Blog #3: Project Karma Showcase 1
July 4th, 2025
Happy Fourth of July! Whether you celebrate the holiday or not, I hope you guys enjoy (or have enjoyed) today. I’m here with some exciting news in terms of progress for Project Karma. We just had two back to back meetings yesterday and this is what we’d like to share. As a heads up, from now until possibly the start of August, I will have a “Project Karma Showcase” every friday where I show off new information based on the game. I hope you look forward to them!
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
It was a bit hard for us but we had to change a many of things in our game if we wanted to realistically publish it sometime soon. Many of the things we changed makes the game shorter and simpler, but besides that our original visions and goals for the game are still here. So what exactly did we change?
The game’s story used to be a bit larger than it is now. We had planned on having bosses in each area, lots of enemies, skills, etc. However we realized it was best to keep this to a minimum. Each area will still be these cool platform segments you can walk around and fight enemies in, but not to the huge extent we once anticipated. A few key details have been swapped to accommodate the story better as a result. I believe we have also been able to finally hammer down the gameplay elements because of this. The main thing we did here was cut a lot of existing ideas to fully support other ones, a decision of which I fully believe this trade off will help us in the long run.
What is the Story of Project Karma?
Like I said before, most of the story has to be kept a secret. However I’ve run out of excuses, so from now on I’ll reveal tidbits of the world within the game!
The game will take place within a dream. This is no secret and should be obvious based on the opening cutscene alone. The main character, Alzeah, is a lonely princess who lives alone in her castle on a mountain. An incident takes place in her castle which forces her to leave and search for help. On her way, she meets a mysterious bunny who offers their assistance. Together they venture though the dream world in search of what went wrong.
That’s the basics of the story. There’s still a lot more I’d love to share about our characters and world, but we’ll leave that for another time. I hope you’re able to at least get a glimpse into what we’re making.
Concept art of Alzeah, the Princess of Sorrow (working title)
How will the Gameplay Work?
The game is still split between a platformer and rpg. The platforming sections will allow Alzeah to explore the world around her. She’ll be able to jump over platforms and float above pitfalls using her handy umbrella. Oftentimes she’ll encounter obstacles which hurt her upon impact. Everytime she takes damage during the platform sections of the game it’ll translate over to battle, so make sure not to get hit too much.
Short and simple is our motto here. It isn’t anything impressive or new, but I hope it’ll be fun to control and play!
Once she comes into close contact with an enemy, a battle occurs. She’ll have the option to either attack the enemy or guard against them. She can also use Karma, which is essentially the magic system in this game, allowing you to deal extra damage or heal. Once her turn ends, the enemy is given a chance to attack. Alzeah could either jump or duck to avoid the attack, so timing is key here! Obviously it’s nothing complex, but we feel like the gameplay mechanics are at least interesting enough to try out.
Here’s a couple of ideas for how the battle UI will look. It’s still a huge work in progress, but I think we’re at least getting somewhere now?
What’s next for Project Karma?
I feel like we are finally in a comfortable enough position to where we can move on from the concept phase into actually working at our game phase. There’s still a lot left when it comes to finalizing minor story details or making sure we have our battle mechanics down, but other than that I think it’s time we actually start making Project Karma! By the way, the final name for our game will be titled “Project Karma”. Not because we couldn’t think of anything better, but because we think the acronym “PK” sounds fire and the words Project Karma pretty much encapsulate what this whole thing is.
More concept art I made which I’d like to show off
I hope you enjoyed learning more of the world within PK and looking forward to the next blog. Take care!
-Pancake Camilo
Mario and Luigi dance, to mix it up every now and then