Record of Dorathia
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Hello everyone, this is rdein.
It's been a while since I've had to write a "formal post" like this, so it might be a bit poorly worded or organized. My intent is to present our current game project and share information.
The game is called Record of Dorathia. It is a turn-based dungeon crawler RPG where you navigate a labyrinthine world with a party of characters of your own making.
So, what does the title mean? I can't reveal too much about it yet, sorry!
Development Team
Before I talk about the game itself, I want to present the development team behind it.
It is essentially the same group that worked on Momodora 2, with the addition of Daku (who is a Momodora 2 superfan!).
We are a team of 4, with PKBT doing systems programming, Elektrobear doing music, Daku handling the artwork and graphics and helping me with the game design and story, and me doing a little bit of everything and putting it all together.
I feel like I should also say that the game is 100% made by humans.
Gameplay
As I've mentioned, it is a dungeon crawler RPG. Navigating the labyrinths, being lost and finding loot, and getting ambushed by enemies... You can expect that sort of thing from this game.
Combat follows a turn-based RPG fashion where most of your actions have a maximum amount of uses. Success in battle will require you to target the enemies' weaknesses, as well as managing buffs and debuffs.
There are a lot of status effects in this game and before I knew it, it became the core pillar of the combat. Also, bosses are succeptible to status effects! I've made sure that every action the player party can use should be effective no matter what.
An example I want to highlight is the Sleep spell. Against regular enemies, it makes them fall asleep. When enemies are asleep, you're guaranteed to critical hit them. It is an useful crowd-control tool that also doubles as a damage increase. However, that would be too strong against bosses, wouldn't it? For a situation like that, a boss will not receive the Sleep status, but it will receive Drowsy instead, which reduces their attack and agility for a number of turns.
The game has other systems in the combat such as the "Willpower" mechanic as I'm calling it right now. Landing critical hits, kills, and targetting weaknesses will grant you one "pip" of Willpower. At 3 pips, your next action will deal significantly more damage and not consume an use. It's up to you to build up Willpower and choose how to spend it. Healing actions (including Raising fallen party members) are also affected by this system.
To make your party of 4, we've designed 8 classes. They are: Dark Knight, Oathkeeper, Cleric, Oracle, Blademaster, Monk, Hunter and Witch. The first two are designed "tank" classes, meant to provoke enemies and soak in huge hits. Then we have two healers, and finally four attacker classes.
Each of these classes plays differently from one another and have their pecularities. You can also customize the palettes of your party members (8 available per class).
Story and Setting
You play as a party of wandering souls who have found themselves in a mysterious location known as the Observatory. A powerful witch named Monna has summoned you here.
She introduces herself as one of the twelve weavers of fate known as the magi, creators and keepers of worlds.
The player characters enter a covenant with her and agree to travel into one such world in order to find the lost soul of her sister, Alma.
The magi were briefly mentioned in the latest Momodora game, and it is here in Record of Dorathia that the spotlight is entirely on them.
The Observatory is also home to a few NPCs that will aid you in your quest. To name some: Celica, the nun, will heal your wounds and save your game. And managing the workshop is a magesmith, Juno, who will help equip your party.
History of Development
You might be thinking "Wait... What? This type of game is so unexpected."
To be completely honest, it's something I've had in my mind for many years at this point. But I needed the right moment to fully commit to the development of a project like this. Let me share a history of how we got to this point.
It all started in the latter half of 2019. At the time I was reading a lot of "choose your own adventure" game books (Fighting Fantasy series). I was hooked and thought I could try writing something similar of my own.
Since I'm a game developer, the most natural way was to make a "digital gamebook", as in a videogame type. I experimented with many ways to do it but in the end the project sort of fizzled out. Shown below here are some of those early experiments.
Eventually I even switched the project from a videogame to an actual tabletop RPG system. But even that was short-lived and I couldn't find the motivation to keep going with it.
In January of 2020, on a trip with my brother, I was asked when the next Momodora was going to be released. Of course, there was no Momodora in development at the time... But his words got me thinking and planning a new one.
That's when the development of "Moonlit Farewell" began. It lasted from February of 2020 until October of 2023. If you recall, the game was released in January of 2024. Those extra months between the end of development and the actual release were used to playtest, complete the localization, and other such things.
However, once development of Moonlit Farewell was concluded (for the most part), I started dedicating my time to whatever was going to be made next. And that turned out to be this RPG project, Record of Dorathia.
It's been roughly 3 years since then, and as you'd expect, it's been a very challenging project. Not only it is a completely different type of genre than what I'm used to, but an RPG by nature has a lot of moving pieces. When making a sidescrolling game, you can have a character moving and doing basic actions like jumping in one afternoon of programming. For this RPG, it took weeks and months just to get several functionalities implemented to truly get a feel of what we were making.
RPGs are among my favorite genres of videogames, and it's always been a dream of mine to work on one. It's no secret that Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross are games that are very dear to my heart.
I had also been making metroidvanias for so many years at this point that I thought I could use something different, refreshing. Counting Minoria, the Momodora series is 6 games in total. That's a lot of games of a similar style.
I was asked about inspirations, and there are some key games I can mention: the Chrono series, Final Fantasy, Etrian Odyssey and Pokémon Gold/Silver.
Closing Words
I feel like this blog post has stretched beyond what I originally imagined. Oh well...
One last thing I can say is that development is proceeding smoothly. We are making it at our own pace, giving it the time it needs.
I do plan on launching a Steam page with a trailer in the near future. You can follow for updates on either Twitter or Bluesky.
Thanks for reading.
-rdein
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