Dark Matter: Hudokai is a J-RPG inspired sci-fi adventure crafted with RPG Maker VX Ace, blending nostalgic elements from classic RPGs with more modern, action-based combat.
The universe is held together by dark matter—an unseen force that the Cult of Kai seeks to control. After escaping a prison ship, Nova finds himself in the enigmatic "Nexus", where he becomes entangled in a perilous struggle against the cult. As the stakes rise, Nova teams up with the determined vice-warden Lione Burgess and a crew of misfit outlaws to thwart the cult's sinister plans. But time is running out, and Nova’s lost memories might hold the key to the cult’s defeat—or their ultimate victory.
Characters
Nova - an enigmatic man with a mysterious past he can't quite remember. Some say he committed the worst of all crimes, condemning him to a prison ship. Having escaped, he now looks to right the wrongs of his past by taking down the villainous Cult of Kai.
Lione Burgess Vice warden for the Galactic Preservation, Lione strives to uphold the law as part of the Galactic Preservation. Despite an uneasy alliance with Nova, she maintains control through her no-nonsense attitude. But she may yet be hiding a difficult past and family ties.
Aliza Legion With Dissociative Identity Disorder (aka Multiplicity), headstrong Aliza shares her body with Blake and Rizumu. When not reading books, she's using her sharp intelligence to take out enemies with her crossbow. With a limited lifespan, she hunts down the manifestation of her id.
Phoenix Fox Living in the moment, Phoenix fights for freedom for those who deserve it. Quick witted and wise-cracking, he uses a stolen experimental gauntlet developed by the Cult of Kai. More than anything, he fights in memory of his wasteland friend, Leo.
Kim Silver Brought up as the scientific specimen, 001, Kim is an enhanced magical being known as a Gear. Thought to be the last of her race, the Final Gear, she looks at the universe with the wonder of a little girl. But this pure girl's destructive power could be manipulated by unscrupulous villains...
Maximillion Judge A foul-mouthed teenager who means well, Maximillion Judge seeks out his father and home world. Home is where the heart is, so he says, and Max has a big heart. He wields Roke's partner's scythe as a 'Deathbringer' - a being tasked to reap those who do wrong.
Varsh Varsh would like nothing more than to vocalise the thoughts that constantly invade his head, all whilst sitting back and letting everyone else do the manual work. But life has other ideas. Working as a gather of information for the biggest library in existence, Varsh travels to seek the answers of the universe.
Viktor Len Leader of the Cult of Kai, Viktor Len was plagued with an illness that threatened to end his life early. Driven by a want to live, he funded the creation of a metal body by renowned scientist, Phyllis. Now born anew, his fear of death drives him to want to live forever. With condensed dark matter from the void, called Hudokai, he might just have what he needs. But there's more to V.Len's desires than just living forever and a love of theatre, especially with the building blocks of the universe in his hands...
Fight the Cult of Kai in a 30+ hour game story
Fly across the three galaxies and land in 12 story-related locations in a fully voice-acted adventure. Restore your memories, meet a diverse cast and hunt down the Cult of Kai across 30+ hours of story.
Equip and level up Hudokai gems
Condensed dark matter made physical, Hudokai gives each of the 6 playable characters magical abilities. Equip the Hudokai in weapons and armour to level them up to even stronger variants!
Fight in active battles using equipped skills
Jump, attack and guard in real-time as you combat enemies across the three galaxies. Equip Hudokai abilities and individual character skills to use combat moves on both the ground and air.
Battle in tactical space fights in your ship
Blast off into space and explore the galaxies for 15+ optional locations, or shift gears to more tactical-based combat as you fight off a plethora of enemy spaceships.
And plenty more!
Synthesise and upgrade your weapons, take on bounties, find concept art, gain achievements, play card games and make narrative choices to impact your alignment and change the ending.
Can you unravel the secrets of the dark matter before it's too late?
Developed by Onyxbreakers.
Release Date 20/09/2024
Comments
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Hoi Hoi~
I'm a fellow RPG Maker dev who viewed this game via another person (who commented recently, you know who~) and I just gotta say, I really admire the work that was put into this game.
Yes, it's buggy as hell. Yes, it's wayyy too over bloated and should've been separated into different games since a majority of these worlds are based off novels one of the directors wrote years before development. Yes, it's really broken and a lot of the writing is saved via the voice acting. But ya know, it's really charming. The save file on the run is 40 hours long, not even going through optional worlds, that's serious dedication and the fact the game is not only complete, but published and almost entirely voice activated is a marvel.
I really hope this isn't the last game this team works on, in fact, I wouldn't even mind a game entirely focused on the Sea of Seals world because it seems that was one of -thee- favorite worlds of the directors if the amount of concept art for them is to be considered. Just something with less of a grand scope to fully refine and perfect what is included in future ventures because there really is talent in this game, it's just sad that it's in the buggy state it is.
Either way this game is a time-capsule for that mid 2000s internet aesthetic and I -love- it, can't wait to play the next game that comes out, and willing to assist in it's creation in whatever way I can.
Also as a lil' treat, here's some miscellaneous sketches I made of some of the characters while going through this game with another person.
Dark Matter Hudokai Image #1
BUNGY
KIM KIM#2 KIM#3
THOSE TWO RANDOM FURRIES FROM SEA OF SEALS
KLOM (Love Him btw) CHEEZA (wish there were more of him)
I’m so incredibly grateful for the praise, and the fan art has to be the best surprise I’ve had in a while—it truly made my day.
Dark Matter Hudokai was originally envisioned as a three-part game, with each part concluding at the end of a galaxy. Unfortunately, due to RPG Maker’s restrictions, transferring save data (like levels and items) wasn’t possible, which meant we had to make compromises in the design.
We’ll definitely keep your generous offer of assistance in mind for the future—it means a lot to us.
Out of curiosity, what was your favorite part of the game?
For favorite parts, I honestly have to say the Concept Art Gallery, and just generally discovering the developer history of this game. Idk why it was ordered correctly in the menu, but aside from that, I like the concept art because I -love-, and I mean, LOVE viewing old/scrapped material in a game, it satisfied both the side of me that loves preserving things so they aren't lost to time, AND the side of me that likes looking at developer history, something that on a side note is rich on the Hudokai Facebook page.
If I can go into details, the history behind the Sea of Seals arc is fascinating because there's so much pen to paper concept art that oozed 2000s energy, it made me feel like these were characters one of the leads had for a long time and wanted to make something out of it, but couldn't, so they added them into this story as a sort of tribute to their fond memories with them. It's cute, I really like it.
Additionally Max and Alex also intrigued me because early on we found pen to paper image of these two purple haired guys fighting, it looked cool and it reminded me of said 2000s energy of the Sea of Seals arc had, and it was constantly on the back of my mind as we went through the game. Then, when the game was done and it was time for me to look at the files, I found out that there was this cut character named Alex who looked exactly like one of the guys in that image, and the fact he was scrapped in favor of making Max a main character. The most fun part of that, and frankly everything revolving the history of this game is piecing together parts of the game that seemingly are innocuous, but when put together reveal something grand, ya know?
As well as finding out reasons why certain things look the way they do. Nova's armor being shading differently than his body is cause of the fact the design was traced over his old scrapped design, for example, pieced together by looking at the concept art and Facebook posts from 2012.
There are so many lil' easter eggs and stuff in this game and I love it~ Genuinely fun, no strings attached (p.s. that birthday cake should've been hidden in the files lol, it's so cute)
First of all, it's worth recognizing how impressive it is that a game of this size and scale gets released at all. This is clearly something that you've been on and off developing for a long time, with bits and pieces of the ideas kicking around for years before that.
That's why, after over 40 hours spent with the game and seeing its story to the end, it almost physically hurts to say that it was a tedious broken mess of a game.
The story is long-winded, meandering, exposition heavy, and generally hard to follow. Plot threads and characters are picked up and abandoned with an unpredictable pacing. With a few exceptions, each chapter feels like its own self contained story that probably should have just been its own game, where it would have more room to breathe and develop its characters.
The best way I can describe it is that things sort of just.... happen. In the wake of a story beat, it's common for a character to say something like "alright, let's go to..." without all that much indication on why they would know that's the way forward. It's a roller coaster ride of the worst kind: a bumpy and nauseating one. The story being so scatterbrained and the events coming from out of nowhere made it really hard to get invested in both the overarching story and the individual planet stories.
The silver lining of the iffy writing is that a staggering amount of it is fully voice acted. I think the voice acting is the game's greatest strength. Not because it's good or anything like that, but because it's there. It frequently elevates the writing to something I can only describe as peak comedic gold. There is some seriously meme-worthy stuff in here that I just might be quoting for a while. If any kind of fanbase or streamer latches onto this game by some miracle, this will be the reason why. I can say with certainty that it's what kept me going.
If the entire game were nothing but cutscenes and spotty voice acting, it might actually be pretty easy to recommend. Unfortunately, to get to that good stuff, players have to actually play the game, and I don't see a full playthrough of this appearing on YouTube any time soon for people to experience vicariously.
The game is riddled with countless softlocks and crashes, and a player not savvy enough to keep multiple saves can very easily ruin a playthrough. A lot of these bugs come from a frankly embarrassing use of RPG Maker's events system. Seeing how many event tiles were controlled by other parallel events instead of simple pages and/or self switches broke my brain. To that end, it becomes even more impressive that the game managed to get finished and released, because I don't know who could ever have what it takes to create and test a game that's scripted in this way. But this crazy way of doing events is probably also why a comprehensive bugfixing patch is unlikely; it's pervasive throughout the entire game, and would probably take months of reworking and testing it.
The best I can recommend for anyone looking to experience the game is to install RPG Maker VX Ace so they can make whatever fixes and edits they need and boot the game in playtest mode.
The LMBS scripts used for combat are.... fine.... but nothing was really done to improve the feeling of controls or attacks. Balancing of progression and stats is completely broken, and by the 2nd hour no enemy was a challenge ever again. Nothing could stand up to my adaptool-beefed stats and my trusty basic attack button.
It's a shame that the combat ends up being so throwaway and nothing, because if it actually felt like a LMBS Tales game instead of superficially resembling one, it could be the glue that holds the whole thing together.
As much negative as I've said, and how much more negative I could say, I still think that Dark Matter Hudokai must be seen. It deserves a special place in RPG Maker history for its sheer scale and its lengthy development. There weren't a whole lot of naively-scoped "dream game" projects from over 10 years ago that actually managed to get finished, and Dark Matter Hudokai feels like a time capsule from that era. I'm crossing my fingers that some moderately well-known online personality that digs into obscure indie games sheds a spotlight on this game sometime soon.
I really hope that Dark Matter Hudokai is not Edgar and/or Lee's last game. With a smaller scope and more focus, the ambition could be put to great use.
First, thank you for your constructive criticism and honest feedback.
We genuinely appreciate the time you took to play Dark Matter Hudokai. We acknowledge that it is a bit of a mess and broken in places, and your insights resonate with some of the challenges we’ve recognized over the years.
A few years back, we actually sat down and discussed how we could streamline and improve the game. Unfortunately, doing so would have required bringing back the original voice actors, which was a feat we managed once in 2016 but would be difficult to replicate now.
That said, we’re truly glad you found aspects of the game enjoyable, and your positive remarks—particularly about its place in RPG Maker history—mean a lot to us. Thank you again for your kind words and thoughtful critique.
What was your favourite meme worthy moment?
There also might be a full playthrough at some point in the future.
Although the scene was meant to be serious, the initial scene with Rove (or I guess.. Pikhaul disguised as Rove???) cracked me up with how intensely misogynistic it was. It sure did its job at showing him to be a bad guy, but I couldn't help but find the tonal whiplash hilarious.
A lot of the one-off battle quotes that are obviously reused from normal dialogue are, by the end, in this sweet spot between endearing and annoying. They feel so random and out of context in a way I can't quite describe. "I'm an officer of the law." Yes you are Lione, but why are you saying that right now? Very funny. Just the other day I was saying "Yay, stuff! My second favorite thing!" but replacing the words "stuff" or "second" with other things. An endless source of in-jokes between me and the people that were watching me play it.
My favorite character to get dialogue from is definitely Max. For the short period of time that he was left behind in The Nexus, I missed him dearly haha. He's so standoffish and rude for like, no reason, and he comes across as an angsty hypocrite even after he has his big moment to shine on Canary.
In retrospect, it's really obvious how he's the amalgamation of 2 characters from the story's early development, but everything odd about that is part of his charm. And the whole thing with Foltix is hilarious, considering how quickly it's discarded and never really brought up ever again.
Strange little games like this don't come around often, and I can't gush enough about it, both its good and bad.
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