My Ideas: The Valley of...Something.

On tonight's horrendously late blog, we discuss the third of the video game ideas fit for this column. This is the third and last game of the Genres category I'll be sharing with you; remarkably, the fourth one managed to generate 180 or so pages of material before I started losing interest. To be fair, I got excited over that one in the summer, so I had time to kill.

This game, however, was more traditionally an idle concept, with one exception. The inspiration was another Playstation classic called Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I'll provide a bit of background. The Castlevania games are a series action/adventures stretching back to the original Nintendo. Most were strictly arcade affairs where the main character, a warrior with a magical whip and/or morning star, had to travel the countryside and a haunted castle to fight Dracula. This sequel to earlier Castlevania games had a similar premise, but the normal warrior was replaced with Alucard, Dracula's far more versatile and noble half-vampire son. And instead of a normal series of levels, the game featured a single, often open-ended maze of a castle that could be explored in many different ways. It took the original concept and turned it into something bigger, more expansive, and extremely entertaining. It also turned it into Metroid specifically, but that's fine. If you have to borrow, borrow from the best.

I was enchanted; I had to improve upon it! Sadly, the first idea I had to do so was "make it 3D." I feel sort of dirty typing that, as if any indy cred I had just flew out of my soul. But I couldn't help it! The game painted the castle as such a big, beautiful, surreal, horrific world that I wanted to see what I was missing. And yes, something can be both beautiful and horrific. Especially in my mind. But there were so many mysteries in the background of the game; stairwells to nowhere, ruined towers, a giant floating eyeball, etc. It made the game feel a tiny bit incomplete.

So, in my game, the game's setting, a cursed manor (instead of a castle! See how clever I was?) was in full 3D. It wasn't the only change. I realized I couldn't utilize Earth's mythology, since Castlevania already used so much of it. Classical horror tropes, Greek mythology, Judeo-Christian demons, classic undead, it had them all. I had to get creative, which is only fair since I started this project by shamelessly ripping off someone else.

I worked on a mythology for the game and then created a simple child's faerie tale to work the story around. The story revolved around the Valley of...Something. I had the name written down in the faerie tale, but that was only written on paper, not stored digitally. I have no idea if I still have that paper, and in the ensuing years, I forgot the name of the Valley. It was Korroth or something; on my scale of made up names, it got a 3 or so out of 10. So it's just the Valley for me and has been for years.

This Valley was created by the gods, or specifically by a god. When I made the game's mythology, I wanted to create a pantheon of gods, but I did something I never saw in fantasy before; I made them all women.

I saw all-male pantheons before, you see. Tolkein's counted, I think, and some of David Eddings' works had one as well. Most are nicely mixed between genders, but this was different. Once I agreed on the idea, I had the gods spring into being and handle things the usual way; each one added their godly focus into the collective universe, altering the lives of mortals as they did. This continued until one goddess, Bas, didn't get the chance. The next gods came too quickly into being, so she never had the chance. This, understandably, pissed her off.

And so, when the last goddess appeared, the twelve goddesses, called the Sisters, collectively decided to start a new planet fresh; one untouched by the chaos that came from emerging goddesses imposing their own views onto a pre-established civilization. And it was good, up until when Bas got involved. This time, she would give the world a gift. She would give it war and strife.

Since that was exactly what the other Sisters wanted done away with this time, they opposed her. But fighting a war god is always tricky, and all of them combined had to defeat her. They couldn't kill her, but they defeated the divine element within her, leaving her massive body to fall onto the planet she corrupted. She hit a mountain range with such force that it created a giant valley. She was buried, to sleep forever ideally.

Instead, her body began to emit demons; the products of her war nature. And eventually, a tyrannical wizard discovered the Valley. Megalomaniacal, this wizard, named Prince Khaspar or simply the Nightmare Prince, wanted to become a god himself. He believed he could subvert the sisters by proving himself the master of all their elements. He thought he proved it for all but Bas, but to prove himself her superior, he would have to summon and control the demonic hordes she created, and possibly tap into her unconscious form's power directly.

It's here where things get complicated. The other goddesses sent avatar to try and stop him, but he defeated and imprisoned or killed most of them. But his own experiment went awry, and the demons were summoned but not controlled. They trapped his immortal body in stone and flooded the valley and the manor itself. This continued until two of the imprisoned avatars escaped. The players controlled one or both of them, as they explored the manor and below it. Eventually, they found Bas' dormant body and defeated it just as it began to awaken.

I'm not that embarrassed about this project. Some parts were bad, sure. The main playable leads were incredibly weak. They had no personalities, and in fact I couldn't even tell you their names without looking them up. But the setting, that's another story. It really was a tragic, deep place, and one well divorced from vampires and their hunters. There were horrific elements, like the fate of many of the avatars, and sad moments, like the levels the surviving servants of Khaspar were willing to go to survive the demon-infested manor. There were even rudimentary explorations of gender relations, and that was well before I became a Buffy fan.

In fact, Khaspar and the Sisters made their appearances in many places beyond this story. They were central to my first serious Dungeon and Dragon game's setting and present in the second, and they often factored into the meta-plot of my other ideas. In many ways, the lesson of this game is the opposite of that of the Dark Banner. There, the lesson was to remember the characters and concepts even if the game itself never panned out. In this case, it was the game's outer casing, its shell if you will, that was valuable, and it merely needs a game and characters to fill it. I can tell you that of the four original genre games, this is the one that still has the best hopes of becoming something real some day. Let's see the 180 pages of spaceship components and mechanics say that!