WITH DIVINE PROTECTION! Doorway Deities Simulator

Submission for "Game Mockup Jam #2" : create a mockup for a game that may never exists in 1-4 screenshots.

The download contains all the shown screenshots and some assets in higher resolution, included per jam requirement.

Game page is under construction, it will be expanded in the future to make it look like an actual game project. I might edit the screenshots as well (and add more). I want to post a devlog soon that talks about the designs in far more depth.

By the end I haven't really drawn a lot of actual in-game screenshots (I rather want to pretend than that I'm a character artist than game designer or GUI artist). The one that should show the gameplay is a super rush job paint over of a screenshot from Kenney Assets (City Kit Suburban): https://kenney-assets.itch.io/city-kit-suburban 

I have to be honest and admit that I still don't know what the gameplay loop actually is. I like RPGs to see character stats go up, learn new skills and get class promotions, so there's that.  I have some more small WIP sketches that I did not finish in time, like poses for a character's in-game model. Not sure if it's something you would see often with this type of game. Perhaps used as story sprite, because I think it will get annoying quickly if you see a magic animation everytime you cast a spell, even when it's one image flashing by. 

STORY:

"If you hear ancient Latin spoken next to your housedoor and there's no one outside, be not afraid, you are visited by the friendly Roman doorway deities."

CHARACTER LIST:

A way too short introduction to the divine doorkeepers... 

• Cardea: she/her - goddess of hinges and locks
  
• Forculus: he/him - god of doors 
• Lima (or also called Limentinus/Limentina): they/them - deity of thresholds

PREMISE:

Janus [major god of doorways] personally hand-picked Cardea to be his assistant, whereas the council of the twelve major deities assigned Forculus and Lima to work with Cardea. Janus is less than pleased to have these two rejects serve Cardea, but sometimes you have to make do with a ragtag team.

Since time immemorial the trio never rose above their already lowest rank in the pantheon. One day Forculus came up with the terrible plan to steal Janus' key so they could escape from their upcoming bad job performance review through the forbidden doorway, wherever that leads. The reluctant Cardea is pulled into the shenanigans of her colleagues, and the trio stranded in the modern world with no apparent way of return.

For a deity needs sufficient offerings to survive, they need to rebuild recognition within deadline, or else they cease to exist.

DEV NOTE:

These are the main characters from my not-so-WIP otome/amare visual novel project in a what-if AU scenario where they fulfil the roles of a bunch of obscure Roman doorway deities you probably never heard of. Since the character already exist, only the outfits are newly designed. For the longest time the otome project was untitled but its name is shaping up and it's not actually called "WITH DIVINE PROTECTION!", this is just a fake game name for a hypothetical series (as games of particular genre by same dev tend to follow some naming scheme).

The mockup idea came to be through the combination of being in the mood of drawing concept art, the jam coming at the right time for this, as several optional prompts match an idea that was based on a random trivia that remained unused because that did not fit in the main story's universe. A character is/was called 'Lima', but that turns out to also be the name of a Roman goddess when I consulted the good ol' baby naming websites. This is one of the strange instances where I got a name first, that it just pops into your head, and then you try to figure out  the rest of the details.

In the otome you're allowed to name the MC/heroine and 1 Love Interest, so it kind of came natural to me that they could just be 'Cardea' and 'Forculus' over here. Since 'Limentinus' is often conflated with 'Limentina' and 'Lima', I treated them all as the same being, while to be honest I can imagine them being separate deities but it's not unheard of that historians lump them into one person if they share similar titles. That they have different genders has a very meta connection to the OC, as the Lima prototype is a non-binary pansexual LI in a romance VN that never got fleshed out (I'm talking about an unused VN idea which came before the otome).  The otome incarnation deviated a bit from the template with different name(s), other pronouns sets, presents more masculine and is mostly male-identifying (still genderqueer to some degree). It's probably a side-effect from not wanting to throw away brainstorm ideas, as in my mind they still exist through many parallel universe versions each with their own unique variances, yet share the same core and near identical visual design.

I'm a huge fan of the character art in "Shin Megami Tensei" and "Hades", so this side-track project scratches that mythology art itch. I'm stuck in a writing block, so making a visual novel is absolutely the last thing I want to think about, and I miss the type of brainstorming that comes for a gameplay-focused game.  But even then I feel like I can never fully escape the idea of not having to write anything, because there were times I wanted to draw a story intro cutscene as one of the screenshots to exhibit. With that I could also try out a whole different artstyle than my usual own, such as a fresco painting or mosaics as ancient Roman art throwback? What I want to say that even though the genre is not a narrative game in the slightest, the story is still the entire hook that shapes what kind of game it will be.

I made use of multiple jam prompts, because I find that more fun that you always end up with something else than what you set out to do. Apart from the ancient mythology prompt I also focused on the following:

- Including a map: I talked so much about Lima because I thought that they finally can be the MC for once... but it makes no sense canon-wise the moment it came to picture that Cardea, Forculus, and Lima had to be some inseparable trinity in this game, and Cardea is more important and well-known. Limentinus or Lima is also described as the keeper of 'limes' which denote the frontier of the Roman empire. Defense tower game then? But I rather want to make something cozy instead of militaristic, so by hard-focusing on the doorkeepers theming it shifted to a management sim (I also suddenly remembered the blast from the past "Theme Hospital"). This matches better to the roles and occupations they have in the otome universe (actually... I never made a post about this in public!), as I find the low-ranking Roman household gods rather cute how they are deities of a very specific one object. While not in the context of limes, Lima in this game is still responsible for multiple administrational task such as bookkeeping who give them offerings and the locations and states of door, and they're also the de facto communication manager only because you definitely don't want to rely on Cardea or Forculus for that task.

- Mythology/folklore manifesting in unexpected ways: which is why I picked the modern world city setting. But for practical reasons, if it's turned into an actual game without modelling everything from scrap, the library of modern day building assets allows a larger variety in environment design than sticking to ancient setting.