A Punishment for Mai - News & Updates #2

Weekly Report #2

A new week and here I am again to bring back some progress to the game status. This time i'll focus on characters and gameplay. So here we go...

Mai

• Name: Mai Mitchell
• Age: 28
• Birthday: March-15-1987
• Height: 1.64 m
• Weight: 67 kg

Story:

Mai was the youngest of three sisters. She was living happily with them and with her parents also until one day, seven years old still, her parents decided to buy an abandoned hotel and went to live in there.

After a month living in the hotel, Mai's mother found a strange book and, thereafter, everything changed. Her mother began to behave oddly, as if nothing mattered to her, except the book; Shortly afterwards, her father disappeared leaving no trace and, being not out quite, her two older sisters fell ill and died strangely. This left the poor Mai, 9 at that time, all alone, with her mother increasingly isolated in herself.

One day, while cleaning, Mai found her mother conducting a strange ritual. Her mother found Mai was 'spying' her and forced her to participate in the, increasingly more frequent, rituals.

At the age of 10, tired of the barbarism carried out by her mother and having to involve in it in silence, Mai denounced her mother to the authorities. Her mother was jailed but soon after that, disappeared from prison, inexplicably.

Mai, meanwhile, following the arrest and subsequent disappearance of his mother was completely alone and went to one hospice after another until she got full age. After leaving her last orphanagem she became a wanderer until she met a man with whom she established a relationship. After some time living together, Mai got pregnant.

It seemed that, Mai finally would be able to be happy again, but all shattered during the second month of pregnancy. Her partner disappeared and she, all alone again, sank completely in the darkest recesses of his mind.

Suddenly, a day like any other, Mai went off to sleep, but when she woke up, she wasn't on her home anymore...

Lucy

• Name: Lucy McVid
• Age: 19
• Birthday: August-3-1996
• Height: 1.59 m
• Weight: 62 kg

Story:

Since the death of his mother, Lucy became an introvert and lonely girl. This was also getting increased, due to her inferiority complex caused by her sluttering.

She had no friends, but she wasn't alone, because her father supported her at all times.

Time went by, Lucy and her father were increasingly inseparable and this helped the girl to not be sad, but then everything changed.

Her father began to receive phone calls from an unknown woman and, from that moment on, everything went wrong. He became unfriendly and violent. He spent hours doing strange rituals and talking to that woman in phone.

Over time, Lucy, just like Mai, is forced to participate in the rituals, but unlike she, Lucy did not have nor has the power to bear with those and ends up suffering a lot.

In her eighteenth birthday, the girl finds, during an argument with her father, that she carries some kind of power in which the unknown woman from the phone is interested. The discussion rises increasingly in tone and ends with her father forcing her to participate in a human sacrifice.
During the grisly ritual, Lucy falls fainted. During hours she suffers overwhelming nightmares. When she finally wakes up, discovers that she is in a different reality, that she is all alone and that someone locked her in that place. Like so often throughout her life, Lucy huddles in a corner staring off at infinity and says nothing...

In earlier news I already discussed some things like the story basics or the characters' (like in this one). But about the gameplay very little i said and in a game this is a key point. So today I'll give you a general glimpse of the gameplay mechanics for A Punishment for Mai:

• Action-RPG: some people also call it Hack'n'Slash in 2D. This is the basic idea behind this game's gameplay. Some examples in this same genre could be games like the classics "The Legend of Zelda" or The Adventures of Alundra. But of course, APFM is not one of these games, nor it is set in a fantasy world. APFM is a horror game, so although there exists all the classic elements of the Action-RPG, like Magic (yeah, there is magic, but the explanation for that will come later in another report), experience per enemy killed, which will make us gain levels, melee attacks, a shield to fend off enemy attacks or even Magic Points, which are called Mana (MN) here, APFM will have other elements, more survival-horror-like games. Examples of this could be a reduced number of battles compared to action-rpgs usual style, using firearms (which require ammunition), a targeting system, moving through smaller and darker maps (trying to cause a 'claustrophobic' feel and fear on the player), etc.

• Puzzles: The thing we love uppermost in survival horror games are puzzles, hence this element was the only sure-one with a place in this game since the beggining of its design. So there are different kinds of puzzles; from lowering levers to restoring the power in some area to hitting spheres to 'turn' them... Said like this, it sounds rather easy, but this have to be seen while playing.
• Survival: Definitely, this is one of the parts which is getting really hard to integrate into the game correctly. We want the player to feel the shortage of ammunition and healing items but not to the point of feeling overwhelmed and leaving him/her with no choice but to leave it as impossible. We have much balancing to do yet in this section. So we'll continue working on this aspect.

• Growing-up system: Let's take this little closer to the RPG-side of the game. In addition to levels, whose range from 1 to 10 and will serve to improve Mai and Lucy's parameters, there is also a kind of 'board' for each character, from where they can upgrade even more their skills and even learn Magic. All that at the cost of Skill Points (SP). One thing to keep in mind as i don't want to overlook it (although this system will be deeply explained in a later report too) is the fact that you can enable / disable the Magics and parameters' 'upgrades' at will, so whenever you disable anything, you'll recover any SP invested in the enabling process. This will let the player choose what he needs in each situation.

And that's all for now regarding gameplay. I sure left some things out but don't worry because i'll be gradually updating more deeply info on the gameplay of A Punishment for Mai.

• Original Soundtrack: A new track is finished. We'll be uploading some more samples soon I hope.
• Sound: Every necessary sound for the chapter 1 are already finished, prepared and imported in the maker itself!
• Map-Levels: All the maps for the main zone in the chapter 1 have been finished, all that is left now is to integrate those in the game.
• Puzzles: And we keep on moving on this aspect, designing and programming, at the same time, the aforementioned 'main zone of chapter 1' 's puzzles. Everything is going pretty well in this section.

FanArt

I couldn't say good bye without showing you some new weekly Fanart ration:

Well, this is all for now, please stay tuned for next report.