windows operating system (copyrighted by Microsoft Corporation) and the Android operating system (copyrighted by Google LLC). In general, PCs and mobile devices are not even playing ground for gaming, though my goal is to focus on performance and playability for Infidemia, and so far both of these platforms work, although not with the minimum requirements I hope to meet. Hopefully this game can run on a lot more devices than I expect, though it will take some optimization to get there. After finding a setting for building it as a mobile application, I was able to improve performance and only face slight lag while in the overworld (I think the dialogue text box sound effect may have lagged the game considerably, so I may have to change how that works on mobile) while having battles momentarily pause after playing animations that affect the whole screen or take longer to load. Anyway, for now I don’t know what platforms the game will be playable on, though I am testing platforms that I am able to.

–> Content rating – Compared to the Capsule Dragons series of games I worked on, Infidemia is a much more story-driven game, and I’ll have to review the story in order to establish a proper content rating. It also has a different style to it and I’m not sure what audience it will be appropriate for, although I am doing my best to keep Infidemia how I see the game, as well as keeping it a respectful and fun experience. There are various battle actions like using swords, spears, or magic spells, while some scenario actions include flirts and taunts. Out of context, a lot of this may sound strange, though it should be noted that this makes more sense when playing the game… …the content rating can only be based on how these things are represented in the game (and what things are represented), so without context of the game, I can’t give a proper description of what audience I think will be suitable, and I don’t have any official approval of a content rating yet, though there may be one in the future.

–> Drawings – Experimenting with some concept art, area design, a little bit of character design from last year, and I’m not sure what artstyle to use. I’ve been doing a little bit of this, but I do not consider myself an expert at art.

–> Paintings – There may be some background scenery that I decide to paint for the game. Please do not expect it to look good, just know that I am wanting to experiment with art and design as part of game development.

–> Progress – Development’s still going slowly.

–> Screenshots – Will be added once I think the game is in a presentable state.

I’ve been busy with random side projects (mostly just the music, and one day when I made a few sound effects) though I hope to be working on Infidemia more and write more posts about development.

I haven’t been in a good mindset for… …a time I will leave unspecified…

…and working on this game has been a challenge for me to keep working on it. Even when development gets tough, and I watch characters stare into doors instead of opening them, or somehow winning a battle perfectly by not doing anything after selecting an action-based command, I’ve decided I’ll try to work on this game a bit more. I view working on it like a test of “…can I make this game?”

Even though this project has been interesting to me (…working on Infidemia is at the top of my priorities, besides things I have to do) it’s been really hard to focus on doing it and also to focus on admitting the intro is going to be bad instead of trying to revise it… how many times… nine times? …What I mean by this is that I’ll have to admit that there will be many failures along the way, and I’ll have to learn from mistakes instead of trying to avoid them.

It’s interesting to learn a lot about making a role-playing game and trying to make it a game that I want to play (the focus on this game is making it how I want, while respecting the audience of anyone who plays the game). I’m not complaining about the amount of work or about time or anything – this is what I spend most of my time on anyway – and I just want to talk about the learning process involved for this game.

I’ve been taking inspiration from various games I’ve played, books I’ve read, etc., though I hope to make Infidemia feel unique. If you find anything that might sound like a reference or seem to be copying off one of the sources I was inspired by, it probably was either unintentional or happened to be something I used as a source… …anyway, I’m also accounting for copyright and trademark regulations, so references aren’t going to be completely obvious (if there are any noticeable ones, that is…)

Working on this game has made me think that it would be cool to see more people make games – I went from not knowing anything about programming to figuring out how to customize functions in another platformer project I’ve been working on – and I believe that anyone can make a game. It would be interesting to play more diverse role-playing games from more people, too, since role-playing games focus on stories, and maybe RPGs are the way to continue storytelling in a digital and interactive format.

I’m not an expert on games myself, though my best advice for anyone wanting to make a game would be to find tutorials about a style of game you want to make.

In my opinion, game design itself isn’t something that requires intricate knowledge of programming or art or music, it’s something that you just have to experiment with, learn about by examining it in games you play, and focusing on figuring out how to make a game that is fun to play – whether that fun comes from clearing a challenge, a reward system, or a complicated strategy that you build together and see the result of, game design is something that you can learn about by playing games, and studying games to figure out how to make a game you want to play.

Infidemia doesn’t really feel like it’s a game that has a meaning attached to it, though I’m making it just because there was something I wanted to talk about, and making a game seemed like it was the approach I could take to this. …I don’t want to talk about what “it” is, because that would spoil the story, though maybe the player will notice that when the game’s ready to play.

Even though the game feels ambitious and I’m making it sound like it’s a big project (it’s… a very short game, actually…), none of this would have been possible for me to do within one day, or an hour, or even one year. Although I started on it a while ago, and managed to get some base concepts and structure setup within the game on the first day (the first draft of the first script… …it’s not well written at all, but, it helped me figure out how to start the story), it still took a while to figure out where to go with the game.

Anyway… that’s all I wanted to mention for now. I’ll update this article if I notice anything seemed off.

Thanks for reading this.