TopDown Story Skeleton

Here is a list of planned story plot as extracted from other thread:

Mission 1
Kid, just graduated from flight school on Earth. His Mom and Dad are proud, but worried that he will be away from home and out in space and who knows what trouble (little could they know Smiley Kid searches for a job online and finds a job in the outer edge of our secure space area.This is the frontier for us humans and is now reaching areas near other species. Kid gets a job for Boss man. He is a nice guy, been through lots but still has a kind heart. Takes a liking to kid so gives him a job. He will shuttle supplies between 2 space stations. Simple enough that a rookie fresh pilot could handle easilly.

This is the first mission. Kid flies a shuttle craft with cargo. On his flight from station 1 to station 2 he gets a warning that a comet just broke up and one of the pieces smacked into a big asteroid and now there is a massive meteor shower right intersecting his kid's course.
The game he has to manuveur the shuttle and avoid all meteors and deliver the cargo.

Level 2 when he gets to station 2 and does level 1, boss man is happy he is safe and as his gratitude for getting the job done gives him a better shuttle with a weapon on it. He figures debris will be in the aread for some time to come from the impact. So this will be prudent.

Mission 2 is to deliver cargo from station 2 to station 3 farther away in the new shuttle. During the flight, an urgent message comes in a breaking news story. Apparently an enemy species is moving closer to our sector. We got news from those living even further out than our frontier, these are the true explorers and pirates of mankind. These space pirates(those that survived the encroaching enemy) are coming back to civilized space, our space. Kid is told by Boss man to watch out for pirates and get safetly to station 3.
So our mission now is to avoid the pirates who need supplies, supplies we are likely to have in our ship.

Mission 3, we manage to fight off the pirates and make to station 3. There boss man is happy to see us again. He tells us by order of Earth Mandate of Highest Priority all citizens are called to fight the new oncoming enemy. Boss man says that now we all work for the military till this threat is over and that we are recruited for now wether we like it or not.

Kid now gets a small fighter and the next mission is training in the new vehicle. He is too take out enemy cargo containers and know how to do pickups dropped in by big supply ships. He learns about what the pickups do and basic hard core game play information


Mission 4 kid goes off to first battle near the furthest inhabited human planet this is the first encounter. Kid fights off light fighters out on scouting patrols.

Mission 5 kid is rewarded and moved up to a bigger fighter with dual guns. He now encounters more of the attack forces small and medium size ships.

Mission 6 kid moves to the current fighter with a co pilot, of all people boss man. Together they face there first really tough enemy ships and find there are more than one race involved in the invasion. Kid and Boss man are rewarded for this discovery and coming back alive to give this intelligence report.

Mission 7 they are on the best fighter ship we have. Part of a fleet they go into almost the final battle. Part 1 is fight off the enemy invading smaller vessels, part 2 is take out the capitol ships.

Mission 8 the flight back home. This is the reward mission, just fun flying back through all the places we have been back home to Mom and Dad and they get to meet Boss man.

We will need to come up with a better Mission 6 if we have the text adventure. Let the text adventure have the cool intelligence storyline. Ours will be more action based so mission 6 can be just brilliant flying and winning a very odds against type battle and hence the reward of best ship we have. Maybe topdown goes low into a planets surface with the enemy chasing and with Topdown skills forces them to crash, shoot each other and wins a very tough battle with lots of skill of flying and not just shooting.

Mission 6 could be a 3d side scroller for this one. Maybe start out in topdown fashion, then transform into side scroller with cool effect and then the fancy flying and pursuit can be done nicely and little shooting just cool flying.

Hi kryton,

this sounds good !
I was also thinking of changing camera in some missions - but we must give player chance to get oriented and not confused. So mild beginning of mission and then BAOOM :D

Bye,
Petr

I was thinking about it, start like normal, then the camera zooms out from our normal angle. We see a capital ship with tons of fighters coming. One of the factions heads towards topdown. This is when the camera zooms in and we see topdown head down to the planet and the factions follow him. Then it goes into side scroller but in 3d, we will need to play around with it. maybe almost like star craft and orthagonal view from above and to the side, so we can steer topdown around peaks, through canyons and tight turns, control elevation, so have total control in all directions but just limited in height somewhat. It will be a great fun game mode and maybe even be more useful for second version of the game in the next release. The rolls could be reversed, this style more the norm and then space version less.

Hi,

just quick idea which occured to me in school :)
What about boss being the traitor of Earth ? Our hero works for him, but when he finally ( in mission 8 ) visit him he will see him how he is doing some video communication with our good old enemies, which want to pay him in natural resources for his "service" thanks to which they can pass through Earth shield ( and start hell in "Down and dirty" )


Bye,
Petr

Oh, wow that breaks my heart. Sort of like seeing Captain Picard turn into a BORG. Maybe if we can somehow make a him a good guy again, maybe he is a double agent later or we find out, he was being brainwashed or controlled against his will.

The ending is supposed to be happy not sad, you must have had a tough day at school :)

Hi Kent,

not tough, just too long day :)
I don't know, but take for example episode IV of StarWars - all ends happily by death of millions innocent souls on Death Star :D so I would not expect new episode continuing the story. But end of episode V is quite thrilling so I can't wait last episode :).

This shock with killing capital ship, our hero super happy that "problem is solved" and now he see that boss is treating them... This makes you curious whats behind it. Why boss is evil now and if it is really the boss ? :) Where is sequel ? ;D


Bye,
Petr

Actually when you think in terms of arcing storylines. Like in Babylon 5 they had the 5 years of story sort of planned. That is what made it so good. If we are going to make this a real universe, maybe we should figure out an incredible story line that arcs across many sequels. This way all the stories will combine into one big story.

I guess what I am trying to say but the long way around is to decide, how long we want to work on this? 1 game, 2 games, 10 games and sort of develop a great story to fit the idea and make it that much better of a project.

I am up for anything the group decides. If we decide to go long distance, we can even plan different types of games so we keep ourselves challenged and get to make different types of games. Then we have the text adventures too. Or even Myst type game with puzzles maybe?

So it would be nice to make a plan and sort of make it as good as we can. The other thing is, as they do in TV writing... you plan for many seasons, but if the show gets cancelled by the tv network, you are able to wrap things up neatly for your fans.

So if the group decides, wow we can do this type of game and this type and all make it part of the same verse and arcing storyline, we could plan for that, but also make each story(game) complete in case we decide to stop so the fans are not left hanging.

Well just some thoughts. Amazing how your idea to make Boss man "Evil" started so many more ideas.

Here are the types of games I would be interested in working on, that is types that would be in our verse and continue the story in each game.

The way it is now, instant action and mission based top and side 3d scroller.
A first person adventure game with some shooting action.
A game like Starcraft or Command and Conquer, real time strategy
And maybe a hard core space game where you command a capital ship like the Enterprise in Star Trek and have a full crew. This would be based mostly in the ship so it would be lot of strategy, info analysis, decision making and away missions and of course combat and control.

What about you guys?

Let's stay with our 8 mission starter game first. When we have it done like we want to, we will see much better how much effort it was and can estimate better any other project. Let's start small, or it will fail.

btw, you guys have great story ideas.