Molly the Were-Zompire coming soon!

My next game, Molly the Were-Zompire, is in peer review right now with a little over half of the reviews necessary to pass. I’m hoping that it will go up on XBox Live sometime this week. It will sell for 80 MS points ($1 USD).

Like Epiphany in Spaaace!, Molly the Were-Zompire is an interactive novel. Whereas Epiphany focused on sci-fi cliches, Molly focuses on making fun of RPG cliches. Although I like Epiphany, I think Molly has the stronger story – it’s less concerned with parody and has more general humor in it. As for the technical aspects, Molly is using basically the same game engine, although I upgraded it slightly to support the inclusion of pictures. Scattered throughout the game are a few wonderfully hand drawn pictures to go with the written text. And by wonderful, I mean they were drawn by me. Come to think of it, maybe I would be better off claiming that my 9 year old drew them.

Although it’s coming out after Epiphany, Molly the Were-Zompire has actually been in development for a much longer time. I actually came up with the idea of Molly many years ago in a story called MaZoGiDeSto – A Magical Zombie Girl Detective Story. I never actually finished the story, but I kept messing around with the character until eventually I came up the idea of a Were-Zompire (part werewolf, part zombie, and part vampire) and she switched to that. When I found out about XBox Live Community Games, I was determined to make a game starring Molly. At first, I was going to make a traditional RPG, but when the gameplay system I created for Molly turned out to be more complicated than fun (involving matching power-ups to various battle situations), I scrapped that idea and made the game an interactive novel instead. If you were to hack into the code for Molly the Were-Zompire, you’d actually find a lot of code from that earlier form of the game for stuff like battles and character stats. You’d also discover that Umiko the pirate-ninja was a member of your party (she’s still in the current game) but the other two playable characters that join Molly – Torment (a being of pure evil) and Sleet (a washed up rock star) – are nowhere to be found. I thought about including them, but in the end, I didn’t find a good place to stick them in any of the plot threads so out they went.

In any case, I’m excited that Molly the Were-Zompire is finally going to be released. Now onto my next game idea! I think I’m going to take a break from Interactive Novels for the moment and am going to do something more gameplay oriented. Maybe a dungeon hack RPG with historical and mythical characters as party members (Mulan, Santa, and Einstein unite to fight evil!).