My first attempt at conceptualizing the world of Lila Dreams in terms of its geography was to sit down, and create a map. “Ok, this here, that next to it, and maybe over here this other place with this area in between.” It was fun–like when I was a kid and drew all those D&D maps!

But, that didn’t feel right. It felt too expected.

We’ve all played games where the geography is like real life, and you walk from point to point in a seamless transition from place to place. It’s pretty cool, but in a world where reality isn’t always solid ground, it didn’t seem like the most interesting choice. (And sometimes it’s boring to walk across 24 miles of empty landscape to reach a town.)

So, thought I, why stick with convention? Why can’t places be connected by doors that lead to points between areas that aren’t geographically logical? For instance, you might step through a door in a warm tropical forest and find yourself in an underground maze or on top of a giant beetle or in the picture of an advertisement in a magazine laying on someone’s living-room floor.

It gives us a good bit of flexibility to take players to exotic places without all the fuss necessary with that fancy “logic” stuff. The connections will persist; there will be a navigable and memorable geography, but it just won’t be like the kind of geography we’re used to. It’ll be more interesting and more fun. We can skip the boring parts!

There are four kinds of doors in the game.

1. Bedroom door. This is the primary kind of door, and it generally leads you to “normal” places like cities and landmarks.
2. Garden gate. There’s only one place this leads to, and that’s to your personal garden.
3. Schoolhouse door. Only the brave should venture through this door. It leads to the dangerous labyrinths, of which there are many types.
4. Asylum door. These only exist in a particularly wretched place called Dementra, and unspeakable horrors shamble therein.

Doors are not the only means of travel. But they are the most basic.

First, a big “Thank you!” to everyone who has stopped by, and especially to everyone who has subscribed to the blog. We really appreciate your support, and we desperately need it to get the word out there about the game.

Here’s a bit of concept art that leads into what I will talk about now.

That is part of Lila’s Tableau. (Remember, Lila is the 11-year old girl who’s mind will be inhabited by you, the players.) The Tableau is a kind of communication device. It’s pretty big, about the size of a two-level house. There’s one in every major town, and it’s connected to that mysterious tower you might have seen in the concept art gallery.

In this game, emotions are a really central aspect. Because we’re frolicking around inside this girl’s psyche–and you know how emotional pre-teen children can be!–we’re going to run into emotions. Therefore, emotions will touch almost everything in the game. Your character will have an emotional “alignment,” abilities and items will have attributes that are affected by emotion, and the environment itself will change depending on Lila’s mood.

A very cool feature (to which we owe credit to Chris Pasley from Kongregate for spawning the idea) is that players can actually affect Lila’s mood. I won’t get into any details, because I want to save that all for later when the design is more stable, but I can say that the Tableau is one key part of the process of how players change Lila’s mood. The rewards are many, so if your character is aligned emotionally with Lila’s mood, good things happen.

This is one of the central activities in the game: a kind of tug-of-war to influence Lila’s mood to match with your character’s alignment so you can reap the benefits. It isn’t a direct PvP type thing, but more of an indirect process of mass cooperation among the members of each emotional “faction.”

I really want to say more, but I have to wait and let those cats out of their bags later. Stay tuned for more exciting adventures!

Since we’re working in conjunction with the great people at kongregate.com, and the games on that site are mostly small Flash projects, you might be wondering what kind of game Lila Dreams will be.

Simply put, it is a massively multiplayer game with a Flash interface. Most of the game logic (the gameplay rules) is programmed in Java and runs on the server. Lila Dreams is very different from anything on Kongregate, which is not to say it’s better, just that it’s a huge game and is probably not what you would expect to find on the site.

Just in case you don’t know, a “massively multiplayer online game” (often abbreviated “MMO”) requires large numbers of players to simultaneously co-exist in a virtual world, playing together and living in the universe of the game. Very often, there’s a lot of belligerence towards Bad Guys that threaten the well-being of the Good Guys. World of Warcraft is probably the most popular example of this type of game. Lila Dreams is nowhere near as big as that game, but it’s very ambitious for a tiny team like ours–just three sexy men.

So, it’s like WoW?

Not really.

World of Warcraft is a medieval/primitive setting, whereas Lila Dreams has a mix of varying levels of technology. There’s even a touch of science fiction.

There are no elves, dwarfs, or other Tolkien-derived player races. There are no dragons, orcs, or other Tolkien-derived creatures. There’s no magic. Well, there are “powers” that might be analogous to magic spells, but in terms of the setting they are psychic powers and not spells. So, there’s no magic.

There is no level grind. Level grinding is when you do boring tasks like killing cellar rats over and over to watch your game character become more powerful so you can kill bigger cellar rats. I personally do not like level grinding, and I think that it puts the focus of play on the experience of grinding rather than on the experience of the game world. I am working hard to design systems that do not require grinding so that the game world itself is the focus of fun.

No level grind, but there is combat: juicy, 2d platforming combat with RPG-like mechanics! This wasn’t always the idea, though. I originally wanted the game to not have combat at all, but in the end I decided that combat is something that a lot of people want. And we aim to please! So, then I decided that if there must be combat, I will find a way to avoid level grinding. I’ll talk more about the combat systems in later posts. It’s very early in the development cycle to be giving out details.

There is a kind of crafting, and it’s a central part of the gameplay. All I can say for now is that you don’t craft items–you grow them. Yes, gardening. But in a surrealistic game world where plants are not just plants. But I must not give away too much! (It’s very hard for me not to spill the beans! Oh how I fight!)

So, it’s nothing like Wow?

Well, kinda.

You get to make a character, choose what to wear, fight exciting battles against a bestiary of insanely weird creatures from Lila’s mind, team up with friends and explore strange places, meet in towns and emote at each other, get to know helpful NPCs (non-player characters), grow items in your garden, and manage your character’s abilities and inventory. We’ll see how much more we can cram into the game before launch, but we also hope to keep building on it after launch to make it even better.

So, yeah, it’s got things in common with many other MMOs. It’s just a lot smaller than most MMOs since we don’t have even 0.01% of the budget of something like World of Warcraft.

When can I play?

My, aren’t you just full of questions. (Or not, I don’t even know if anyone is reading this blog to be honest!)

It’s coming out this year. And there will be beta testing for a while. [Clarification update: beta testing won't begin for quite a few months. My apologies if this was not clear. Bad, naughty Jason!] That’s as specific as I want to be. But it’ll be worth the wait!!

(Drum roll, please…)

Hello, and welcome to the official Lila Dreams developer blog!

Lila Dreams is an ambitious “small” MMO (massively multiplayer online game). Yes, yes, “small” is kind of a silly adjective to use to describe an MMO, but I’ve just done it, so it’s definitely possible. Now, does that mean the game will be simplistic, cramped, and shallow? Heck no!

Small, in this case, means we’re really working hard to limit the scope of the game while putting forth a Herculean effort to make it a deep, fun experience that will keep players engaged. The plan is to generate income (in conjunction with kongregate.com, our beloved collaborators) in order to continue to develop and expand the game. It’s likely that we will launch kind of small (there’s that word again!), but we hope the game can grow into its shoes.

At this point in development, the game isn’t much more than a collection of ideas, hope, and a couple of crude prototypes. Oh, and a growing pile of really pretty concept art. But there is a vision here, so we hope you’ll stick around to see how things unfold.

If you don’t know, the game is a 2d, side-scrolling platform game that takes place in the mind of an 11-year old girl named Lila (pronounced, LEE-lah). As she drifts through life, players (as a race of mental entities called “Memekins”) must deal with the emotional storms and actually guide her through events which could crush her or save her. There will be plenty of actiony combat, some RPG-lite elements (but no level grind), exploration galore, and other non-combat activities like gardening in the soil of Lila’s psyche.

What to expect from this blog:

• Gradual improvement of this blog and expansion of the Lila Dreams website. There isn’t time to make it all look pretty all at once.
• Talk-o-rama about the game design, as we feel comfy disclosing details. We’re going to be tight-lipped for a while, though. (Don’t want to over-promise and under-deliver.)
• Plenty of concept art and screen shots.
• Some tech talk about the technology we’re using (like Flash and Java) and tools we’re making (like our map and animation editors).
• Lots of blather about how hard it is to make an MMO!

I (Jason, lead designer and producer) will try to post here regularly. I don’t yet know how often that will be, but I’d like to post once a week.

There’s not really much to talk about at this point since we’re still in early production, but if you have burning questions that you want answers for, please leave a comment, and maybe I’ll answer a few for the next installment.

Buckle in, and get a snack. Let’s see what is down this rabbit hole….