MOKKA

No more posting Jail for me!

After I learned everything there is about the human bone, I decided it would be more fun to blow up digital worlds.

You should wishlist Virtue's Heaven on Steam!

And Buy GB Rober, while you're at it!


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This week marked somewhat of a big milestone in Virtue's Heaven's development in that I actually managed to have enough of the game's systems in place, and enough stuff built out, that I was able to actually see how all these separate parts interact with one another.


A thing that was always important to me, but that I previously barely had a chance to work on, because the game's direction wasn't clear to me, was to give players a "home" area that they have to return back to. There a lot of reasons why I wanted that, but the biggest reason is probably because it's fundamentally different from the rest of the game's areas. When you're home, you're safe, and also you are not alone.

Virtue's Heaven is in a weird spot conceptually, because it very much tries to tell a story about how individualist ideologies are destroying the world, while also being placed in a game genre (Metroidvania), that is very much about individual struggle and mastery. This is why most of the upgrades you get in Virtue's Heaven are tied to a character that you meet and none of these upgrades are of a material nature. Instead of finding a weird pair of shoes that somehow give the ability to run faster, in Virtue's Heaven it's one of your friend's believes that do that. Sure, it's just a superficial thing, because they both work similarly, but in the grand scheme of things, this framing matters.

Because, when you're down there in that weird tower that you have to break into, the only thing that ties you to your friends up there, are those beliefs. You are completely on your own, but you draw strength from the knowledge that your friends outside are believing in your ability to free the Future.

And when you return back home, not only are you seeing your friends again, the world outside will have changed while you were gone: Friends that were imprisoned, will walk around outside and slowly populate an area that was fairly empty at the beginning, and once you managed to finish off an area's boss, you will notice that time has progressed ever so slightly. The things you do, don't seem to be making a difference down there where you're fighting for your life, but up where the people live that care about more than just their own skin, things are slowly improving.

Again, this shouldn't surprise me as much as it did yesterday, since I made all of these things. But seeing these ideas actually work (though in a fairly unrefined way), was really cool.

There's an added thing here in the current version in that it's a bit hard to actually go back home, once you've defeated the boss of the first area. The current version has three fast travel points, but only one of them is easily accessible and it's right at the start. Also currently there is no Map. It does feel a bit like what it might feel like when, after you've climbed a Mountain, you realize that now you need to go back down. It's still somewhat challenging, but the tension is different.

Anyway, I have no idea how much of this is actually interesting to other people, who are neither me, nor have access to the game. But to see these first glimpses of what I want Virtue's Heaven to actually become, was really nice!

With that being said, please put it on your Steam Wishlist!

And if your want to play this early version (and you're not an Igf judge), you can support me on patreon and get access that way.


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