Fates Weekly Update #4

Hello, folks. Chief here with the 4th update of Rising Angels: Fates. As we get into the groove of development, things are settling into their standard routine. It has mostly been a mid-production week where there isn’t a lot to show and not much to talk about. Originally, I was going to do drunken karaoke to keep people entertained, but I’m still federally banned from singing. While that spares you from the brutal savagery of my singing voice, it means we have a fairly limited update for this week.

-Would everyone like to see a running word count? I like having one to help me, as the writer, keep honest about how much progress I’m making.

-Did some tweaking of the interface this week. Right now we are commissioning an artist to replace the temporary assets used to make it. Once we starting getting those done, we’ll be able to show some gameplay screenshots and perhaps make a demo for you all to give a try.

-For the dakimakura supporters, we should have a sketch of Natalie’s up next week. Hopefully, I will also be able to show off the wall scroll as well.

-Thanks in part to our friends at Innomen Productions, we now have a forum! For those of you who want to talk about any of the Rising Angels series, this is now the hip new place to do it. There are also several other awesome games to check out while you are there!

-Since the musical styling of Chief is out of the question, let’s talk about the existing romantic interest carrying over from Rising Angels: Reborn, the Nimross’s brave hero, Zuri.

zuriSketch

Name: Zuri
Age: 121
Gender: F
Rank: Lieutenant
Nationality: Ryu’llian
Bio: The security officer of the KSS Nimross. A former musician who joined the Katajion Defense Force for unknown reasons. Determined with a strong sense of right and wrong, Zuri’s fearless and optimistic nature serves as a rallying point to those around her. However, behind the mask of justice, Zuri constantly berates herself for perceived weaknesses.

Chief’s Notes: Zuri, the dragon fighter of the group and Natalie’s romantic companion. Zuri, the human co-pilot with the incredibly minor role. While these phrases might seem to describe two totally different characters, they both were true about Zuri at various points of development. When the game was starting out in its concept phase, Zuri didn’t really have a place. Like Commander Rasoona, she was designed to be a character who needed to fill a specific role on the crew. Sol needed a co-pilot to take the stick when he was off with Natalie and a foil to help bounce jokes off of. She wasn’t going to be anything more than a check on the crew line-up.

Then I saw her concept.

zuri

It’s hard to explain what caught my eye. Zuri was the first draemon in the series. Despite the series always walking the fantasy line, I hadn’t ever considered adding dragons to the series. When Nuge showed me this concept after being told to do whatever she wanted, I knew I had an opportunity. Of course, I needed to start doing a lot more development on her personality. For those of you who remember, her original description was nothing more than two lines. She liked to work out and was upbeat. That’s all I knew about her at the start of development.

One of the biggest problems I had with writing Zuri was that I wasn’t sure how strong her relationship with Natalie was going to be. For the first two thirds of the story, I couldn’t find a spark between them. Sure, they were friends, but that was as much as I could do. They worked well as a duo. Zuri could provide the muscle, Natalie the brains behind it. Easy, by-the-books relations. I think it was around the picture of her hatch friends that I started to realize that I was underestimating Zuri. There was more to this fighter than I had originally thought.

Simplicity. I think that is the best word to describe Zuri. While you could interpret that as she’s dumb, as indicated by her lack of understanding of technology, I wouldn’t use it that way. Many people would say that there is no clear cut answers in the world. There is no single answer to a problem. Zuri wouldn’t agree. Right is right, wrong is wrong. There is no middle ground, there is no gray area. A warrior is a warrior. To Zuri, there is very little in the world that causes her to falter when she knows what her duty demands her to do. While Natalie sees a thousand different answers to the question of their fate, Zuri only sees one. Protect those she cares and never harm the innocent.

That simplicity is why I think Zuri and Natalie make such a strong pair. Natalie was a SITO with dreams of the top, becoming an admiral and rising to the top. Zuri never thought of herself or what made her happy, just what the code demanded and what others needed. Zuri never had anyone she could care about after Akurel left her. When Natalie entered her life, Zuri saw some of Akurel in Natalie and that old flame reignited in her heart. For the first time in a long time, Zuri started to think about herself and what she had lost on this path. For Natalie, she began to see that there was more in life than what she could get out of it. There were the makings of an eternal bond between them, if both of them could learn to see how the other did a little bit.

As we go into Fates, that bond is going to be tested. At the end of the Zuri route, the bond is still fragile and easily broken. When a figure from Zuri’s past returns to haunt her. With the universe falling apart around them, both of them are going to heavily depend on the other to help make sense of the new world they’ve stepped into. Out of all the character romances, Zuri is going to be the most difficult to maintain and see a positive resolution. To be able to hold the heart of the draemon warrior, you have to be prepared to put your own on the line. A warrior’s bond is forged in fire, after all.

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Okay, after having to rewrite this a third time because it kept getting deleted, I’m going to go take a break before I finally go off the mental deep end. Until next week, Chief out!