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I'm having a bit of trouble trying to come up with a solid plot for my game. I have bits and pieces of a story here and there that must happen, such as the hero must acquire these ten mystical stones and this magical "sword" to be able to win the game. Among other things there's also an order of wise old guys that seek to restore peace to the land, and a clan of mages that has been attacked by the bad guy (I modeled him after myself and textured him with the colour scheme of Alucard Tepes. Evil, aren't I!). There is also a "chosen one" person that is going to be, according to the order, instrumental in finding the magical sword of the gods.

Now, since I'm having a hard time tying all these things together in a way that I think work, I thought of the idea to maybe let the player tie it all together in whatever way he or she seem fit. The only thing that the player would have to do is finding those things that is required for starting the events that will lead to the ending (the stones and the sword). If the player thinks he can do it without finding the Chosen person, I'll let him do it.

But all the different choices that the player makes along the way would affect the outcome of the game in one way or another. Like, if he decides to do one thing, instead of saving this one person, that might come back and turn out in a bad way in the end, because that person might have been a great help later on or whatever.

The first thing I thought of was this girl that's about to join the mage school and become a mage. You first meet her in a town, and then in the school which has then been attacked. She's the sole survivor and is protecting the mystical stone that the enemies are after. Now, if you met her earlier in the game and made friends with her, she'd be happy to see you and help you out. But if you hadn't, she'd think you were just another bad guy after the stone and attack you, and you'd have to fight her, possibly to the death. You get the stone in either case, but the girl was supposed to show and help you later in the game, so your decision had consequences that are, if one would sit down and think about them, perfectly logical.

I think this would greatly add to the replay value of the game. If I have tons of these kind of decisions that the player might not even be aware of that he's making, then each time he replays the game and does something different the whole story might play out completely different. Sorta like chaos theory (not the game though, as I haven't played it).


Another thing I thought of when testing out a new feature in my dialogue engine was that maybe you should be able to choose your own love interest as well, and to choose wether you're actually going to have one at all. It could be a conscious decision of the player - he actually pursues someone as a love interest - or otherwise; it's something that just happens because of the way the player acts throughout the game.

That mage girl was supposed to be the love interest, but what if some players didn't like her? Maybe they thought that he would be better of with some other girl? (This idea of choosing your hero's love probably partly come from the Malon/Zelda debate of the Zelda communities (it can be quite awful and funny at times)). Or boy? Wouldn't having the possibility of a gay hero be pretty cool? It wouldn't have to be obligatory, but how surprised would the players who tried it be if it turned out that it worked? Would that increase their level of enjoyment? I think so. It would probably encourage them to explore other aspects of the game, without forcing them to do so, like many games does (you have to meet that person and do that precise thing to get that other thing and so on).

The love interest you choose would of course also influence the story, and depending on your previous actions, maybe that particular love interest would not be available (maybe she's dead or have learned of some of your despicable actions. Of course, despicable actions might lead to the option of having bad girls Or maybe THE bad guy. Okay that's probably pushing it a bit far... or maybe... you'd get to rule the land together as lovers ). Perhaps some players want to pursue multiple loves and that could lead to uncomfortable situations...


So what do you people think? Do you think a game like this would be any fun? Or would the seemingly infinite amount of possibilities only make the player confused? I think he wouldn't be, because he won't know that he's making most of these decisions. He chooses this way over the other and doesn't really think about it, but it has an effect on the story.
This will be hell to program, I know, but I already have a pretty smart system so I can probably pull it through. But if it's not a good idea to start with, I'll go for the old usual linear story with non-linear elements (side-quests), instead of this.

Phew, that's a huge post, and it's almost 2 a.m. I'd better get some sleep. Any weirdness in the post is probably because of me being tired and having a headache.

What kind of game is this? PC game? Mod for an existing game? Have you looked into what degree of dialogue options your engine supports? Do you have a good team of people working on this, to do the huge volume of work necessary for a non-linear game, and do it at a high level of quality?

Ten stones sounds like a round number, I don't like it, maybe just three and a half, yes thats sounds about right.


Also as the above, what engine and what design? Combat style?

lPeregrine wrote:What kind of game is this? PC game? Mod for an existing game? Have you looked into what degree of dialogue options your engine supports? Do you have a good team of people working on this, to do the huge volume of work necessary for a non-linear game, and do it at a high level of quality?

Yes, it's a PC game. I'd like to port it to console if it was possible, but a) it's ridiculuosly expensive and b) I don't even know how to
No, I only have myself. I do have quite a lot of spare time though, which is how I managed to get the game to this degree of completion in the first place...
The engine supports whatever dialouge options I code into it. The actual game play is very much like Zelda: OoT, MM and tWW. The dialogues looks very much like those found in those games to (it even has multicoloured texts!). But there are some elements of other games as well, like Castlevania. Here's two pics I took, although it's stille an early beta version, so some stuff, especially in the GUI and graphics department is subject to change (and has so too, in the first picture there would now be a clock-like thing (similar to Castlevania 64) and the text showing the time of the day will soon be gone too, and the debugging information too of course)
Older pic (player couldn't move his eyes around, and had a generally ugly head (everyone complained so damned much that I changed it))
Newer pic (player can look in different directions and open his mouth. So can the girl he's looking at. NPCs moving their mouths when they talk was the new feature I was trying out, that I mention before. I saw it in one of the videos from E3 on the new Zelda and shamelessly stole it).
I just hope that no-one will be put-off by the somewhat cartoonish style. I could go for a more photorealistic style, but I think that would be a bad decision. There are so many of those games, and I have no intention of making just another game.

@Bean: Well, they are elemental stones, and I can't have three and a half elements, now can I? That just wouldn't make any sense. Better with five normal, and five not so normal anti-elemental stones
As for the engine, I'm using the A6 Engine. I'd like to write my own engine completely, but even with my unlimitied amout of time it would unfeasible for one person to write one with all the features of that engine.
The combat style is fully real-time action (as you see in the first pic. That's not an enemy though just me being evil). There's a lock-on feature too, if you're a noob. There used to be combos possible, but I scrapped that and let the player decide his own way of fighting instead. Works better too, since the enemies are going to look and fight very differently from one to another.

But what about the story ideas? Do you think those are any good?