Blue 2

I dug through some old notes today while trying to avoid doing all the things that I should do. (fittingly enough the last time I wrote on this game blog the title of it was "procrastination". Fitting to say the least)

Well I read through the plot I had written little over a year ago and... It's not half-bad. I mean it's not the greatest piece of literature ever written but I thought about how to streamline the game and maybe make it a game and this plot would fit somewhat well into that as well.

Instead of making it a sprawling game I thought maybe make it reserved where you are stuck in locations to find clues with story bits inbetween. Sort of like pixel hunting games.

Of course the problem is that this kind of gameplay is pretty bad and horrible and all the other things but whatever.

I thought I'd post this and also post the plot I had written because... Well why not?

(MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD or maybe lieutenant spoilers... hurr hurr)

Blue goes to investigate stolen data from a major corporation. Looking through the area for clues (this would be almost a tutorial level) he finds leads that will lead him to an Anarchist hideout. Over there he will find Red who is the culprit behind all of this and says as much. But before Blue can do anything about that a bunch of cyber commandos (think the soldiers in Frozen Synapse) break into the anarchist hideout and kill everyone (except Blue and Red who are in a "back room").

Trying to contact the police station Blue finds that the whole nearby area/region has been shut down and no one can get in or out. (much like the lockdown in the first game) The commandos are hunting for the data that Red stole and it is Red who has initiated the Lockdown so that the commandos cannot escape with the data.
(somewhere here is a plot hole I'm noticing. I suppose that the commandos have to actually steal the data for Red to have any reason to initiate the lockdown. So I guess they did that at some point too)

Blue enlists the help of a hacker inside the lockdown and manages to contact the police station with the information he has and he is now the "man on the inside" that has to deal with all the shit die hard style. (or maybe not)


That's as far as I got but as far as plots goes it's entirely passable. In fact there might not be a whole lot left after the written section. It might even be multiple endings. The commandos might get away with the data (bad ending), Red might get away with the data (bad ending), Blue might catch one or both (good ending) or might kill one or both (decent ending). The data might be lost or the data might be recovered.

(Spoilers end here)

Of course I love multiple choice but I also know that that stuff quickly becomes unwieldy so I'll probably have to stick with one or two options.


So this was my yearly random blog out of nowhere. See you in 2014.

Decided I wanted a break from all that gamemaking. I haven't worked this hard in a long time. Or at least not for this long. I'm giving myself a couple more days until I bore out (I know that during the weekend I'll be away so that's probably when I'll phase myself out). But so far progress is actually happening.

And I'm ridiculously excited about it. I'm making things I personally think are insanely cool but I also know that no other human being on the internet is even remotely interested. Because I know exactly what I tend to think about those other people who gush and talk at length on IRC about their latest small progress they've made.

Now I'm one of those and I'm loving it. I've been playing around with sound. I'm using AGS 3.1.2 without the revamped sound engine though so I'm probably going to have a bunch of .txt files with music lists before all of this is over. Sound is a pain in the buttocks. But it's one of those things that people like to have.

I've also been thinking about voice acting for a late scene in the game. So if anyone's interesting give me a shout. I'm not even close to that yet though so I can't say for certain if I'm going to have that voice acting or not.

What else is new? I mockupped a title screen. It doesn't quite work because it has trees. So I should go out and shoot some cityscapes and maybe find something more... suited. But I still sort of like it.


I also made a quick video. Because I love screenshots but I wanted to show just how much random crap I'm animating in the background. Well maybe it isn't that much but the fact is that I love it when... stuff... move.


Though with all this enthusiasm I also wonder if I overdo certain aspects. A lot of the charm in the first game was how simple it is and now there's stuff all over the place. There's still a lot of work to be done. Especially graphics-wise.

Today, for example, I noticed I didn't have a "main menu" where you save and load and stuff. And if I am to have a custom save GUI I'll have to work on that too. So far though I'll keep to using the built-in save system. No point in messing with that until the polish phase.


I still don't have a plot though...

This might be a short one because I have to go to work in fifteen minutes. But yesterday before I went to bed there was the talk about "finishing them games." Before falling into my dreamstate I decided on a deadline for this project. Now. It's most likely that this deadline will fail but it's also very doable. I just need to cut down on... stuff.

The deadline is October 31st. The reason for this is that November is National Novel Writing Month and any progress on anything else will probably halt that month when I try to write something instead. There are some other projects I'm in at the end of October but honestly that's no excuse not to make the deadline.

Though if I don't it'll probably be some time next year or so.

On actual progress there is a little. I should have something playable by the end of this week if I go like this. I don't have a proper plot yet but I have the beginning and if I make the first couple of minutes of gameplay and story maybe the rest will come.

So the plot of Blue 2. I don't really know it yet. I have some barebones but no plot actual. This post is basically going to be a half brainstorm stream of consciousness thing. Basically my own notes that I'll publish for everyone to see and if anyone happen to read it I'd really appreciate your ideas as well.

The basic game chill was opposites. Which meant that this game would have Blue the protagonist and then a dirty underground hacker called Red. (Red vs Blue). I don't know how much of this will remain.

These are the fragments I have:
Somone hacks The Eye. A corporation information bank. It contains sensitive information that the corporation does not want public. The hackers are a group of information terrorists who think that "information should be free" and threaten to release the information.

Another story thread is that while hacking The Eye the hackers released a virus messing up certain areas of cyberspace. This would lead to quarantine areas and a certain kind of time limit because it sort of must be stopped.

Follow that up with the story thread that the sensitive information of the corp is in fact that a devastating virus was developed by said corp for monetary gain in fighting it later.

A subplot of little consequence is also cyberspace Ghosts. That I still haven't really figured out what are but are elusive shapes that appear and disappear randomly and weirdly. They probably wouldn't tie into the main story but would be more of an atmosphere thing. (maybe setting up a sequel!) Some ideas what they might be are rogue AI avatars or maybe people who died while logged in.

These are the fragments I have. They all make for a fairly decent plot setup but I don't really know where it would go from there. Obviously the hackers have to be caught and stopped and so too the virus. But the way in which to go about this... I don't know. I hate this because tend to have these kinds of ideas about Point A and Point B but the road between them...

A couple of scenes I have in mind already.
-The hacker ("Red?") meeting Blue in an outlaw area and telling him all about how information should be free and the kind of information the corporation was keeping in The Eye. Here it would be awesome to give the player a moral choice of sorts to side with Red or not.
- An opening scene taking place in a the real world (probably a cutscene) showing Blue logging in before entering the virtual police station (a place sort of inspired by the police station in the Blade Runner game. Of course in simplistic top-down graphics but I just have the image of Blade Runner in my head)

I guess if I was all about I could make the intro scene since it comes first and it'd need some messing around with and maybe I'd get ideas for the game proper by doing it. It'll probably happen. But I'll make these simple blog posts first because I'm fairly busy and writing these takes a lot less effort than a 24 hour gamemaking throwdown :D

So now I've had these things off my chest. Next up: Characters. Maybe.