Mercuralia
A downloadable game for Windows
In your search for a rare bird, you are caught in the tide of a mysterious ritual, a festival of living statues, and the ruins of an ancient floating city. Explore deeper into the festival grounds and talk to festival-goers.
Mercuralia is a mix of first-person exploration with visual novel elements. It takes about 30 minutes to complete.
CW: for brief descriptions of bodily harm and some coarse language.
Controls:
| MOVEMENT: | INTERACTION: | TEXT: |
| [WASD] to Walk | [E] to Interact when prompted | [ENTER] or [CLICK] on text box to advance dialog |
| [SPACEBAR] to Jump | [B] to use Binoculars | |
| [SHIFT] hold to Run | [ESC] to open Pause Menu |
Graphics options and a chapter select feature can be accessed from the main menu.
Developer Notes 2/23/24:
Mercuralia was a testbed to for a lot of new ideas around worldbuilding and graphics. Visually some of my big inspirations were block printing, the sculptures of Antoni Gaudi, and deep-sea landscapes. Like my other projects, it draws on conversations and imagery from dreams. I think it'll be the last project to use the 'walk around and interact with stuff' structure for a while.
Along with the game I also included some process artwork made during development which is collected in a short booklet 'MercuraliaSketchbook.pdf'.
The project will mostly remain as is, though if anyone experiences majorly game-breaking bugs I'll try to address those.
I hope you enjoy.
-Jacob
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fix bag texture
This game was SO beautiful. I never knew a games every frame could look like a stunning piece of art. I aspire to be this good at art direction one day :)
edit: I just now read thru the sketchbook! I greatly appreciated you including that! How did you achieve that kind of artstyle in unreal engine? Its impressive
Thankyou! The art direction is definitely the part of the process that I enjoy the most. I'm trying to structure future projects to be even more focused on that kind of stuff; the atmosphere etc..
So that's a pretty big topic but I'll try to be brief. The most important thing is to have a strong vision for what you want to achieve at the start. For me, that means doing sketches and getting a lot of good reference materials. I'm constantly taking screenshots and doing paint-overs on them. I knew Unreal 5 could handle rendering a lot of geo at once so I pushed my style in that kitbash-focused direction.
I'll look at my art target, then what the engine is giving me and try to problem solve my way to get closer to the target through shaders or textures or whatever tools I've got.
A lot of times game engines, (especially Unreal which can be quite heavy on effects by default) are doing a lot of extra junk visually that I don't want or need, so understanding what they're doing and then tweaking those features can be helpful. I always turn off the auto-exposure histogram for example.
You've done some impressive work yourself, if you ever want feedback on something you're working on don't hesitate to reach out.
Thanks a lot! I really appreciate the advice! Your work inspires me to start a new project in Unreal after this one. I always turn off the auto-exposure too but I should study what else Unreal does by default... On my next project, I'm definitely creating a stronger inspo board and trying out more stuff in the concept stage. Again, thank you for taking the time to write a long reply, I can't even explain how much I appreciate that.
ahhhhhh that was so beautiful thank you!!!
Thanks so much for playing!
Awesome game! Love the atmosphere! Fantastic! Wish there was even more <3 Keep it up!
Isn't this reminiscent of Myst and its sequel Riven, as far as play-style?
Yeah, I'm really interested in the worlds of that Myst era. The way those games created atmosphere was a bit more abstract and mysterious by virtue of the limitations of their technology.
Interesting art project. Reminds me of some more experimental 1990s games. Also has a "dead online world" vibe to it. Might revisit it. Found out about the different daytime and map menus too late. :)
It was a really cool experience, but I kept waiting for the sun to come up or something. It was clearly night and nothing in the game looked like it does in the screenshots.
Only after completing it I realized something in the graphics settings was screwing up. It seems that only changing the Overall Quality button changes things and when that is set to medium or low it looks "ok", otherwise I get something like the picture below.
I mean it's still cool and moody, but I don't think it's the intended experience even if I enjoyed it 😅
My graphics card is a Radeon RX 5700 in case that means anything. I don't remember seeing similar bugs in other games on this machine.
Ah interesting. Yeah, I know there's a big discrepancy in visuals between medium and higher settings. I think this is due to Unreal 5 and all the new lighting/raytracing features that are toggled between those settings. I probably won't use UE5 for my next project since the minimum specs seem rather high and it's a bit unwieldy/untested.
Glad you had an interesting experience regardless, thanks for checking it out.
It had a wonderful atmosphere with lots of very strange architecture and people!
It was really nice to walk around!
I especially like the end of the game, meow!
By the way, it was hard to play on GTX4060 with high quality, and medium was just the right load.
Good to know about performance, it's my first time shipping something with Unreal 5 so I'm still figuring things out. I may make medium settings the default.
Thanks for checking it out!
Hey Jacob, I'm interested in playing but I can't seem to progress at all.
After I get released into the 3d world, I managed to talk to the tea brewer once, but I haven't managed to talk or interact with anyone or anything else. Sometimes the screen would show a bright frame and a sfx would be heard, but the frame would disappear in a split second.
I can't tell if that is normal but I have a feeling it might be a mixture of a technical or ux issue.
Also holding B down switches back and forth the binoculars very fast. I can't press B fast enough to not trigger a double B press.
Maybe it's a frame-rate dependant issue (I'm playing at more than 60 fps)
Looking forward to playing in the future.
Hey Ferran, that's definitely a bug, I've never seen that behavior. Just to clarify, You can walk around and see the world but the interactions with characters & binoculars aren't working?
It's hard to clarify because I haven't played this game and I'm don't really know what I'm supposed to be allowed to do, but I played again to give you a better answer:
Right after I'm put into the world, I barely have time to talk to 1 person (like Bill) that then the prompt "The ritual is beginning" shows, the sky changes, but I'm still next to the tea brewer and I have to walk in silence, unable to talk to anyone I think I should be able to, without a prompt appearing "Talk to XXX" all the way until where the ritual beach has the "attend the ritual" prompt.
That helps a lot, I'll look into it. Thanks for letting me know.
I'm experiencing the same thing, once the "The ritual is beginning" text appears, none of the interact prompts show up so I can't talk to anyone. The only way I found out about this is cause I loaded an area at morning and was now able to talk to someone i couldn't talk to before
This was amazing art style game i think and looked really nice beautiful style great job well done keep it up!
Thanks for playing!
还没玩，但是图看起来好美啊