Devlog - Legend of the Abyss

[kavaris]

27 minutes ago, LordFall said:

Pokemon Go.

Oooooh okay. I told (you) lord (though obv., everyone can chime in and help lord / us)that i have a discord, but that we should all riff first, cause we arent yet sortve like... Iuno how youd phrase it... We arent yet in that realm of like "okay this is what i want, or that is the target zone" And that might come alot later, so take it all with an open mind — for now—for now

This is a test.

Its to see how ... ... ...or no, im srry, im phrasing it wrong... one moment...

I meant to say, its like a test or \*experiment — to sortve *pull out the words* from your imagination (to engage your imagination and interests a little), to see what your heart is

27 minutes ago, LordFall said:

Pokemon Cards in and of themselves have a market cap of $2.5 billion so that's pretty cool. 

I designed some playing and collectibe cards for Legend of the Abyss...

striving for... okay i gotchya, one moment.

This gets me thinkin of what i call "Collectibles", which is connected to games, but it also widens your imagination field to things suchas...

Stuffed animal, physical, teddy bearish realm of stuff, moving into –> Toys/Games –> Action figures –> Comics / Art & Anime/Manga, etc.–> Trading cards (Yugioh, Pokemon, etc.) –> Video game, music (ost), book and/or animation / movie/tv show stuff (could be anything)

.... i mean....
Im sortve rifling through alot, but collectibles is a wide category, And im tryina get you remembering like, all the things like this, that connect to like that 5-10 age kid in 80s, 90s and beyond, like that notion for all of these stories and char., caricature or the myth(ology) of what connected all of these things that had heroic or fantasy / creature - esque things going on, which itself is obviously part of that ancient myth and story, like whats the title of that later antiquity legend about the Ethiopian queen / princess? Is it Aethiopica, Like i wanna say it proceeds Ovids Metamorphosis (if its not that, then its something that largely borrows from it) point being, that romantic or otherwise heroic fantasy genre is part of the earliest Greek Metamorphoses, or the traditions that once had stemmed in Pythagorean, or Archaic theology, like the "mytho-religious beliefs come to life..." sortve things, from our perspective.

So im just riffing, gettin ya thinking. You can tell me what you are thinking..

Edited Monday at 11:25 PM by kavaris

[kavaris]

Explain to me the game again, but from this sortve perspective,

Like whats the story w/ it, and who are the characters in it, And "Why", like are these characters serving the game / environment, or does the environment serve the char., or sumthin else, Like get a little abstract w it

[kavaris]

(cont.) No rush. Take your time, cause i have to run to a store rel quik

[kavaris]

(cont ii.) @LordFall Im just mentioning-*, in case you didnt see that i had been responding to you, i just forgot to @ you before this /

[LordFall]

1 hour ago, kavaris said:

Explain to me the game again, but from this sortve perspective,

Like whats the story w/ it, and who are the characters in it, And "Why", like are these characters serving the game / environment, or does the environment serve the char., or sumthin else, Like get a little abstract w it

The story is about a mage named Nerathar who travels accross different Kindgoms in the 17th century and eventually conquers the world. It's a dark fantasy world with magic and the point is to explore how magic and the scientific revolution/age of enlightenment of the 17th/18th century would pair up.

The first version of the game will be a fast paced 2D roguelite hack and slash type of game. Like Oblivion Override or Dragon is Dead 

 

From where if it's successful I wanna develop a wider scale game like a 3D action adventure game and the vision 10 year down the line would be to turn it into a VR web 3 MMORPG.

The world-building, anime and TCG are aspects of it I'm developing alongside the game. 

Edited Tuesday at 12:40 AM by LordFall

[kavaris]

@LordFall (Part 1) Oh okay. One sec., i had this prepared, As i had been turned on to the fact that you're indian or part indian ~ And so im rifling thru some things that may or may not be interesting, along the lines of things that you might already kno about, or that u might find interesting, sortve in the realm 9f ancient caricature that stems from the most Ancient of Indian art and style, like this, As India created that very Anime looking style, in conjunction w/ wat was a later entry, from their old / ancient traditions that extend into asian ~ Japanese and chinese... i only know this cause i looked at various painting / art from Japan artists in the 1700-1800, which of course predates Anime... but watchamakalit, you see similar Indian creatures and style of art here. Then theres a vid., illustrating indian creatures / art ~ After which ill then comment on your comment.

(see images, 1st one is Indian Rahu creature)

Im sure theres more, the Indian stuff goes back to a very Ancient tradition ..

Edited Tuesday at 12:42 AM by kavaris

[LordFall]

That's really cool, I like that. I'm not Indian but I wanna incorporate some elements from multiple cultures and religions of that time. Hinduism is one of them so mystical creatures from the Hindu lore is cool. I wanna take some elements from Shaktism as well specifically some of the goddesses they have and their ideas on feminine and masculine polarities. 

The lore is also about exploring immortality and life after death as part of the story is that the main character deifies himself through the word conquest and also ends up given the power to resurrect the dead and thus he creates an immortal empire across earth and the Abyss. 

Sort of how Hades 2 is about invading the underworld

 

Edited Tuesday at 12:55 AM by LordFall

[kavaris]

28 minutes ago, LordFall said:

The story is about a mage named Nerathar who travels accross different Kindgoms in the 17th century and eventually conquers the world. It's a dark fantasy world with magic and the point is to explore how magic and the scientific revolution/age of enlightenment of the 17th/18th century would pair up.

The first version of the game will be a fast paced 2D roguelite hack and slash type of game

(Part 2) Oh so just a 2D, you can prolly do that with not much help on anything from me. I mean, you might want to also consider, is this idea something others will find interesting, or is it more of your own passion, And making it *popular is more secondary to this primary objective.

You dont have to answer that, As thats more something for you to consider as you go...

16 minutes ago, LordFall said:

I'm not Indian

Not indian. Got it.

28 minutes ago, LordFall said:

Nerathar

Now is this character a hero, or does he function more like someone in the middle—Neither good or bad (from our modern perspective) like Odysseus, like that sortve trickster, murderer turned hero, that is, sortve like most Kings or their predecessors, they may not necessary even want to be a ruler or leader, at first, but they are kindve forced into it thru an unfortunate set of circumstances, And then that is then the "leader who becomes king, out of happenstance" -Like that trope of maybe someone like Agamemnon, Granted not many ppl think of him that way i dont think, But if you just consider all the flavors of the diff protagonists, rulers or otherwise leaders types, then you sortve enter into this complex moral and emotional dilemma / situation involving... Maybe the protagonist / Odysseus-style character, like it could also be more Arabic-style, like the guy was a thief (Aladdin) before they became a ruler... i mean theres many ways to approach that aspect, ...

Like maybe you want this divine lineage thing, like, whether that be a reference towards Tolkiens elves, who are partly immortal, partly human because they can still be killed through severe physical stress, but they normally dont age... and thus end up living for thousands of years ... Thats more of the god-like, sortve Platonic road ~ that is the "man-made" versus "god-made" dilemma... It then touches on many elements story wise, or whatever direction you would have it explore... Like, in the realm of folk or fairytales, which is more of like a shared / orally passed down thing, you could go w/ the romanticized king arthur story, the idealistic-good-guy trope... i mean, im just giving you ideas, theres quite alot of details you might add in conjunction to this of course.

Edited Tuesday at 01:05 AM by kavaris

[kavaris]

@LordFall Ill leave ya w/ this, my routine, or my vers., of playing video games is now putting on or playing music from video games, and playing w/ the cat/cats... And ive been playing, whatever youd call that, for like a solid 5-7 years or so, i mean i was researching ancient stuff + languages, but im on a hiatus, And everything else, including the discord stuff, its all highly classified now, and hard to really explain

 (i have like entry lvl programming on there, to help ppl learn, and many, many things that it ties into, but thats just the beginning, everything is like its own secret project... i also have a sourcehut you can learn from, if u get into programming ... pm me if u into it)

Edited Tuesday at 02:19 AM by kavaris

[LordFall]

@kavaris Appreciate the thoughts, man! To answer your question on Nerathar: he definitely sits in that morally grey, divine-warlord territory rather than being a straightforward hero or villain.

He doesn't start out wanting to conquer the world; his motivation stems from family tragedy and survival. But once he master's blood magic and begins dismantling major empires, his goal shifts. He sees the 17th-century world which as that time was mostly religious wars, political corruption, and human mortality as completely broken.

He's not a reluctant leader or a lighthearted rogue. He's a ruthless conqueror who forces his own deification to build an immortal empire, eventually taking the fight directly to the Abyss.

The 2D roguelite is just the baseline to get the core combat and aesthetic right before expanding into the broader universe. I'll keep dropping updates here as the worldbuilding develops!

 

[LordFall]

This is how I built the magic system so far. As the story progresses more and more powerful magic will be introduced. 

The idea of the 3 S tier branches is to represent body, mind and spirit and they will be the primary anchor of the world domination military campaign the story revolves around. 

It's gonna be complicated to implement that many different types of magic in a game so the first 2D version I'm gonna aim to implement probably only 3-4 of them.

You will play 4 different characters and one of them will just be a 17th century basic soldier with a musket, another one a samurai, another one the female fire mage that's secondary main character in the story and Nerathar the main character who uses blood magic. It's gonna be lore based so people get invested in the story. Kinda like Fire Emblem but a fast paced side scroller instead of turn based combat. Something like this 

I've been procrastinating on the Youtube marketing lately but just turned the magic system into a Short. 

 

Edited Wednesday at 12:37 AM by LordFall

[LordFall]

Just had a pretty big breakthrough

Turns out I can self-publish a manga with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and get them printed for $4.50 per unit. I didn't realize it would be this cheap, that's pretty insane.

The math turns out I can sell each volume of the manga for 

Canada: $14.99 CAD Profit = $4.45 CAD

United States: $11.99 USD Profit = $3.79 USD

Pretty damn good. My idea is to release release daily short form content as top of funnel, middle of funnel post manga chapters online on like Webtoon and GlobalComix and then bottom of funnel have people order the actual books and join my discord/actual site when I make one.

This would be phase 1 of the release of the IP. Goal is to build the initial fanbase and test the cashflow model.

Phase 1 will include the first 3 seasons of the Anime and the first 6 volumes of the manga. 

I didn't realize getting a manga printed was so cheap, that's really a game changer. Releasing 1 chapter a week that'll be about 8 chapters every 2 month and I wanna hit 8-10 chapters per volume. Starting to release them in October 2026 that will take 12 months to complete phase 1. At that point the goal will be to start recruiting a team to build the first game and to deliver a playable experience for the IP. I think starting with the manga makes a lot of sense for storytelling and getting the audience hooked then the playable experience and TCG will be the next steps of the IP to release in phase 2. 

The reel I posted today on the Instagram got 500 views so we're starting to get some traction! 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DchccULJNwS/

Edited Thursday at 02:16 AM by LordFall

[LordFall]

Been posting daily one piece of content as an Instagram reel and as a youtube short for the past 4 days now. I want to do it for a full year and do a 365 days of content challenge which would be 730 posts and maybe 1095 if I start to do Tiktok as well.

The reception has been not bad, some posts got like 5 views but some are getting over 500. I posted it to my main account for the first time which was pretty anxiety inducing but people seemed to like it.

Shoutout to @Sugarcoat, you partly gave me the confidence to post my designs more publicly on my brand! 

I'm gonna take it as a marketing challenge to scale the reach more and more and hopefully build up an actually active community that I can build a discord channel around.

Here is what the socials look like right now, only 13 subscribers and 8 followers on IG. Let's see how it goes 1 month from now, 6 months and a full year. I think as long as I keep consistent with the daily posts and work to flesh out the universe and hit my October 2026 plan to start launching the manga it'll be quite successful.

It's been the most fun I've had in years. A lot of the projects I am involved with I also enjoy but this is truly a guilty pleasure and passion of mine. When I was reading Mastery by Robert Greene he talked about going back to your authentic childhood joys as a hint towards your quest to mastery. I know what he means now since as a child I could spend all day playing video games and now I spend all day researching history to world build for the game so it seems like it's working!

 

On 8/16/2026 at 10:13 PM, LordFall said:

Just learned a lot from watching this video on Star Citizen and the currently unfolding fiasco that this game has devolved into

So the game has been in development for 15 years and is the dream game of Chris Roberts. He fell pray to scope creep and now is $1 billion dollar deep and the game looks like it's gonna collapse around this holiday season if it fails to deliver the single player campaign that it's promised for years.

It's directly linked to that first video I linked in March on modular game design and how being able to ship complete products is important. Star Citizen is stuck with a massive vision of an instance less galactic world that is basically impossible to do with today's tech and now even their single player mode is full of bugs and unplayable. I do feel bad for the man but apparently he's quite toxic to work under so he has plenty of development work to keep him busy after this collapses.

I asked Gemini to modelize the project and to analyze the learning lessons but I also used it to predict if the project will collapse and when it will do so. Since it only has 2 months of runway and a monthly operating cost of $100M+ I personally think they will not succeed in shipping Squadron 42(their single player campaign) and the holes in the bucket will completely cause the project to implode like Ashes of Creation. Gemini gave this outcome a 55% chance.

The best case scenario is they go bankrupt and sell their assets to another studio to takeover the project and ship a more limited version of the game so that it's still playable and people that have funded the campaign through cosmetics still get their in game items. Gemini gave this outcome 30%

15% chance that single player campaign hits its promised date of Q4 2026 and everyone is happy and they get more runway to build out the full multiplayer vision. I hope this happens for them but if you watch the video and you witness the toxic work environment that they showcased as well as the lack of accountability from the team; doesn't seem likely to happen. 

It's interesting what we can learn from other people working on big projects, I hope that my game will end up even bigger than theirs in the end so I'm always glad that video recaps of what went right or wrong in these projects are available for us to learn from. Props to Kira the Youtuber for making this one. 

Seems like Squadron 42 indeed got delayed. They used the GTA 6 excuse to push it towards Q2-2027. I think that was smart since the game seems unplayable right now and they need more time to polish it. 

 

Edited 21 hours ago by LordFall

[Sugarcoat]

@LordFall Thanks🫡 Fallen Lord😂 

Edited 5 hours ago by Sugarcoat