If you have played Dagon, you probably know that 21.37% of the game's charm lies in the details, i.e. hidden (in plain sight) interesting facts. I was afraid that such a meta-narrative would break the flow, but nothing could be further from the truth. If you are also a curious person or nosy person, you will be happy to know that Mercyful will also be rich in this type of collectibles. More: we are in a privileged position due to the fact that we are making a documentary game, where the plot plays a secondary role. And just like in documentaries that you may find in the true crime tab on Netflix, the trivia stuffing simply does the job.
Mercyful may not be an encyclopedia of black magic, but rather a fancy special issue of a history magazine. One that will not exhaust the topic, but will plant clues that you will be able to harvest on your own. For each interesting fact, we always provide the source, and - believe me - we put a lot of effort into research. We will not refer you to Wikipedia, nor will we stop at the magnificent books published by Polish Replika, a series that could be used to create a thousand Mercyfuls.
As part of the promotion of the game, I will be posting here some more intriguing information that I managed to collect during preparations, so if you are not following this Steam page yet, now is the right time to sign up for the newsletter (just click follow). Especially since Next Fest is lurking around the corner, that is, the festival where you can try a free demo (FREE DEMO!), so it's high time to get hyped. HYPED.
Curious Case
Hey, you gloomy bastards.
If you have played Dagon, you probably know that 21.37% of the game's charm lies in the details, i.e. hidden (in plain sight) interesting facts. I was afraid that such a meta-narrative would break the flow, but nothing could be further from the truth. If you are also a curious person or nosy person, you will be happy to know that Mercyful will also be rich in this type of collectibles. More: we are in a privileged position due to the fact that we are making a documentary game, where the plot plays a secondary role. And just like in documentaries that you may find in the true crime tab on Netflix, the trivia stuffing simply does the job.
Mercyful may not be an encyclopedia of black magic, but rather a fancy special issue of a history magazine. One that will not exhaust the topic, but will plant clues that you will be able to harvest on your own. For each interesting fact, we always provide the source, and - believe me - we put a lot of effort into research. We will not refer you to Wikipedia, nor will we stop at the magnificent books published by Polish Replika, a series that could be used to create a thousand Mercyfuls.
As part of the promotion of the game, I will be posting here some more intriguing information that I managed to collect during preparations, so if you are not following this Steam page yet, now is the right time to sign up for the newsletter (just click follow). Especially since Next Fest is lurking around the corner, that is, the festival where you can try a free demo (FREE DEMO!), so it's high time to get hyped. HYPED.
New Look
Halloween is coming, we need to be ready. Let's start with the new look. Expect updates this week.
The Inquisition: Power, Pain, and Heresy
Hi there.
Today I want to introduce you to a dark and intriguing world where the rules are set by the Church and the judgement is passed by the Inquisition. A world where you will have to make tough decisions to get information and save your loved ones.
The story begins with the protagonist's dramatic separation from the love of his life, Henrietta, who is allegedly involved in the investigations of the Inquisition. The great power and prestige that come with the title of Inquisitor become his only hope of regaining his beloved and living a peaceful life.
Desperate but relentless, he embarked on a quest that led him to a mysterious settlement and an ageing priest. The priest offered the hero a deal: in return for a certain mission, he would help him find his beloved. The protagonist realised that in order to convince the priest, he would have to make a not-so-easy attempt. He agrees to take on the role of Inquisitor and solve the murder that has paralysed the village. Little did he know that this was just a test of credibility, as the priest knew the real murderer.
Crossing the threshold into the dark chambers of the Inquisition, more than one has succumbed to a cruel force. Together with our Inquisitor, you will take up the fight against adversity and uncover the secret that lies hidden in the darkness. Will you be able to preserve your values in the face of cruelty? Find out for yourself what lies behind the closed doors of the Inquisition and add Mercyful Flames to your wishlist on Steam now!
On Steam, we are celebrating the Steam Mystery Festival which involves promotions for titles with relevant themes and titles in the detective climate. We recommend games about Sherlock, Frog Detective, The Wolf Among Us, and Disco Elysium. There is a lot to play. But there is also something to look forward to.
We still, like losers, can't show you the demo. The reasons and causes are the same as always - we don't have a good game for now. We're still sitting and tinkering on the project to deliver satisfying content, but for now, we don't feel confident enough with Mercyful Flames to show it to the world.
What's our biggest struggle today? The lapping of the strict gameplay layer with the scenario. At this point, we have something like a cake made of independent layers. Once we experience a piece of the story, once we deliver a piece of gameplay. Perhaps this is the nightmare of role-playing games in general, but we have the ambition to prove a product that can blend these elements to the consistency of a unified matter.
In a nutshell, our main task is to trim and sculpt the scenario so that elements that enrich lore knowledge are transferred to environmental elements and relationships resulting from interactions with characters or objects. Instead of selling the information during independent cutscenes and log readings, we try to smuggle it in at a non-overwhelming size, mainly as a reward for quests.
We made bad production decisions, but we are a competent enough team to fix them. We are working up a sweat so you can play Mercyful Flames and experience the story yourself.
Voices from the past.
Hi there.
I want to tell you one more interesting fact. We tried to make sure that the game did not have a voice-over, well, because, you know, costs. Our grumbling was simple: it needs to be recorded in English, it needs to be recorded in Polish, and it may need to be recorded in other languages... And if later we make some changes in the script, well, then we have another problem. Voice over is out.
Unfortunately. It didn't fall out. The more work we put into bringing the world to life, the more we added sounds, animations, and other nitpicks, and the more the feeling that the experience was incomplete nagged at us. Intuition told us that a narrator to guide the player through this dark and depressing world was the missing piece. Well, we trusted our intuition. We gave it a try, and what was heard, will not be heard again. In the Polish version, we made a voiceover with our efforts and the result allows us to smile with self-satisfaction. For the English version, we will look for a suitable person.
What impact has the addition of a voiceover had on the work so far? Contrary to appearances, quite a lot. Well, the script of Mercyful Flames was written in the second person, a style known from paragraph games or RPG sessions. In the case of our game, we decided that a first-person narrative, which allows us to report on events in a somewhat storytelling style, would best suit the proposed dynamics. Besides, the inquisitor's story is very personal, and the presented course of events comes out most credibly when the author of the reflections is the main character.
Sooo... We have already added a voiceover to the first scenario and it works.
Priest Master
Hello, fanatics.
I would like to announce that we are working on a bridge between Priest Simulator and Booze Master. This means that as soon as we're done with the former and before the release of the latter, you're gonna experience a short winter adventure, meeting characters you already know. It's gonna be something like Heavy Duty, but more unique. You will be able to experience the adventure together with Quella, Jerry and Mortimer. We will officially announce the game when we have a Steam page prepared. Ahoy!
New Camera Movment
Howdy, gloomers.
Remember the images from the last devlog? We showed previous iterations of the game. I wrote that the camera moves along a single curve at that time. However, we went one step further and stopped it. That is, not quite so much. It can't move, but it can rotate. It's a bit like sitting in a tank that has had its tracks punctured by someone. This type of camera is begging us for VR.
Anyway, see for yourself:
We are now working on bringing the world to life. Since you won't be able to move freely around the area, we have to make an exceptional effort to make you buy our idea. You must believe that this is not a flat world that serves only as a backdrop for playing cards. This is a world where you can suffer and cry. We are adding animations, sounds, particles, and a whole lot of probiotics to stimulate your peristalsis of mechanics.
Coming soon.
For more stories, please visit our channel:
The New Perspective
Dear Believers,
There is a Halloween event, so I allow myself to share information that is extremely unpleasant for me to disclose. Look, I know some of you are going to be pissed off, but we decided to make a big change to the game.
Simply put, the two previous iterations did not deliver the fun we set out to do. A third one had to be done. What we found attractive on paper turned out to be monotonous and chaotic in the digital edition.
What have we done? We changed our perspective once again. The goal is to get closer to the card prototype, and moving the camera along different axes was not good for the game. The current model will follow one curve. We try to get the right depth using, for example, predefined camera settings and frame composition. The trick is to keep the illusion of a living, three-dimensional world, without adding mechanics that make it difficult to get involved in the design we propose. The mechanics are relatively complex, we collect a lot of information and make hundreds of decisions based on numerous calculations. Full freedom in penetrating the world of Mercyful Flames knocked out of the game rhythm and unnecessarily prolonged the gameplay.
This change of work does not take much away effort from us, but we are making this game for you. Sorry it's taking so long, but we try as much as we can. Thanks for your patience.
For more stories, please visit our channel:
What type of game is this?
Dear Believers,
It must be confessed that although Mercyful's core looks trivial on paper, there is no tag in the Steam database that accurately expresses the essence of the gameplay... Then again, I can't seem to find one in my base either. The instruction manual is just a few pages that suggest the complexity of the game on the level of solitaire multiplied by "ludo". If I had to shrink the design down to just a few words, I would say that the goal of the game is to get a set of cards marked as evidence.
From a low-level perspective, Mercyful looks like a board game containing several stacks of cards. The player seeks to find evidence, while each interaction with a stack of cards requires sacrificing action points and/or increasing the level of plague.
Well, the idea is that we ransack lockers, snoop in the bushes, examine corpses, interrogate characters and look for clues that will lead us to more stacks of cards. The most intriguing element is by far the characters' interrogation, as they are the ones who usually directly lead us to the evidence. Characters can be interrogated in various ways, choosing from several interactions, and each of them is sensitive to a different type of interrogation. The reward for progress is to increase the probability of success when testing given interactions, ie. character development.
Now, let's imagine that each piece of evidence acts against the evil we seek to expose where each card that is not evidence contains a piece of one coherent story. Let's add panels with torture equipment to the mix. On top of that, we throw into the pot holy patrons, executioner's friend, inventory with items... Great Scott!
So what type of game is this? Who cares if I'll say it's a story-driven "Monopoly", it'll be called RPG anyway.
