From Dev to Dev. Baptiste Miny, from Ars Goetia, for Mutropolis!

Another post from the serie "From Dev to Dev"! This time the artist behind The Blind Prophet left us several tech-tips about a recent adventure game released on indiexpo, Mutropolis!
 

 

The Blind Prophet is a very interesting project, developed by Ars Goetia (from France), a dark, bloody and stylish narrative driven point and click adventure where you take on the role of an apostle, sent on a mission by God to protect humans from the corruption of demons., that passed a Kickstarter Campaign during the January 2019.

Check out the tech-tips of its artist about Mutropolis! Let's go!
 

This game already looks good, and is very well written. It was hard to choose any specific tips, but here are a couple of little improvements that could be made to the game.
 

 
First of all, I’d love to have some context for the plot, even if it’s nice to discover the lore through the characters’ conversations. Any presentation of the plot, even a short one or mysterious one, would help lead us into the adventure more smoothly. There might be some easy question that are easy to answer, and that would help the player understand what they later see. For example, introducing the location, and the time period the game takes place in.
 

 
Some parts of the illustrations are still too rough in my opinion. I know how it is, as an artist: you always wonder whether or not you’re going to ruin the illustration, if it loses the energy it had while a sketch. My advice would be to add some precision and stiffness where the gaze of the players will focus (and where there are objects to interact with), and let the rest of the picture be a little but rougher.
 

I love the work of artists like Richard Schmid, for instance, in which you instantly know where to look at, and the rest of the picture helps you focus on those elements. Also, a general tip would be to never hesitate to go for particles and special effects in your environments!
 

 
The characters have some good animations, timing and are well written and designed. I hope you’ll be able to put in some voice acting, even if it’s expensive (don’t worry if you can’t though, I can’t do it in The Blind Prophet either). An in-between solution is to go for a couple of intonations and expressions, and re-use them. It’s cheap, but effective!

As I said, I couldn’t really tell more from the demo, but it’s already a good quality production. Good luck to you.

P.S. Please, put a clear a tutorial for the inventory, I really struggled to find out how to open it!

• Baptiste Miny from Ars Goetia

text checked and reviewed by DarknessAwaits