When Mike and I were talking about The Lords of Midnight remake, one of the things we were going to do, was start the game earlier.
The Novella starts with Luxor and Morkin at the Forest Keeper’s hut. They are on their way to The Tower of the Moon in order to be part of the Council of the Wise.
The Novella is effectively all exposition. It’s about giving you the player, the information you need to know, in order to continue on and immerse yourself with the game.
This came to mind the other day because I was asked about remaking The Lords of Midnight, again. It is something I would love to do. I’m just not fully sure anymore what it would mean. However, there was one thing that I remembered that we did want to do, and that was change the Novella into a Animated Graphic Novel, and split it up with the initial game play which would then start from the Forest Keeper’s hut.
The game would place in you a restricted map, inside of the Forest of the Moon, and you need to find your way to the Tower. This would allow for the Narrative to be blended with the tutorial, and thus, by the time the game starts proper, at the start of the Solstice, you would have all the information you needed without having to read any manuals.
Once you start to increase the production values, then maybe there is something that could be for a larger audience.
I’ve already had some conversations about the audio. About how to score the game.
And visually, we have an idea of how it would look. Most of you already have an idea from Jure’s art that was non-original style for The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge. But I place a gallery at the end of this post. But if you then take into account this image the Jure sent me the other day when were were discussing how we would make the game look…
The real issues comes down to the interface and the gameplay. What would we need to change in the actual game. The main thing is to stay in the narrative. Every decision we make must be based on the story, and staying in story. We would probably need to make a few slight changes to the original just to give it some breathing space.
And all that text… it’s problematic but it’s also the charm of the original, you wouldn’t want to get rid of it, but should some of it be lost? I really don’t know the answer to that yet. What if it was all spoken?
Now, if I could just find some money to allow me and Jure to work on it full time… or almost full time…
