Games and Projects

Premise

After traveling through a portal their genius friend made, friends Nunko and Thered find themselves in a utopian world. However, things will not be so utopian as they search for their friend!

In this new world, the entire society runs on a force called Arra. Arra is what makes up who we are - bolstering one's physical, mental and spiritual self. By honing one's Arra, one can achieve amazing things. By sharing Arra with others, it has also taken the role of a currency, making it much harder for one to misuse it (as you would be literally sharing your life force).

Inspiration

Japanese RPGs are my favorite genre of game. After I knew that I wanted to make games of my own, I naturally gravitated toward making an RPG. As a kid, I played games such as Paper Mario, Mario & Luigi, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy X, Golden Sun, and more. Over time, I also felt that turn based RPGs have been going out of style in the industry. Instead of replacing turn-based RPGs with action RPGs, I would like to try to capture the best of both styles in my own game. Over time, I gained more influence from other games that I've played, such as Chrono Cross, Star Ocean: The Second Story, and Octopath Traveler. I always struggled with coming up with original ideas in terms of game mechanics. Instead, I combined a lot of different inspirations, sometimes unknowingly.

As far as the story goes, I originally came up with the idea of basing the characters off of myself and my friends (I know, it's not very original). I wanted to be able to make a unique game mechanic, so once I was able to come up with the idea of Arra (based on the concept of aura), the idea of having the friends travel to a new world fit right in. Over time, and thanks to input from my IRL friends, we were able to shape the game's world, Aliaterra into a world who's creator actually lives there, and has had to endure tragedy and conflict of her own doing. As someone who enjoys fourth wall breaks and "meta" ideas, I wanted to make sure the world's creators were present in the story, albeit not really being like the gods that normally represent them. In addition, I wanted to make the game's story true to my heart, so given that game development has been my own dream, I chose to have the characters have their ambitions challenged. As a result, I expect the game to not really have a strong villain, but rather, a character-driven plot about their journeys to find happiness.

Development

The idea of Arra World has been worked on for about fourteen years now, and has evolved a lot over that time. In high school, I originally came up with the idea of a game where my friends and I would be main characters, and it would play a lot like Mario & Luigi games (I lacked a LOT of originality back then). Honestly, it was not much more than an idea that would allow me to make a game with (mostly) original characters. Over time, the idea of Arra came to be to drive the game's narrative and mechanics. It was influenced largely by the real concept of aura, which in itself manifests differently person by person. Since this was around the early 2010's, I made a prototype of a combat system for this game in Adobe Flash, which was an entirely turn-based RPG then. As a matter of fact, it was this experience that led me to make the Create a Flash AS3 RPG tutorials that were originally on the CoderNunk YouTube channel (which I have since unlisted).

Around the year 2014, I was introduced to the member of my friend group that would be the closest to me when it comes to game development. He was a very talented musician, and when he heard I wanted to make a game, he wanted to get involved. My other two friends also decided to work on the game with us, despite not having the technical background (nothing against them, they still were very helpful with ideation). The four of us spent most of our time writing the game's story, but we also discussed various game mechanics. Since my friends were away at college, we would get on Google Docs late at nights and work on the story. It was a blast. As time went on, we found that we were biting off more than we can chew (we didn't even have a prototype yet!), and decided to abandon the project. Despite this, all four of us are still best friends, and with this experience testing our limits of our friendship, we only grew closer.

After college, my musical friend and I decided to work on it for fun over the following three or four years. We focused more on the game's world and designed some puzzles during this time. However, our full-time work was time-consuming and we were still unable to focus on the game as much as we wanted to. Ultimately, my friend became a self-taught copywriter (and a very good one at that) and I was still working busy nights at my software engineering job. Originally, the two of us wanted to start a game company together, but our careers took different paths, and that's OK! Despite all this, Arra World became a thing of passion for me, so I decided to keep the project alive on my own.

Now that I was working on the project alone, while still working full-time, I did not make much progress in terms of getting a functional prototype working. However, the COVID-19 pandemic gave me a lot of time back, and that's when I was able to hone more of my development skills. While most of my work has been related to game design and story up to this point, I now finally spent some time on a prototype. 2020 provided a great opportunity for me to learn Blender and Godot, and I had a lot of fun working on the game again. Ultimately, I was able to make a few 3D models of my characters, as well as a small playable demo of combat in Godot 3.x. This time renewed my vision - making this game is what I must accomplish with my life, no matter what.

This year, I had trouble managing my time, despite leaving my job. However, my mission this year is to get on the path of healing, so I can be recharged to work on Arra World as much as I can. I also know that the game is very largely scoped, and I am probably over my head. However, I plan to approach it incrementally. My goal is to get a working prologue of the game done by myself. When I'm able to do this, I can then look into how to expand my resources, whether it be crowdfunding, hiring team members, etc. It'll be a long journey, but a fun one!