Mercyful Flames News

I don't want to bore you with stories like we've tried so hard to deliver demos to the Steam festival. Everyone already knows the standard developer lament. The lament of a person who made every effort to deliver on time, but with heartache she/he had to make a difficult decision to postpone the premiere. But what else can I say? We're in this fucked up situation too.

We did three demos. Two working, one defective.

The latter is Mercyful Flames. Despite the fact that almost all the plans related to the development of the game have been completed, the final version is not satisfactory for us. Simply put, it sucks. We will only release versions of the games that we do not consider a waste of your time. Mercyful Flames still has annoying bugs, performance problems, lighting problems, translation problems, UX problems, sometimes very poor sound and a lot of other shortcomings. Of course, all of this will be eliminated. When? We will not provide any dates. The current festival was a deadline. The lesson we have for the future is that we do not operate on deadlines. We make the game until we can present it with a clear conscience.



The second demo we haven't released despite being made is Booze Master. The Booze Master was prepared in a very correct form. It's a correct game, with correct graphics, correct performance, correct sound, awesome music, awesome characters, decent UI blabla... But in gerneral, it's... just correct. At a time when a few good games are published every day, presenting the correct game is an ecological crime. We realized the demo plan, but the plan wasn't good enough. The game needs some polishing and we will keep polishing it until we say "okay, this is good".



That's what we could say about Priest Simulator. It's not perfect, but we did our best here. If you haven't heard about Priest and are waiting for Mercyful or Booze, I recommend checking out the demo. We released it. This is our benchmark.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1405690

I apologize we haven't brought you two demos this time. Shame as hell, but I'd be more embarrassed if we published it. Hope Priest Simulator will make it up to you.



Answering a question that has already arisen somewhere: Asmodev projects are being developed in parallel. Not by one person who works on a different project every day. It has no relation.

The plan is to make it before the demo release. The interaction needs some juicing. Couple of months ago I shared with you my concerns regarding dice. TLDR; we couldn't come up with a satysfying solution to a problem of implementing a feature of a physical game in a PC game.

The best solution turned out to be... a solution to a completely different problem. As the interaction with NPC is our key feature, we weren't happy with the fact, that all the text was spawned immedately after selecting the appropriate button. Imagine searching for a suspect for few minutes only to interact with them by choosing a button, and reading a dialogue.

We believe that stretching the core experience will serve the pacing of the game. It won't affect the mechanics at all, but will make the game feel less rushed. You can remember from the trailer, that the whole interaction flow looked like that:



It consisted (actually still does) from:
1. Fading.
2. Zooming the camera.
3. Choosing a theme.
4. Choosing a method.
5. Displaying a result of the "dice" roll and presenting a dialogue.

How are we going to stretch it?
1. Fading.
2. Zooming the camera.
3. Playing a welcome animation.
4. Choosing a theme and displaying a pile of cards with possible answers.
5. Choosing a method.
6. Playing interaction animations. 7. Revealing a card from the pile. 8. Displaying a text response in chunks.
9. Displaying a result of the "dice" roll and presenting a dialogue record.

The points 6-8 are where the magic is going to happen. Hope you will be compensated for not being able to feel the plastic cubes.

Good evening.

We need you. Are you depressed enough to find yourselves in such a gloomy reality as in those screenshots? Or to put it bluntly, isn't this game too dark? If we were to make this world for ourselves, it would look like this. That's what Mercyful is right now, and we'd like to stay with the appearance.

I highly doubt we will let any sunlight into the game. This is a purely aesthetic choice. We want to stay in a wooden, underexposed styling to get something like the atmosphere that bothers you during attic and basement scenes in horror movies.

Nevertheless, our overwhelming darkness is a part of a coherent artistic vision... that can be called a whim. After all, it's you who are gonna play the game. Can you see anything or should we turn the lights on? We don't want you to fall asleep. Magnified, sanctified be thy holy will.

What's the main factor that keeps the game from being an idle clicker? Plague. A painfully secondary concept that has found another incarnation. Previously, you may have known it, for example, as a doomsday clock. Or just hit points. It is pure coincidence that our designer, Lord Baltimore, called this feature one way and no other, just before the world plunged into such and no other panic.

A plague is a combination of two elements:
1. The daily schemes of the opponents of the Church (we established that the plague would increase randomly every day by smaller amounts - so that there was pressure).
2. Feelings of safety of the inhabitants and their attitude towards the player (the higher the plague, the less trusting they are towards the main character).

It is influenced by scenario elements such as kidnapping / murder events. But we can also increase it by ineffective attempts to interrogate the inhabitants or by murdering innocent people during torture.

Fighting evil, annihilating enemies and using divine powers shows the inhabitants that the church is awake and that evil will be judged. Somehow, righteous behavior hampers the progress of the plague. Good keeps us alive.

TLDR; Plague is just a „global” statistic that tries to thwart your plans. It’s called „plague”, because Mercyful Flames’ story takes place in Dark Ages.

We have a family atmosphere in Asmodev, and we talk a lot. So I asked our 3D bandit, Adrian von Bond, why the hell he's still changing the graphics as we need him to do some useless stuff. This game is not about visuals after all. It's about fire, crime investigation, and pagan altars. And he answered: BECAUSE I DON'T WANT IT TO LOOK LIKE FUCKING ASSET STORE FLIP, YOU PIECE OF PHLEGM. I wanted this game to be Infernal Radiation on coke, so the current look is good enough for me. However, I'm afraid Adrian won't stop after getting a PhD in creating the comic-minimalist atmosphere of B-class horror. He may go into realistic graphics then. Please stop him.

Oh, and we just got the pubs opened in Poland. I am attaching a tribute.