Indefinite Hiatus

I should've posted this back in 2020 when COVID hit, but I was in massive denial that I was going to get anything done. Plus, I didn't want to admit it at the time, but I lost over 20 pages worth of notes (pretty much all of them) that I thought I could just rebuild from, and then writer's block struck me and the project died in the water. I couldn't bring myself to admit it at the time, but here I am.

So much effort, time, and sweat I poured into Prodical Isekai, down the drain.

Spoilers from this point onward, so go ahead and play the demo if you haven't already.

Honestly, the storyline was pretty straight-forward from the get-go. Paul and his father get abducted and Isekai'd. 
Paul meets the antagonist who can shapeshift into anybody who can put whoever he's talking to, into an emotionally manipulable position. Scaring off the forest beast that pursues Paul, the antagonist took the appearance of Paul's sister (that he lost back in his own world). 

So, yeah. When Paul is crying while being asked as if he "saw a ghost". Yeah. That's because he was looking at one.

Paul also resembles another character called "Paulos" (woo-hoo! How original! I know) who was the Brother of the Elf Ikos that Paul bumps into, and the two proceed to try to insult each other in hilarious and entertaining dialogue.

Also, remember what I said about the antagonist shapeshifting into anybody who can render who he's talking to, in order to emotionally compromise who he's talking to?

Yeah. That's why Ikos freaks out and casts "Dispel Illusion", because he thought Paul was the Antagonist.

... Yeah, that's about all I can remember.

I feel bad that I lost all the notes and that the project crumpled to dust.

A big part of the conflict with the Antagonist and overarching theme behind the bad guy is indeed emotional manipulation, but there was also more: How not being genuine or authentic in who you are as a person or using the talent of being a social chameleon in extremely hurtful or despicable ways can traumatize people (like Ikos), or worse, cause divisions, death, and destruction (If you've played the demo, then you can gather an informed conclusion on what I'm talking about).

I didn't want to just make the antagonist "OoOoOoo! Scary red-armored, red-eyed, black-haired edgelord! OoOoooOoo!"

Sure, yeah. The character of the Antagonist is a cynical Sophist who's riding off of a power-high to manipulate people into doing whatever he wants, and he causes chaos because he's bored out of his mind, but I wanted to make it BELIEVABLE.

That was another reason why losing the notes was so catastrophic to the project.

When you stare at the antagonist, you stare at type of person that actually thinks that way IRL - a type of toxic person that uses your emotions, morals, values, and codes to coerce you into making decisions that benefit him/her/it/whatever. The Antagonist on the other hand, doesn't believe in anything and will gleefully say whatever it takes to get under your skin and undermine you.

Having no morals or refusing to believe in anything and willing to be a hypocrite is exactly what made the Antagonist as evil as he is.
The Antagonist also isn't some snobby, two-faced desk jockey that can be broken like a twig either. I designed his character to be a drunk-with-power black night very much by design, to also add an extra layer to the evil of the antagonist - He/she/it doesn't need to be smart or torture people through manipulation of their values. He does it because it's more fun than being an absolute dragon of evil (which he is very capable of being).

Also, before anyone throws any political shenanigans in my thread, I'll be the first to point out what I already said - The Antagonist does not believe in any moral values. He literally gets his sick kicks by getting under people's skin and getting those that do have beliefs (no matter how progressive or regressive we believe they are) into ripping each other apart. If you are someone who thinks in "Me vs Them" mentalities, then congratulations! You're literally the type of sucker that the Antagonist will manipulate to his whims!

In the story however, he fails to do that with the Humans of the setting of the game, Prodigal Isekai, because the humans from Prodigal Isekai were Isekai'd into the Fantasy world, and already knew the type of evil slimeball the Antagonist was, due to having previous experience and recognizing his tactics.

Having "been got", he set humanity up with lies, deceit, subversion, manipulation, and every trick under the sun to trick everyone else against Humanity.

I wrote this all back in 2015, by the way!

Ikos was written to resemble what happens when someone becomes irreversibly hurt by emotional and psychological manipulation - the distrust, the obsession for truth even when there's no need for it. Hell, I had a side-plot prepared where Paul has to tell Ikos to chill out because he was using crystal balls as a fantasy-equivalent to mass-surveillance, because he's horrified about being manipulated again. When he meets Paul, he insults him from behind the wall because he has no idea if Paul is a genuine person of upstanding character, another unwitting useful puppet of the Antagonist, or even the Antagonist himself.

And then we get to the Queen character.

Oh boy. I get to talk about the Ikos's mom.

If you've already played the demo, you already know The Queen. I did NOT need to go as hard as I did for the into for her, but it is what it is.

But then we get to the part of the game where Paul meets her.

Remember what I said earlier about Ikos and Paulos?

Ikos is an Elf, but his father died. His mom the Queen had ambitions, so he chose a Human husband to elevate her people's status, and subvert humanity's role as Judges in the world in hopes to elevate her people above everyone else.

Unfortunately for her, the Antagonist knew about her goals, and being a snake in the garden that the Antagonist is, did what he does best: Take advantage.

Paulos was the queen's second child - a half-human that the Queen had with her human husband before the Antagonist poisoned him, setting it up to look like an illness (I wrote this before I saw Phantom Blood, and I was ready to scrap it because I couldn't conceive of how I could communicate to the player that the human king was poisoned and indeed NOT dying to a sickness. And then after scrapping it I saw Phantom Blood and went "Well, shit!").

The Antagonist later kills Paulos,  framing humanity for the murder, taking advantage of the unrest, lies, strife, division and subversion (that the Antagonist himself caused).

By the time Paul (and by the extension, the Player) meets The Queen, she is instead a distraught wreck.

IRL, a lot of us will make bad calls, then attempt to justify them. The Queen is an embodiment of why we do that. (Ok, maybe not an exact 1:1, but she represents the image - the feared idea of what we think will become of us if we don't justify our actions).

The alternative to justifying our worst decisions is, ideally, taking responsibility for the consequences of our actions, be they good or evil. Intentions be damned. 

Having good intentions when doing anything does not work. The Queen was designed to be the end-product of such a way of thinking: A distraught, traumatized, regretful, depressed, self-loathing war criminal, punishing herself via self-inflicted house arrest.

She does find out her husband was poisoned (by the Antagonist, who set it up to look like a jealous human judge who... also set himself up by voicing that by marrying the queen would cause jealousy and disrupt the balance - WHICH IT DID, BY THE WAY)

Her child, a product of her relationship with her human husband, then gets murdered.

At the same time, Humanity's popularity in the world starts tanking, thanks to the Antagonist's shenanigans.

The Antagonist set the stage, but the actors played themselves to HIS tune. All the antagonist needed to do was just give the wrong (or right) people an excuse. It was them that had to act on it.

(Also to be fair to the inhabitants of the setting, they have not had the experience with being manipulated that we've had IRL. I was hoping through the climax of the great reveal of this plot, I could have the Antagonist show the player how deep his subversion went, but while going through a highlight reel of him giving exposition on how, it's shown that his tactics were all stuff used by people IRL).

But getting back on track:

The Queen's intentions were to avenge her murdered child. She waged a war of annihilation against the Judges of their world, in the name of Justice, while being a manipulated pawn by someone who gladly wipes his rear with the concept of "Don't be an Evil prick".

After the smoke clears and she finds the truth of it all, she doesn't try to justify her actions anymore, or find a fall-guy or even try to hide it (which she could have chosen, as many leaders have done, countless times over). 

She instead allows the truth to break her. She chooses the high road, even though it inflicts a wound on her soul that will never heal.

This is the stark contrast between the Antagonist and the Queen.

The Antagonist doesn't believe in any Morals or Rules. He just does what he does, then points and laughs when people fall for his tricks. Humans were the only ones who wised-up and managed to defeat him, but couldn't over power or destroy him. He is the embodiment of the spirit of hypocrisy, bad faith, deceit, and using soft power in an evil way for the sake of entertaining himself.

The Queen on the other hand was a loving, fair, and genuinely decent person who had the good people in her life surgically removed as more toxic and increasingly negative things entered her life.
She was fed endlessly wrong information until it turned her into a cold and detached Tyrant who was given a target, the means to destroy said target, and a perfectly valid reason to destroy said target.

Anybody could easily see themselves in the Queen, or Ikos, or even the Antagonist to a degree.

The entire plot happens, thanks to the cynicism and blatant disregard for goodwill of a single (albeit powerful) person.

How we think and what values we value is HUGE to who we are as individual people. "Prodigal Isekai" was an ambitious project that sadly was never able to progress beyond the stage of a Demo, because everything the game was supposed to warn people about, had come to life in front of our very eyes, back in 2020.

Prodigal Isekai died in the cradle I was nursing it in, because the purpose it was supposed to fulfill had been taken by the world losing its collective mind, proving me right in one of the worst ways I never could've wished and don't wish on anyone else.

Oh yeah. There's Paul. I completely forgot to talk about the protagonist.

Paul,(named so, literally after the Apostle of the same name), was meant to not only just be the vessel of the player, but he was also going to be the foil to the Antagonist.

Where the Antagonist basks in his cynical worldview and toys with people's emotions, not even believing in his own words (or anything, really), never believing in any objective right or wrong but instead takes a sophist view where he can just make up whatever suits his fancy to get under people's skin. 

Paul on the other hand keeps his values close, never betrays them once he gains the strength to stand for what he believes in, and above all, doesn't have too much of a code himself, but instead stands for what's right for the sake of it.

The Antagonist tries to figure out what other people's moral codes are so he can undermine them and destroy those people, because that's what he wants to do. Paul on the other hand, stands up for what's right, stays out of other people's business, and also doesn't even share what he believes in due to not wanting to shove his morals onto other people. He does what's right because it's the right thing to do, and if he doesn't have the information necessary to act, he doesn't.

There's more, but the more I talk about this project, the more I lament what could have been.

Thank you all for being with me.  My biggest regret is that I didn't say this sooner, and that I instead kept you up on a false hope that I'd work more on the game - work that I couldn't get the time to get done.

Again, thank you all and Goodbye.