MessyAcademy
patreon
Miki's Dream extra behind the scenes & news
🕑 Added 2021-02-12 07:34:24 +0000 UTCStarting with the news first off, since not everyone wants to see the details as some stuff can be considered spoilers on a light or medium note.
Miki's Dream otherwise known to be added with Version 0.18 of the game will be shooting for a possible release this weekend, possibly on Sunday night! (14th) But there is a chance that it could be pushed back to Monday.
Pretty much the bg art is in our hands and everything else for assets seem to be ready. We'll be doing some testing to make sure the content doesn't have any major game breaking bugs and do a once over on polishing before releasing it.
(Below are spoiler mentions possibly! Read at your own risk!)
Miki's Dream was originally planned as a Side Story piece of content, which focuses on a major event that doesn't fit within the main game's story for the timeline. Each of these normally do hint at roughly where on the timeline of events they take place when compared to the main story.
The idea was to have Side Story content be roughly around 4-5k word count when it does pop up through the dev process, mainly this kind of content will be saved for special events or until we've finished the main game episodes first. With Miki's Dream, said word count ended up becoming around 30k word count.
This is about double the size of a normal episode that we've seen before in ep 1-3 as those are around 18-19k, 17-18k and 14-16k respectfully.
Needless to say, Miki's Dream is massive! It does follow a point A to point B style system much like how ep 1-3 play out a set timeline of events with no way to branch away from them really. But it does have a few moments where players are allowed some freedom choice in what to check out, possibly where to go first and plenty of choices to make along the way.
Each choice has unique outcomes, some good, some bad, others neutral. Overall this content has the most choices/interaction that we've offered with MA before!
Now fans of Miki will really benefit greatly from the content as there's a lot of subtle and tiny things brought up or mentioned throughout the content that does add more lore to her character. These are things that might end up popping up later in the main story for her route at some point or another as well, maybe in more detail and possibly not brought up much more.
Fans who don't care as much for Miki might not get as much out of the fine details, but in terms of the way you handle things through the content. I'm pretty sure all fans will enjoy the way that it plays our regardless if Miki is your top girl or if she's low of the low. :P
There's various things in the content preventing Miki from exploring further, puzzles, enemies, traps and more! Each having unique outcomes and how things can fail or even multiple ways to beat content with different rewards from it.
As we move on below, it'll focus on cut content and possibly become much more spoiler filled! So do keep that in mind as we go over content that just was too much to be added.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The dream had at least 4-5 extra locations not seen in it's final version, which just felt like it'd add a little too much extra and cause issues. Many of these were what I'd consider "filler" locations that didn't serve much purpose, so while it is cut content. It isn't anything too exciting.
Battles were meant to be much, much more complex. It was going to feel very much like a rpg where once you engaged in battle, you'd get a list of commands and these commands would play out events leading towards winning or losing, etc. This of course seemed like too much for MA and would've became its own project within a project if we had more time to mess with this further. Its still something I'd like to do in the future with another project, but for MA. It just didn't quite fit without becoming something completely new.
Items were going to play a bigger role, where you'd have to be careful with how you used magic attacks as you could only gather enough magical energy to use certain attacks from finding unique items along the way. We do see a very light use of item stuff in the final version, but not quite the same as it would've been.
Pretty much in short, a good amount of what was cut from the final version was removing some of the complex nature of the content. Some of it would've been possible to a degree, but it would've felt not as great when put together and within the nature of the dream.
Originally Miki's Dream came to be a thought many months ago, it would've been much more like a special episode similar to ep 1-3 rather than what we ended up getting in the final version. But the rough draft idea at the time was to take place within a fantasy world that Miki traveled through with the help of her pet dragon to take her to unique locations to help solve issues along the way towards her ultimate goal.
This of course does have some elements that carried over into the final version, although a different setup of location and what is taking place. It felt like Miki's Dream would feel more fitting within a set area and go through locations rather than a bigger area like a world setting.
Overall, I could go on about every little bit of cut content or what ifs, but I'm very proud of what Miki's Dream did turn out to become. It's very unique for MA content and without trying to sound silly, I'm actually a bit nervous with seeing the feedback and thoughts towards the content. Not in a bad way, but because it could easily become a situation where I could see fans liking it a lot more than the main game and wanting something completely different while we're focused on MA.
