You know, now that I think about it, the Maren DO sound kind of like the idea of the Nightmares taken further and expanded upon. In fact, the name "Maren" reminds me of the girl "Marin" from LA. Is that just coincidence, or did you derive some of your inspiration from there?
No connection, though Maren also happens to be a girls' name.
I got the name when doing some research into the origin of the word 'nightmare' and
came across this, which suggests to me it's a variant of
'Mara'.
A slain Maren drops the Nightmare Locket it wears round its neck. These lockets contain the tortured soul of the Maren, and can be taken to Noon for him to 'exorcise' (since the Maren were not always evil ) essentially turning a bad dream into a good one, and releasing it into the world again. That's the final stage of cleansing an area of nightmares.
Wait, so will you be able to visit the dream world of these "good Marens" after you've cleansed an area? And what do these good Marens look like? Or are you keeping that hush-hush for now?
i think he actually means that when you "banish" the night"mare'n" then the shadow like draem maybe full with spooky ghosts turns into a flowerpower green meadow with white rabbits... ( not rabbids... that would still be a nightmare ;P )
think of it like the lttp dark world and when you banish him it turs to the end of lttp ( so the scenes after you kill ganon )
Yeah, I've kind of painted myself into a corner there, story-wise. With all the convolluted backstory I think I'm going to have to show the Maren's world before it was the nightmare realm and they became evil. Whether or not the nightmare realm returns to that state at the end of the game, I haven't got that far...
The chains on the bottom of the level. Maybe it was done on purpose, but I got the feeling that the platform was hanging and wasn't attached to the ground at all... from the looks of it, the chains are going down, towards the ground. Was it done on purpose?
Nah, I'm just being lazy. It's the same art as the chains along the top, just haven't been bothered to re-sprite them at a slightly different angle. But it doesn't look right as it is, I agree.