Word of the World #04 - Blue Jeletan
Hello, we’re back with the fourth entry of our ‘Word of the World’ series of posts! This time, we’ll be showing you a bit of information about one of the included enemy types in the prototype, the Jeletan and some details about their part in the development of the prototype!
The Blue Jeletan, a species of “Jeletan”, are pretty obviously your generic fantasy slime enemy. There’s really not much else to say other than we wanted to give them a bit more of an extensive “character” to them as a species and wanted to indulge in a lot of our favorite fantasy tropes! In the prototype, we can only show so much, but when playing, check out their entries in the glossary and item descriptions related to the Jeletan to read more about them!
We mentioned this in our previous entry, but when we first started working on the prototype, we wanted to have a bit of a larger scale and scope for the ideas we had! At the time, the enemy designs we had created would be based around these creatures, the ‘Jeletan’, who would become the main focus of the story from the original idea! While the scope we envisioned didn’t pan out, the Jeletan as a concept remained to this day and have kept as an integral part of what we wished to do for the prototype.
The story surrounding them was also meant to be a bit more complex, but we had to tone down almost every element and focus it due to budget and time. As a result, their overall involvement in the story is relatively simple and serves more to set up various story details for the future rather than being the main feature! However, as enemies to fight, the Jeletan species are the enemies you fight in the first area!
We wanted to have an enemy type that would be simple to animate with and use in battle, that would also be easier to create variations of in order to give players more than just a single type of enemy to fight. Another result of lacking budget, skill and time, but we tried to do the best that we could with what we had back then! However, despite this, by the time we reached the current build of the prototype, we had around 14-15 enemies in the prototype, with around half of them not being Jeletan! It wasn’t actually planned to have so many enemies or even a second area, but with some more work and time, we managed to do so!
Of course, aside from that, with the introduction of the Jeletan enemies as our main enemy to fight, we also had the opportunity to repurpose that same enemy to create a playable party member! The original plan for the prototype was going to feature 1-3 party members in total, including Yellette and Rena, but ultimately the costs for both modeling entire characters and animating them ended up being more than we were able to afford or create due to constraints with real life jobs and the time each member of the team had. Because of this, we decided instead to use the Blue Jeletan model for the creation of Ermli, the second playable character!
Ermli the Jeletan and Yellette!
Making enemies into playable characters is a relatively easy task as we use both the same control method as we do for the party as we do for enemies and test out enemies first by playing with them and seeing how they move/attack. Though making Ermli into a member was easy, however, it involved creating an extensive skillset, playstyle and combat goal for Ermli that wasn’t just a carbon copy of the other Jeletan enemies you fight, which ended up being the hardest part of making her. Our goal was to give the Jeletan, who played a role in the story as enemies, another window as a character in the party who assists and travels with Yellette!
She’s a bit more simple than Yellette, who was the main combat focus, but we still hope that she’ll be an enjoyable member to use in combat! Her main focus is a “route” based strategy built around her special ability ‘Regal Variable: Wayward Royal’, which essentially allows her to change her color to match other Jeletan and use their abilities! When you use her skill, “Form Change!”, or by using skills of a particular type from a particular Jeletan, her color will change to match and she will receive buffs based on the species she is becoming! The idea being utilizing skills in a particular order to maximize damage in a combo and matching up the timing with your buffs while also keeping varied to keep your style high.
We’d like to expand on her moveset complexity and playstyle a bit more in the future, but for the time being we think it’d be best for her to play very simple and fun!
That’ll be all for today, thank you so much for reading and stay tuned for more updates coming soon!
