An addicts break...

from StarControl Forums

I've been working non-stop 8-18 hours a day on my own games every free moment of every day for about a year now, even though there is almost no chance that they will ever be made.  I want to finish the story for just for myself even if nobody else ever winds up reading it.  But to do that, the way I make games and write their stories, means that have bring all 12 games to what I call "full notes stage" design documents... at least.  So this is going to take at least another year to finish all 12 to that state and be able to have the complete first drafts of all of the main story arcs of all 12 games.  This weekend I decided to take my first actual days off from this as I am almost finished with the dev journal stuff.  Next weekend I will end that public presentation by showing the complete design document for my top down shooter Pirate Dawn and along with the the timeline that leads into it and what I call the "lore files" for Pirate Dawn.  This is space combat best described too this audience as "Star Control-like combat that functions tactically like Star Fleet Battles".  It's not a playable board game, but if you don't like Chess but are a SC fan you will probably find this more interesting than Armageddon Chess.

With that explanation out of the way... this is actually a Star Control post!  ;-)  I tried to take the weekend off from game design, but now that I am back to doing it again that wasn't possible.  I managed to push the PDU out of my head for the weekend... and instead wound up spending the weekend thinking about Star Control, haha!  So here is what I came up with for Stardock this weekend.  I've mentioned before that I've always wanted to make a "Looney Toons space adventure" type game myself, so I really like the cartoony direction of SC.  Since so many have complained about it, I am guessing they will wind up toning it down a bit from full-blown looney toons.  But here's a character I'd love to see in SCO... Wile E Coyote!!!  A kind of tribute too him, anyway.  It could either be a side-arc quest that runs sporadically recurring throughout the game, or a side-story arc of several other quests throughout the game.  It would be a WE Coyote-inspired "super genius" character who is trying to achieve some great goal, probably related to one of your existing primary story arcs.  If more planets than Mars explode over the course of the story, this character would be responsible for one of them... that could be used to temporarily confuse the evidence of why the planets are exploding in addition to being one of this character's funniest moments.  He always fails miserably and disastrously, just like WE Coyote, so when he blows up one of the planets he was actually trying to do something else.

This could be a hilarious character within your existing story if he is done right.  He keeps showing up throughout the story as a comedy break from whatever is going on at the time, for another intricate and disastrous attempt to reach his ultimate goal... whatever that is.  I don't know your story to work him into it myself, so the best I can do is describe this idea I've had in my head all weekend and hope it works out with what you are already doing.

 

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Reply #1 from StarControl Forums Top

Wile E Coyote has always been one of my favourites :)

One of the best skits i remember was when he tried to use a catapult and all the ways it went wrong.
It was that anticipation of what will happen this time that added to the comedy value.

I know I have no talent for writing great prose so I do not envy you for the task to try and recreate this in SC:O
So all i will do is wish you the best of luck and look forward to your endeavours.
 

Reply #2 from StarControl Forums Top

...and maybe he could have a sidekick.  And he would then be a blending of Pinky & the Brain and WE Coyote, and they have some kind of plot to rule the galaxy.  Their "oops moment" of blowing up a planet could be part of their plot to take over the galaxy!

 

 

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Reply #3 from StarControl Forums Top

remember, if you want to blow up a planet you are going to need the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator . .

Aaaaand now I have the theme from Pinky and the Brain going through my head (narf!)

Reply #4 from StarControl Forums Top

That's really funny because I had also been thinking of how to work Marvin into this but it seemed like too obviously just ripping off Looney Toons by using both, instead of a WE Coyote tribute.  It works with Pinky and the Brain because they aren't Looney Toons, they are from much later.  What I call a "bank-shot reference" of combining two often unrelated references into a single thing.