Dear Authors, Protagonists, Characters, Figures...

Welcome to the world of...

The Grand Tale / Heart of Darkness

It's about time I posted a kind of stamp in history about the legitimacy of the project and its grand existence.

Synopsis: Young, shy Irish boy sets out on a journey to explore the many familiar worlds of Dead Open, finish writing his Grand tale (become an Author), and fix the illness (Heart of Darkness) that is growing deep inside of him, eating him up with every death his protagonist amulet endures. What this darkness is and where it comes from is a secret... until the middle portion of ACT 3 lol.

Authors create worlds. They also create Characters and make stories come to life. They are able to do so with protagonists (pieces of the living stone found centuries ago in the mountains of Snowdonia) and gain moderate powers of their choosing.

With the merging of the living stone and books (but CD's, Tapes, and DVD's also suffice) the worlds are created and controlled by Authors (alt. Primer figures), and so are individual characters & objects of any era, type, or size.

YEP, you heard it here. In the world(s) of Dead Open, anything is possible and everything & everyone is real. Yes! even your favorite world you've always wanted to visit is real, your childhood character hero is real as well! They've been exploring these worlds and helping Authors for years! (ofc. speaking of Kim the best furry girl ever sorry...)

Our main hero (Zephyr) is connected to the player via a special protagonist, that lets us control him as spectate what happens, leading us to another, even bigger goal, meeting the Grand Author (Zanetan), the creator of all worlds, for help with writing the best story there is. (not really sure why he's called the creator of all worlds when he clearly didn't even create that many worlds...)

Villains... stealing authors who go against every belief of our own Hero who values originality and hard work, but can't help but feel as if he was closer to the stealing author (Beckett Dean) than he first thought. Other villains may be the Madhouse figure (killer of characters and worlds who is connected to Zephyr in more than 1 way...) and others as well...

GAMEPLAY: best way to imagine it is Kingdom heartsy gameplay with less depth (since it is a shorter game) but oh so much experimentation.

-Bosses have individual rounds that you are able to practice and master.

-Fighting becomes more complex with Left/Right-hand mechanics, switching from one to the other constantly to be able to deal damage.

-Most interestingly, dying can potentially have story consequences (dying = automatically worse illness = only on a few occasions) making the main characters illness worse (this results in leveling up and becoming stronger), when dying on a standard boss fight or in a simple enemy encounter, you are given a choice to take a bit of the darkness, becoming stronger easily, but risking the chance of negative narrative consequences (which actually wouldn't be nearly as harsh as it seems haha)

-Leveling isn't really a thing (removing mindless grinds, they would be almost non-existent because I hate them in games) and you only fight with 1 weapon (wooden Martial arts stick) throughout the whole game. What does change is the variety of enemies from different worlds and unique ways of passing them. As stated before, the game automatically levels you up (but the enemies still get stronger and stronger by a significant margin), and the only real way to level up manually is taking the darkness by yourself to become stronger.

The game length is expected to be about 10-12 hours maybe. the game could still work with 8-9 hours and could be developed up to 14 hours for a good experience still. some worlds are 20-30 minutes and some are well above 80 mins. (there are right now min. 9/ max. 13 worlds)

Thanks for reading, yes 313 is still in the game along with his "cool" side-kick, so all is good. along with some "magical" and "scary" worlds :)

Have a good one and I wish you the best because... you are... the best ;)

With love -Filip Davids and all of the Dead Open OCs