Magus Relics: the Majimono

THIS PROJECT IS UNDER DEVELOPMENT, SO THIS PAGE MIGHT NOT BE FULLY UPDATED, AND NOT ALL OF ITS INFORMATION MIGHT BE CORRECT

What is Magus Relics: the Majimono?

Majimono, for brevity's sake, is a first-person game that intertwines 3D puzzle mechanics with a pseudo-open world, filled with narrative secrets that foster the development of Puoh, the protagonist, and unravel the mystery behind the magical artifact he is entrusted with when coming across an old man at death's doors.

Project vision

This game intended to follow up on A.C.T.I.O.N. as the next entry of the series of self-developed projects, although with a very different approach. The results of A.C.T.I.O.N. quickly prompted us to jump to a comercial engine, but even more importantly, it made us realize a fundamental flaw in our approach. While the idea of doing monthly projects to pile a good amount of experience in a short time was very tempting, our main roadblock was not the lack of it, but the lack of significant projects that translated that experience into the assurance that we were designers that could become key team members.

As a result of such considerations, we decided to take this project not as an emulation of a working environment, but as a real comercial project, aiming to publish it in Steam. This meant focusing more on the quality of the product rather than upholding a schedule from start to finish, so while plannings and organizational techniques were put to use, it was a more adaptative project than any other we had worked in. In fact, since we were putting the focus on the best possible player experience, implementation of a full-fledged narrative would be a must, one that in many of the projects we worked with ended up cut off precisely due to time constraints.

Project tools

The project was developed using Unreal Engine paired with Visual Studio, an engine we had very little experience with. To it, we added the water plug-in, running it in version 5.1.1. Most of the necessary 3D assets were taken from Sketchfab, with each individual contributor noted in the Credits.txt file, and the audios were from XXXX (don't have audios added yet :).

Development process

Majimono began production on 11th May 2023, and was finished on XXXX 2023, with two weeks of breaks scattered in-between. It all began, as always, from a core thematic idea: a story about appreciating what has been left from the past for the future generations. We wanted to make an experience where the player would gradually encounter all those kindness-filled instances that contrasted their feelings of isolation and pointlessness; however, we didn't want to make a collectathon where the motivational focus was purely in the gathering, because we would shift the emotional core of the game into the satisfaction of completion, instead of the appreciation of what the narrative was trying to communicate. This drove me to create an invented alphabet that would both set the kind of interaction we would be asking from the player, as well as shifting the motivation to the exploration and uncovery of information, rather than the gathering per se (supported by classic engagement elements like the narrative presentation and world-building). Hesitation appeared, then, in how to justify why the avatar would be actively involved in finding those moments, and how could we make it easy to understand why he would appreciate them, which resulted in the protagonist being someone with low self-worth, dragged by a sense of obligation, and someone who is overall unhappy because of the environment he grew up in, a direct inheritance from generations past.

From there, we focused on how to make an engaging gameplay system, and already having conceived the concepts of runes that held power, and weapons that extracted said power, the Majimono (the main mechanic of the game) came about, answering the need for strict and defined rules that would allow us a simple, controlled and narrative-related progression. Concurrently, we developed the narrative's climax in the form of the Queen's Madness, and from there on, it was only a matter of answering questions about narrative consistency, how to present the information, and to regulate behind which mechanic possibilities each element would be locked, giving space for out-of-order sequences to incentivize replayability and interestig speedrunning routes.

Once there was a vision for the project, we began programming, which overlapped with many learning processes for parts of Unreal that we hadn't worked with previously, majorly the UI systems, but also landscapes, the water plug-in, the localization system and the use of C++ classes to complement blueprints. This was for us the most frustrating part of the development, both due to the slow pace of progress, having to alternate learning with coding, and the lack of narrative or game design present during it. It was also in this period that we began collecting and introducing the free-source meshes that would make the visuals of the game, which was an even more tedious and unappealing process. Eventually, though, the systems would shape up, and we could jump onto more creative parts of development, improving my motivation, and helping better contextualize the systems we had in what would be the final result.

One very distinct point in contrast with A.C.T.I.O.N is the lack of testing up to this point, as we had been developing for around three months, and none had been carried out. This is majorly due to the nature of Majimono being very narrative centric, and with the limited testers at our disposal, we preferred to wait for more accurate feedback once we could actually influence how the gameplay was perceived and learnt through the narrative.