New Might and Magic fan game- Monsters of Mican

[Skittzo]

Hey folks, I'm relatively new around here, but I've been a longtime fan of the M&M series, so much so that a couple years back I was sick of nobody else making games like it so I decided to take it upon myself to make a brand new game heavily inspired by Might and Magic. (Hey if JVC could do it in the 80s why can't I now when game development is 5000x easier?)



Originally I wanted to make a full semi-open game that kinda blended the concepts of MM1-5 and 6-8, where you'd have a world map traversed in first person (like 1-5) but towns/dungeons/areas all separate spaces like 6-8 with full 3D movement in both the world map and other instances. However, my design doc for this game wound up at a staggering 28 dungeons, and I was on pace to do maybe 5 dungeons a year so I decided to significantly scale back my project and make it a much more linear dungeon crawler.



Still, the game has Might and Magic DNA everywhere. There's a fully customizable 4 member party, a skill system like 6-8 where you upgrade ranks for new benefits, turn based combat like in 6-8 (no option to do toggle between that and action, a sequel may have that), dungeons having puzzles and objects/statues/interactibles that inexplicably grant massive boosts or vaporize your character, a very, very M&M style story which blends ridiculous scifi concepts with traditional fantasy settings, etc.

I've added a ton of my own design philosophies as well, including specific and unique boss encounters, an action bar which gives you quick and easy access to your character's spells/abilities, a "trait" system where enemies can have varying special abilities or properties based on what traits they have (from a list of like 75 traits), a randomized loot system which is kinda similar to MM6-8 but with some big changes, and tons of other more QOL features that we all wish the older M&M games would have.





The game is complete now, I am working on finishing up post-game challenge dungeons which I had originally planned to be post-launch content, but going from finishing a game to launching it takes longer than I thought so I have the time! I am still trying to polish it and squash any remaining bugs, so I am always looking for people to test the game and give me any and all feedback they may have. There's a free demo out with the first 3 (out of 10+) dungeons, but I can also give out codes for the full game if anyone wants to do any more rigorous QA testing.

Demo is here: https://skittzo.itch.io/projectmm

I'm planning to launch in October on the Epic Games Store, then later on Steam and Itch and eventually if possible bring it to consoles.




Please let me know if this type of post is not appropriate for this forum! Thank you for reading and thanks for being Might and Magic fans!

[Skittzo]

I just realized I completely forgot to post my trailers. Whoops!

[Tomsod]

From watching the trailers, it's indeed very Might and Magic -- you seem to have combined the UX of MM9 with the wackiness of the DOS-era MM games. I'll have to play the demo, for inspiration at least! I see it's not open-source, do you at least plan to have some kind of manual/wiki/documentation explaining how everything works, or are in-game hints enough?

[Skittzo]

From watching the trailers, it's indeed very Might and Magic -- you seem to have combined the UX of MM9 with the wackiness of the DOS-era MM games. I'll have to play the demo, for inspiration at least! I see it's not open-source, do you at least plan to have some kind of manual/wiki/documentation explaining how everything works, or are in-game hints enough?

There's an in-game tutorial at the start which should help, but now that I think about it I should totally throw together a manual or something, huh.

For now I can just explain the basics:

-WASD for full movement
-mouse controls the camera outside of menus
-C/esc brings up the character menu with tabs for all menu functions
-tab switches between active chars outside of combat, switches targetable enemies in combat
-1-7 keys use the current abilities/spells mapped to those keys
-R rests if you're able to rest

That's about it for controls. Gameplay is basically clicking to activate interaction items (like NPCs, levers, doors, chests), click on enemies to select them then use an attack/ability when it's your turn. Some abilities don't need a target (like heal or fire wave). That's more or less it, the only other unusual caveat is MP works inversely to M&M, MP raises as you use more abilities and if you exceed the MP max threshold your character will be damaged.

All of this stuff is explained in the game in tutorials and tooltips but yeah it should be good to have it in a readme too at least, I'll work on that. Thanks.

[Strobe]

By mechanics looks very charming, but the design choices are way too goofy for my taste.

[Skittzo]

By mechanics looks very charming, but the design choices are way too goofy for my taste.

Ah sorry to hear that, goofy/whimsical design and dialogue is absolutely something I aimed for. But I'm glad you like the look of the mechanics, thank you for the feedback!

[Skittzo]

From watching the trailers, it's indeed very Might and Magic -- you seem to have combined the UX of MM9 with the wackiness of the DOS-era MM games. I'll have to play the demo, for inspiration at least! I see it's not open-source, do you at least plan to have some kind of manual/wiki/documentation explaining how everything works, or are in-game hints enough?

So I took a bit of time to write up a PDF manual, and also copied the manual to a devlog on the itch page here-

https://skittzo.itch.io/projectmm/devlo ... f-mican-v1

If you're still interested. Thanks for reminding me to do this, it does do a good job of explaining some of the less intuitive mechanics I think.