Elemental Balance & Monsters

Allow me to begin this post with the announcement that Sweet Lily Dreams is now on Steam! Reception has been incredible, although the first two days the game was wrongfully tagged as "Furry" and one reviewer declined the game for having "Adult Furry content" which is completely false, of course. Faith and Curly never have intercourse. That's just... Gross.

The game's new trailer has been produced by Ethron Productions. That man's incredible! He finished the trailer in just two days by doing an all-nighter. See the result for yourself:

Now on to Lunafall! I'll be showing you four new monsters and the Elemental Balance system of the game, so click below to read on!

To make this post complete, I'll include the Radiance creature that I previously posted:

Tall, creepy and magenta. Moving on to Vacuum, of which I previously showed the work-in-progress version:

It walks on its hands with shriveled legs dangling above the ground. The hole in its body represents the vacuum element.

Next up is a whole new one, Rust:

This fat giant with sagging boobies has rusty blades for arms and carries a metal pod on its back. Because of its fat it shuffles across the floor instead of actually walking. I wanted to keep metal in the design, but make everything look rusted and intertwined with its flesh. The touches of green were added for color variation.

The fourth one is Acid:

This one is the most colorful of all. First I messed around with color schemes a bit:

Acid is the color of purple, but I find green to look disgusting and creepy in combination with that color so I wanted to add it, too. To emphasize that all these monsters were once human I gave it a flesh-like skin color and colored the skinless bits red with white for the tendons. The result is a bit of a rainbow mishmash, unlike the other 3 monsters, but I think they go together rather well and the result is quite creepy.

The animation is a bit wack: it stumbles back and forth with one arm reached out to either try and grab you or to shake your hand. The other arm just motionlessly dangles with rotting pieces of skin flesh falling off. The front-view animation is actually quite creepy:

Now why are these creatures bound to a specific color? It's because of the Elemental System in Lunafall. Below is a color graph to show you how it works. It should actually be on a globe, because the elements circle around (as you can tell from the cut-off Plasma), but this graph is easier to see.

The universe is basically divided into two forces: positive and negative energy. When these forces came together, they created the four basic elements of life: Fire, Earth, Water and Air (you know, those basic RPG elements). When these four collide they create the sub-elements of: Plasma, Magma, Ooze and Steam. These are also neutral elements.

Now when an element is touched by positive or negative energy, it changes. Fire becomes Lightning, Earth becomes Steel, Water becomes Ice and Air becomes Sonic. These four are positive. If the neutral elements are touched by a negative force, they turn into what you've seen above: Radiance, Rust, Acid and Vacuum. Simple, right?

Every object and every living thing has an aura -- an elemental alignment. This is decided by heritage, birth, personality, etc. When something is touched by a positive or negative force, the object or creature mutates. Say, a human has a water-aligned aura. If it is given negative energy, it will transform into the acid monster seen above. On the other hand, if the human's positive energy is absorbed, it will also transform into the acid creature. It's all about balance, not about good and evil.

Hopefully I explained that in an understandable way. In upcoming blog posts I'll be showing the positive aligned creatures (they're not as benign looking as the word "positive" makes it sound).

To end this post, here's a very very early work-in-progress on an area in Lunafall. Can you guess what kind of place it is? ^0^