Exilian

Game Design and Project Resources: The Workshops Quarter => Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley => Pangolin Games => Topic started by: Jubal on February 03, 2021, 11:36:37 PM

Title: Amiran: A game I don't have the capacity or time to make
Post by: Jubal on February 03, 2021, 11:36:37 PM

So this is a cool idea I don't have any time for, largely inspired by playing Hades: doing a singleplayer-roguelike-RPG type game based around Amiran, the legendary hero (though questionably heroic) of the Caucasus.

Backstory

Basically in the Amiran stories (excluding the medieval Amirandarejaniani which is for all intents and purposes about a different character), Amiran is the greatest, in terms of prowess, man who ever lived, and is often portrayed as half fey or something like that. Anyway, he basically goes around and fights everything, and ultimately breaks his vows so many times and/or beats up everything in the world until eventually God decides something must be done. So Jesus descends to tell Amiran to stop, and Amiran challenges him to a wrestling match or contest of strength. This goes badly for Amiran because an omnipotent opponent can, it turns out, just say "sure we'll have a rock lifting contest" and then command your rock to not move, which being part of creation it is cosmically obliged to do. Amiran is then chained to the rock and buried in a cave deep under the mountains. He does have company though in the form of his pet flying dog, Kursha.

Every year, Kursha licks at Amiran's chain to try and free his beloved master because he is a Very Good Boy. Every year, on Maundy Thursday, all the blacksmiths in Georgia symbolically strike their anvils to keep Amiran in his chains, reforging the links with this ritual. So, um, what happens in modernity when the last village blacksmith ultimately shuts up shop? (If you think this sounds familiar, I did already write a song on this topic).

The Pitch

So, Amiran finally breaks free of his chains, and here we start our adventure. There's a tutorial/starting section, and then Amiran gets to a hidden valley which will be "base camp" for the game. Here it gets into being much like Hades: Amiran can do a bunch of runs through various levels, if he fails he gets returned to his chains until he can break them "the next year" (in practice, immediate reload).

The plotline is based on pathways and characters that represent different choices that Amiran can make about who he wants to be having spent more or less all of human history chained up under a mountain. Does he want to mellow out and be a peaceful reminder of past traditions, does he want to avenge the wrongs done to him and/or others, is he mostly concerned with restoring his (and others) freedom? My vague mental schema is this trio of main paths - War, Peace, Freedom - each of which gives an ending to the game, with a fourth path, possibly Creation, that wraps them together for a "final ending" and is only unlocked when one rejects the three other endings on a particular save.

As you go through each path, that path's guide character will talk to you about the possibilities and why that path is good, but also the other two guides will point out the difficulties or problems of commiting to that path to the exclusion of other things. So for War one gets the freedom character talking about how war requires authority and likening that to Amiran's chains, and the peace character showing the hurt done to ordinary people, but in the Peace run, the war character will point out that without struggle and fighting justice is never done, in the freedom run you get both war and peace discussing the ways in which individuals cannot be islands, and so on. The final path will be about Amiran trying to draw those strands together and coming to a far less certain but more hopeful conclusion than the other paths.

At the end of each path (except the fourth), Amiran has the option to accept or reject its teaching. Rejection requires that he symbolically reforge his own chain and start over to choose a different path.

Imagined cast:

Character	Role	Based On
Amiran	Protagonist	Myths of Amiran
Kursha	Being the Goodest Boy	Myths of Amiran
Nino	Peace	St. Nino, the conversion saint of Georgia
Vakhtang	War	Vakhtang Gorgasali, the heavily mythologised C6th warrior king
Shota	Freedom	Shota Rustaveli, regarded as the greatest Georgian writer
Nameless	Creation	Nobody - as the fourth option, creation represents the future
Niko	Adds items to the valley	Niko Pirosmani, usually regarded as the greatest Georgian painter

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Anyway, never going to get time to make this and I don't have the ability to make a fighty game anyway, but I'm putting my notes down anyway because I didn't want to forget how much I liked the idea. :)