Theme/story idea thread

[SushiGummy/GeorgeBoden]

Okay, so since we have a bit of a time limit, let's get through this stage as quickly as possible. Everybody post theme ideas, along with story ideas (let's keep them basic for now. We'll come up with the details when we decide on the basic stuff). I'll paste them into this post, and at some point we'll quickly decide which one we like best.

Before we get into themes though, just a quick question. How focused do you guys want to be with humor? Since 99% (and by 99% I mean 100%) of my projects in the past have involved humor, making stuff funny is one of my strongest abilities. Personally, I'd very much like this game to be humorous, but if you all hate that kinda stuff, we don't need to go down that route.

Here are the current themes and basic stories we have:

Medieval Theme
A squire and his crew, who are part of the color guard, inadvertently open up a portal to some sort of negative world, turning their seemingly harmless temple journey into a much larger mission to save the world.

Alien Theme
A town is visited by a peaceful race of aliens who ask the citizens of the town to keep their presence a secret while they repair their ship. While sneaking through their ship, though, the main character discovers that the aliens aren't as friendly as they appear. Their true intentions are to abduct everybody in the town and mutate them into their own monster army. The protagonist decides to take things into his own hands, despite the fact that he has no idea what he's doing.

Heaven/Hell Theme
While on a seemingly-routine religious journey to Hell, the protagonist accidentally unlocks some kind of portal to the negative world. As he goes deeper, he discovers a shocking truth: his temple is manipulating whether or not people go to heaven or hell in order to retain power over the living and spiritual world.

Present Color Guard Theme
After waking up one day and realizing that colors are now dimmer/that he can no longer see the color red, the shocked protagonist is approached by someone who tells him that he is part of the color guard, and that he must prevent color from fading away forever.

Gothic Theme
A Tim Burton-esque world of steampunk dark creepiness. It would involve a crazy plot, similar to what was seen in Suda 51's Killer7.

Movie Theme
The Protagonist travels through many different movies and genres because he's having an adventure or something.

[SushiGummy/GeorgeBoden]

Personally, I think medieval ages are a bit overdone in the RPG genre. Square Enix and JRPGs in general completely take all the blame for this. That's not to say we wouldn't be able to make a great game out of it, it's just something to keep in mind. If we want to do medieval, I'm thinking it'd be better to stick with our own custom style instead of using the style so many other medieval games use (magical priests, healers, clerics, monks, stuff that wouldn't be common outside of games).

One problem I have with this particular idea is that you're pretty much throwing all the characters, powers, and the negative world right into the beginning of the game. We should have the partners, the special abilities, and the negative world appear at their own pace throughout the game. If we throw everything interesting about our battle system at the player right at the beginning of the game, not only will it scare away players who don't want to learn tons of new abilities at once, but it'll also bore them over the course of the game, since we won't really have anything new to give them.

As for renaming colors, probably won't be a good idea in some cases. If we want to have Lila Ghosts or Gult Dragons, that's fine, since you can easily see the colors of enemies. But I don't think players will want to scroll through their weapons menu or attack menu looking for an orange weapon when all they can see are bla, rod, gult, and apelsin weapons. Even if we were to color coat them, I think it would be a better idea to keep the colors in weapon and attack lists English. In most other cases, though, it should be fine to rename them.

Anyways, those are just my two cents. We should probably keep the naming of the game for after we're done picking a theme and having at least some details about the events that go through the game.

[pridethesaint]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BEajE2qlXJiTbva3qxlDXzhnJLSOkh1q3wAD9t-zzSE/edit?hl=en_US I'll just update it as I come up with stuffs. Everyone feel free to ignore it and write your own ideas. This is basically practice for me anyway.

[Nina]

I'm a big fan of dark/serious storylines with random humor thrown in pretty often, especially if it's occasionally inappropriate humor. Someone's dying a horrible, tragic death? Make a bad joke!

I also like turning the tables on the player/audience—something like having the player discover toward the end of the game that what they're doing is the right thing to save the temple at the cost of something bigger, or having it turn out that they are actually the bad guys (which the characters are happily part of, but players get thrown for a loop). I don't know if that's anyone else's cup of tea, though.

[pridethesaint]

I'm a big fan of dark/serious storylines with random humor thrown in pretty often, especially if it's occasionally inappropriate humor. Someone's dying a horrible, tragic death? Make a bad joke!

I also like turning the tables on the player/audience—something like having the player discover toward the end of the game that what they're doing is the right thing to save the temple at the cost of something bigger, or having it turn out that they are actually the bad guys (which the characters are happily part of, but players get thrown for a loop). I don't know if that's anyone else's cup of tea, though.

I was thinking this as well, but not ATHF style random humor. I'd rather use humor that's anachronistic or ironic.

[Nina]

I was thinking this as well, but not ATHF style random humor. I'd rather use humor that's anachronistic or ironic.

Yep, you said it better than I did. Stuff that's kinda dark or ironic and plays off what's happening, not just random giggly things.

Also, the other problem with having everything thrown at you at the beginning is that it tends to lead to a longer tutorial/intro that people could get bored with and leave or ignore and be really confused afterward. We can always have a senior party member who's kind of snarky/arrogant introduce new things along the way ("You didn't know about the negative world? How did you make it so far without dying off?")

Are we looking for other themes too? I was thinking maybe a heaven/hell theme, where the main party is sent to the center of hell (to kill someone, to rescue someone, to bring some knowledge back) or maybe just sent in to the outer levels (a rite of passage, a routine check), and they decide that they need to go further in to inevitably save the world (and then the big reveal is that they were sent as a sacrifice or a suicide mission, if you want something like that). Deeper levels of hell could introduce more concepts (new colors available to the players, or the negative world doesn't come in until you're so many levels in).

[SushiGummy/GeorgeBoden]

Are we looking for other themes too? I was thinking maybe a heaven/hell theme, where the main party is sent to the center of hell (to kill someone, to rescue someone, to bring some knowledge back) or maybe just sent in to the outer levels (a rite of passage, a routine check), and they decide that they need to go further in to inevitably save the world (and then the big reveal is that they were sent as a sacrifice or a suicide mission, if you want something like that). Deeper levels of hell could introduce more concepts (new colors available to the players, or the negative world doesn't come in until you're so many levels in).

We are looking for other themes. You want me to add this one to the first post as is, or would you like to polish it before I do?

I, too, am a big fan of having a serious story alongside the humor. Whenever there's a super-important point in the story, I generally turn off my humor switch and try to make people as depressed/surprised/inspired/emotional as I want them to be. I'm okay having jokes during inappropriate moments, as long as the player isn't supposed to be serious about what's happening. Like the death of an annoying character or having some super-huge-enemy revealed.

Random humor is one of my best humors, though, so that's pretty good. People mess up random humor extremely often (generally by assuming that memes count as random humor), but I've studied it enough so that my humor is actually random, and funny.

I'm also a huge fan of surprising the audience. I like to include huge plot twists in my work, along with some hidden secrets that people won't discover until much later, such as Gary's Raticate dying in Pokemon Red/Blue or how it was proven that Cobb wasn't actually dreaming at the end of Inception. Something that isn't revealed directly in the story, but can be found out with enough obsession.

Anyways, I'm putting together a few ideas myself. I'll post them in a bit.

Edit: Here's one idea.

Alien theme: Some town is visited by a peaceful race of aliens, who ask the citizens of the town keep their presence a secret while they repair their ship. While sneaking through an alien ship for whatever reason, the main character stumbles upon a laboratory, where he finds out the aliens' true intentions: they are slowly abducting everybody in town in order to mutate them into their own monster army. The game could have many settings, such as space, alien planets, 'deserted' planets, Earth in the past (the aliens could have a time machine), the town (post-invasion), inside a mothership, etc.

[pridethesaint]

Well, there's certainly a way to use humor effectively without being a "comedy" game. Perhaps it's simply flying in the face of established genre norms, or alluding, tongue-in-cheekly, to other games or media. We want something that is entertaining, but worth the price of admission (in this case, the time that it will take to beat the game). Lots of turn based RPGs are released each year, but they're all too up their own asses and very few people actually play them. We certainly have to consider the length of the game and how much we're really willing to put in, and seriously asses how many people we're looking to attract with our product.

We should not be looking to make FF6, but instead focusing on a story that is great despite the fact that we're making a flash game. If it's going to be serious, then lets find a simple theme, one that we can convey simply and successfully. If we focus on a humorous plot, however, we can take it as far as we want, but in my experience it's always easier to write a short, humorous piece than a short, serious one.

[MitchRichardson]

Yeah I agree, our game shouldn't be a 40 hour long epic. It should be well developed, but completion should only take between 4 - 8 hours at most. If we feel we need to add length or bulk to it, RPG's are extremely easy to add bulk to in the form of short side quests. Just remember every quest/scene/thing added is more work for all of us in the long run.

Also, I like the idea of a humorous dialogue in RPG's. Many have benefited from it. Look to Earthbound, Tales of Phantasia, etc. You can also check out this flash based RPG which has lines of humor (albeit a little meme based as one of you previously stated, not generally a good thing).
Link: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/548041

[pridethesaint]

Speaking about setting, if we've decided on the color battle system, we should make sure it all makes sense in the context. Sci-Fi with color battles seems a bit strange to me, as what civilization would have progressed to the point where their weakness is the opposite of the spec- oh wait. That's Green Lantern. My mistake.

[Nina]

Are we going to have another poll to decide on which premise we're going with?

Just to throw another two out there:

1. Protag is part of some temple or other belief system that believes in a dichotomous afterlife. He and some fellow students are sent to hell via some kind of ritual on a seemingly routine rite of passage-esque journey where they have to reach a certain point, complete a certain mundane task, and go back. When they get there, though, they accidentally unlock the negative world—along with something that hints at a darker plot. So they go deeper toward the center of hell, discovering along the way that their temple is manipulating who gets sent to heaven or hell in order to retain power over both places, as well as the living world (being devout members, protag&friends are noticeably shocked). They make their way out, and travel into heaven and confront the big bad there (or just the head of the temple in the living world, whichever fits the game better)

2. Present-ish setting. Protag wakes up one day and notices that colors are a little dimmer than usual, or they can't see red, and is understandably freaked about it. He's approached, told that he's part of the color guard, and is sent on a mission to prevent color from fading from the world. As the game goes on, certain colors could become rarer or harder to use, or get taken out of the protag's arsenal entirely.

3. No particular setting for this one. Protag&friends are sent to "collect" the essences of colors in order to protect them from fading away. They'd start out with color-neutral attacks and weapons, and have to use those essences to modify them in some way. Protag notices that the more color you collect, the less vibrant or pure the corresponding color is in the negative world (it probably starts being noticeable in-game about a third of the way through, and protag actually notices this halfway through, or so). Eventually, you're flipping between color and black/white worlds... until the protag understands that they're taking color away from average people to put in the hands of whatever higher order they're a part of.

[SushiGummy/GeorgeBoden]

Well, instead of a poll, I think we should all just share our thoughts about everybody's ideas and come to some ultimate conclusion based on whichever one we seem to like most.

I have a feeling we could actually make oodles of good jokes with your first idea. Personally, I like to avoid involving any kind of religion in my stories (not really sure why, I guess I just don't feel to comfortable doing it), but if it comes down to it, I'd probably be fine working on this idea.

Your second and third ideas are good, but I think we'll be able to have enough variety in our color-combat system without having to drain colors like that. Not to mention, the third idea in particular seems like it would take up a lot of programming power of some sort. I'm not computer savvy in the least bit, it just seems to me like something that would take up a lot of space in the code/memory/computer's soul. Correct me if I'm wrong, because I very well might be.

Either way, I'm thinking you should save your third idea for later, since it seems more like a gameplay/story point idea rather than a theme or general story idea. I'll add the other two to the first post.

By the way, are the two of you working on writing as a primary job or as a secondary job for this project? Right now, this thread doesn't list either of you as primary, so I'm not really sure whether or not it's accurate.

One last tidbit, since I never stop talking. It isn't really necessary to base the story around the color system. Taking turns to attack enemies doesn't really make much sense in the first place, so you shouldn't feel too obligated to have your story explain how it's supposed to work. All we need is some dude who says "Yeah, red weapons hurt red enemies more" and nobody will ever really question it.

[Nina]

I was considering that, actually, about the religion--you never know if someone is going to be uncomfortable with something like that. We could always make it a tongue-in-cheek parody or apply the concept of having three worlds to something else though.

I was definitely thinking with my writer's brain and not my programmer's for the third idea (you pretty much said everything I was thinking about while I was typing, actually). I'm guessing it's a bit out of our scope at this point if we write it into the code to actually change the colors, but we could start drawing the backgrounds with different shades as the story goes on, if we want to go with that as a game mechanism.

My original point in joining the project was to be a programmer, but when it comes down to it, I'll probably be spending about as much time writing. It depends on how much you need me :D

[SushiGummy/GeorgeBoden]

You know, we could always just go bats#$% crazy with the theme. We could make a fantasy world comparable to the world in Adventure Time or BoBoBo. Just, completely throw logic out the window. Shark with a rocket launcher? SURE. Scientist bears? ABSOLUTELY. Rocks with wings? FANTASTIC. Just saying, completely going crazy with the theme is always a perfectly acceptable possibility.

[jordan]

You know, we could always just go bats#$% crazy with the theme. We could make a fantasy world comparable to the world in Adventure Time or BoBoBo. Just, completely throw logic out the window. Shark with a rocket launcher? SURE. Scientist bears? ABSOLUTELY. Rocks with wings? FANTASTIC. Just saying, completely going crazy with the theme is always a perfectly acceptable possibility.

Well it would certainly leave infinite room for creativity. You know the saying "if walls could talk"? Well who said they can't in this game? Maybe you'll have to get information from a talking wall to get further in the story (I bet it would drive a few people nuts trying to figure out who to talk to haha).

[DoctorRheet]

Gothic theme - Continuing from the dark idea with morbid humour, how about a Tim Burton-esque theme? Make it look a bit creepy, very dark, jagged edges, and throw in some dark jokes. Make the plot something crazy, like in the Suda51 cult classic Killer7. Throw in some steampunk. Keep it edgy.

Continuing of the religion thing, I love reading/watching/playing things about cults. That would fit nicely into a gothic theme, it creates an enemy, and it can talk about religion without really offending anyone.

Also, a character similar to the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. It appears out of the blue, says strange things, and makes the player think about its motives and wonder what side it's on. Another example would be the G Man from the Half-Life series.

Also, in response to the color theme/gameplay mechanic, I think it would be better to disguise the different colors as elements if it's not a totally cartoony theme. Most RPGs do this. It would just fit better with the context, and make the player think "oh, so fire is weak against water, that makes sense" instead of just seeing the colors. I think it draws too much attention to the fact that yes, we have a rock/paper/scissors battle system. I worded that strangely, but I'm too tired to think.

[SushiGummy/GeorgeBoden]

Also, in response to the color theme/gameplay mechanic, I think it would be better to disguise the different colors as elements if it's not a totally cartoony theme. Most RPGs do this. It would just fit better with the context, and make the player think "oh, so fire is weak against water, that makes sense" instead of just seeing the colors. I think it draws too much attention to the fact that yes, we have a rock/paper/scissors battle system. I worded that strangely, but I'm too tired to think.

Well, the reason we decided to go with the color theme was because it had never been used in an RPG before. The elemental system, similarly to what you said, is used in most RPGs. I think it'd be better if we took a more innovative route.

Plus, both systems aren't all too similar. Instead of having a water-beat-fire system, it would be more like a water-beat-water system. By now, we've developed it enough so that it's nothing like the elemental system anymore. Plus, colors are a lot more simple than having to remember whether or not water is effective towards electricity or ground.

I was thinking about a gothic/steampunk theme myself (because I love the theme so), but unfortunately I don't think it would fit in well with color combat. I can't see the steampunk era being overrun with colorful enemies. And damn, I still need to play Killer7.

Here's an idea I came up with before. I didn't really like it, but I'll let you guys be the judge:

Movie Theme: Not sure of the exact story yet, but the protagonist travels through many different movies while chasing a baddie of some sort. He adventures through all types of different genres.

[eschermond]

Just throwing my hat into the ring with a Zombie Apocalypse theme:

Player wakes up from a night of heavy drinking with no recollection of the previous night's events. The alarm clock radio tells him the that the world has been decimated by a zombie outbreak. Before being audibly eaten, the radio announcer tells the player that survivors are heading for a safe outpost somewhere in...

The player would be forced to not only find out where the outpost is, but survive long enough to make his way there. Along the way, he could join up with fellow survivor(s) who can work with him in order to reach their common goal.

I think this could be interesting because, seeming that most people are dead or zombified, the humor (which I'm a big fan of, BTW) could come from things that happen in the setting. Dialogue would obviously be very limited, since player and his "partner" would be the only people alive, or so they think.

I didn't really go to deep into mechanics because I'm not sure how most of them wouuld work. It's just a preliminary idea, to let you fine folks know that I'm thinking.

[jordan]

Movie Theme: Not sure of the exact story yet, but the protagonist travels through many different movies while chasing a baddie of some sort. He adventures through all types of different genres.

So... Last Action Hero the video game?

Just kidding, that was only the end of the movie where they went through different movies

Player wakes up from a night of heavy drinking with
no recollection of the previous night's events. The alarm clock radio
tells him the that the world has been decimated by a zombie outbreak.
Before being audibly eaten, the radio announcer tells the player that
survivors are heading for a safe outpost somewhere in...

The
player would be forced to not only find out where the outpost is, but
survive long enough to make his way there. Along the way, he could join
up with fellow survivor(s) who can work with him in order to reach
their common goal.

I like the idea but I don't know how it would fit in with the color combat.

[DoctorRheet]

My point was that the color mechanic is actually common in RPGs, just disguised for good reasons. You've slightly altered it. And I agree with you on the color not having to make you memorize, but you could combine the two to reduce learning curve and still have actually objects/elements/whatever, just make them that color.
And as much as I love zombie scenarios, I agree that it wouldn't work with color combat.

How about something a little more abstract? Or instead of my idea of a dark, gothic theme, have the same design as that, but make it colorful.

[eschermond]

How about something a little more abstract? Or instead of my idea of a dark, gothic theme, have the same design as that, but make it colorful.

Something like Limbo.

I'm a big fan of the notion of the player being on Earth, maybe even present-day earth, but not knowing it till the end, or close to it.

[Nina]

My point was that the color mechanic is actually common in RPGs, just disguised for good reasons. You've slightly altered it. And I agree with you on the color not having to make you memorize, but you could combine the two to reduce learning curve and still have actually objects/elements/whatever, just make them that color.

You wouldn't be able to combine the two, though, you'd just end up with the same elemental system over again. Water would never do anything but defeat fire unless we were really trying to confuse everyone. What I like about the color system is that it is what it is, and doesn't try to be anything else. We can make up all our own rules. There's always going to be part of me that expects fire attacks or fire weapons to be fire-themed... but we can make it whatever we want.

[DoctorRheet]

If the theme will just be color with no "disguise," if you will, I really think an abstract or more cartoony theme would be fantastic. Maybe some sort of magical theme would work, but nothing serious like a zombie apocalypse.

[jordan]

If the theme will just be color with no "disguise," if you will, I really think an abstract or more cartoony theme would be fantastic. Maybe some sort of magical theme would work, but nothing serious like a zombie apocalypse.

Who doesn't want to fight rainbow zombies?

[Admin]

Just in case you didn't see the second update for today, I'm hoping all of you can make it to the chat meeting tomorrow at 9pm EST. We will hopefully be deciding on the final theme then, and at the very latest Friday if worse comes to worse. I'm liking the all ideas here though

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