Meridian Six RPG

Dincorta
Jul 24, 2020
3 min read

It’s been a hell of a rough lockdown.

Between the last post and this one, I lost my dad. My dad, who I had been isolating from since lockdown began, for his own safety; who I was always gonna lose to something completely unrelated to Corona…

As you can imagine, I’m left with a million what-ifs, and shoulda-couldas. If only I’d known, etc etc.

With that, and a whole array of recent what-the-fucks, on top of this bananas lockdown situation… I’ve started going a bit nuts. I’ve been trying my best to reel myself back in and streamline my focus. Occupy my mind with something else entirely.

So I’ve been working absolutely non-stop on either comics, or a new game. Most recently, the new game.

MERIDIAN SIX RPG.

I’ve wanted to make this for a WHILE… A LONG while. In fact, my Circus comic series is deeply inspired by ideas I had for this game. I was knee-deep in The Elder Scrolls Online several years ago and during that time I reworked a lot of my ideas for Circus – the setting, the economy of the world, the way the characters would navigate it, and so on…

It became a sort of thing where it SHOULD really exist as a game, not a comic, due to the nature of it. But I knew at its core, I just wanted to get the story across. A comic that played out like a roleplaying game, and took unique elements from roleplaying games, still sounds like a pretty neat idea.

That’s when I bashed out the first Circus comic and started laying the groundwork for the Circus as a world. In the few years since that, I’ve worked a lot on documentation and refining the logistics, and just daydreaming about it. So a lot of the basis is there for an actual game to be made. The only thing really stopping me was my lack of know-how.

Last year, I began studying for a Master’s in “Games Enterprise” – a fancy name for just game design. I’ve met some cool people with an array of skills, I’ve worked on, maybe, 9 or 10 game jams now, including this year’s Global Game Jam back in January.

I also took it upon myself, when lockdown began and one of my deadlines was extended, to make a full playable game all on my own.

That was Sleeper-9, which I wrote about in previous posts!

I enjoyed making it, through the stressful moments, and the satisfying moments. It served as a great practice run for a [slightly] better game. But a side-scrolling 2D platformer is a little different to a full open-world RPG – so there’s a lot more to learn. But that’s just the thing! Once I get the basis of the mechanics down, the rest of the game is just about navigation, and setting up NPC’s and questlines – all things that I can do quite easily now in Unreal Engine.

It’s gonna take me a fair bit of time, but it’ll be nice to put some work into a project like this for a change, and pick up a skill or two along the way.

The common link here is the Circus – that world from that one comic. That’s the world I’m gonna try to build and make explorable in the RPG. Not entirely, because it’s a big world, but certainly regions of it. I won’t pretend this game isn’t heavily inspired by The Elder Scrolls and Fallout – it is! But I also have my own ideas for it, and if I keep my own sort of style going throughout it, I believe it can stand as quite a unique thing.

Plus, portfolio work is portfolio work!

I’ll leave you with some concept art I’ve made in the past couple of weeks, and hopefully in my next post, I’ll have a lot more to show.