Quote:Original post by sunandshadow
My suggestion is that we each nominate 2 titles, either from the list or of our own creation (I imagine you will want toreate one since you don't have any on the list). So that will give us 8 suggestions (unless OnyxFlame starts posting again). Each of us can make suggestions for tweaking those titles to make them more likeable to us, and the nominator can choose whether or not to incorporate the suggestions. Then we will each organize the titles in our order of preferance, 1 being the best and 8 the worst. Totalling the rankings each person gives each title, the title with the lowest total will be the most popular and will become our working title. Sound okay to you?

It sounds okay. To me this voting is more or less a background activity, a minor thread in our discussion. For this matter I actually do not wish to create a new one. Even if I create a name, the name cannot possibly be representative and you won't understand what it means. I see the resulting title of this voting as a placeholder. My nomination does not reflect my idea or express agreement on any worldbuilding or background story.


I nominate Apotheosis and Chrysalis.


Truthfully, I do not value this voting much, at least not in terms of the meaning of the title. It is a title that is subjected to changes and highly likely to be changed. In essence I vote in order to get this out of the way. My nomination is based on the OPRL preferences.


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oprl

Quote:Original post by sunandshadow
It really puzzles me why you are having so much trouble taking all the things we have already decided about the game (such as the fact that the PC is an uncharacterized human whose name and gender are chosen by the player) an envsioning a game that fits these criteria. That's all I want from you - a detailed description of a game that matches our design doc and the design that we have spent almost 3 months working on in this thread.

Truthfully I found the idea of an uncharacterized human in an alien world unsatisfactory. I have always protested against it, if you can recall the discussion about 'speculative science fictions'. It is not difficult to envision such a game and I have already done that in the beginning of this thread. There was an ancient dispute on what I meant by sacrifice and reincarnation. I still don't know whether you understand what I meant.

The following idea is from three months ago. It still satisfies the constraints.(Please disregard any associates with the nouns that you might have seen else where in this thread, because the same nouns might have been overloaded in different posts and I don't want you to assume the meanings.)

Cryo:
Synopsis:
You mysteriously wake up to an alien world from cryostasis. You do not remember any thing from the past. You now face two distinct races and fellow humans that are called the Cryos. What are these two new races? How do they end up on the same planet? What is their relation to the Cryo? This is a game in which you tackle the mysteries through puzzles, explorations, and manipulating romantic bonds.


Does this description match what you are expecting? Tell me if you want me to resume this idea.

Quote:How can you say the game is formless when we've spent so many pages hammering out an agreement on what its form is? Is it really so difficult to hold in your mind all the things we have already agreed to and imagine a game consistent with them?

The description above is formless, because it says nothing about the central idea, the actual mystery, and the conflict. I am not an advocate of the above idea. I asked many times what the mystery is, what the conflicts are, and if there is combat what is the PC fighting against. Many misunderstood that I was refering to the plot. We settled on the notion that each RNPC has a knot that needs to be untied. However that still does not give the overall story a form in terms of the world building. We never really answered these familiar questions: What is the significance of the fact that there are two races? What is the significance that the human has been frozen? What are the metaphors? What do we want the player to think deeply about our game world and situation?

Quote:Wouldn't it be simple for you to just take my or AG's game review and write over top of it, changing whatever you disagree with?

This is exactly what we have been doing. It is somewhat hard to believe you don't realize this. There aretwo threads going on in terms of this discussion. The one that is obvious to you is the discussions on the 'downstream' elements such as characters and race definitions. The second thread is the discussion about the 'upstream' elements such as the overall form of the story, the central ideas, and the meanings of the mysteries and worldbuildings. I have warned that we should not discuss these untill we get the upstream because the downstream elements are subjected to change and get washed away if the upstream changes. You told me that you are able to link the different bits of ideas together. I had faith in that method and we started doing that.

However, instead of linking different ideas together, that method degraded into a clustering method, in which new ideas are not weighed and considered equally. Ideas that fit with the arbitrary starting point are kept, and other ideas are rejected. I stated that we are not supposed to argue for or against a character or idea based on another character or idea. I also said that we are holding on to certain ideas too dearly.

The original request for a 'game review' is a step back to discuss the upstream elements.

Quote:Oh, and since you have been pulling up people's original survey responses, I would like to point out that mine says "no gems" such as the fox's eye you mentioned.

How does your rejection of gems differ from my rejection of wings? Frequency has wings. Coincidence? Irony?

[Edited by - Estok on December 3, 2004 4:34:46 AM]

Quote:Original post by Avatar God
Man, all we're looking for is a non-specific game review! Imagine you played a game that you really liked, and list the general traits that you enjoyed most. You don't need to put details about liking a character and certainly don't include any major pieces of plot.

Though, to be fair, the Cryo possibility is a good one.

Quote:1. Mystery
As a mystery game, the reasons that I like this game is the profound revelations behind the mysteries. The revelations are relevant to our world, and are presented in a deep and touching way. The plots of this game really resemble those of a good detective novel. Many times I found myself surprised, impressed and even afriad of what the truth is revealed. As a multi-ending game, while each ending makes sense on its own, but them are also connected among other endings to present a compete view of the mystery. At the end, I am left with not one but many possible explainations. Overall, the game story is subtle yet powerful in presenting the ideas, without sounding preachy or forced. The romantic developments are integrated with the ideas to serve as metaphors and foreshadows.

These are the general traits I look for in a game story. It is non-specific and there are no plots involved. It compiles with the Cryo Synopsis above.

After I posted that, you made the following comment:

Quote:It really would be helpful if you (Estok) wrote a game review - remember, it isn't there to include plot details, its to see what we want to get out of the game. It's hard to see that from two greatly different paragraphs of... plot.

What plot were you refering to? What do you consider as general traits that I haven't posted?

Quote:Have you ever taken any martial arts? Because still, from what I can see, Fox's Eye seems to have a lot of correlations with gaining belts. Plus, it isn't like you're just learning new forms, you also have to gain the understanding that goes with the new level, accept the new responsibility, and come to understand yourself more.

For this matter I need to know what s/s meant by "Bleh. Sounds like earning martial arts belts or something" in the original comment that started this. Both of you used the belts analogy to object an idea in 13-tails. I do not know which idea you are objecting to. What are the 'new forms', 'new level' and 'new responsibility' that are refering to in 13-tails?

Quote:And we're voting on a working title so we don't have to keep calling it the GameDev.Net Collaborative Game Writing Project. We can always adjust or redo it later when we get further in the process.

I understand the reason why we want a working title. I do not value the need to vote on it. For example, I created the OPL and just called it something like GDOPL. It had a name, and no one ever objected it. If you just want a working title you could have just called it GDCGWP. We are not acronym freaks so we probably don't favor this title. A logical question to ask is where will this title show up, since, throughout this thread, we seldom refered to our design project by name. One answer to this question, is that it will show up as a title of the design document and the web page. For that matter I do not feel a need to give it a name other than "GameDev.Net Collaborative Game Writing Project 2004".

Quote:About us not being far enough along to talk about the Spirituals... it seems that it would help if we could decide who we wanted the Spirituals to be. Then we could easily come up with the how and why they are how they are.

The choice of the role of spirituals is based on what the ultimate idea is that we want to get across to the player. There are fundamental reason based on the role of spirituals in the overall story that in turn support or oppose low level (downstream) choices such as whether spirituals should be a race, whether they can have children etc. The choice hierarchy in terms of the overall meaning of our game story is as follow:

1. The choice of central idea(s); the meaning of the revelation behind the mysteries; the focus of discussion or speculation;
2. The choice of the form through which the central ideas are presented.
3. The choice of agents and entities that can result in the form that can present the central ideas.

The role of spirituals is a choice pertaining to catagory 2. It is a choice that is not definite if choices in catagory 1 are not set.

The choices on central idea are based on our preferences only. It is a choice that we can definitely vote on meaningfully.

Some of us may not like this idea because it does not guarantee that any specific low level (catagory 3) elements will exist in the final story. It does not guarantee that any of our character designs is retained, it does not guarantee any version of the religions that we discussed will be included, nor that any specific feature will be incorporated. In terms of the catagory 1 choice that has not been decided, these elements that we have been discussing are candidates. And the value of these candidates are not judged by its relation to other candidates but to the catagory 1 choice.

It is possible to propose a catagory 1 choice that favors certain catagory 2 and 3 elements.

Quote:It seems to me that we ought to be past this point. For that matter, it seems to me that we won't all get what we want and will have to aquiesce to the majority of the group (yeah, so there's four of us, but it's always a plurality anyways).

This is true and I have expected this all along. We can decide and use the greedy algorithm method. In which we start with a catagory 2 or 3 choice, and add on the next choice that best fits with the existing one. Structurally, the whole story will lean toward the first or first cluster of choices. With the not enough lateral responses, the collaborative project will end up implementing the idea behind the initial idea proposed by the first member.

Quote:I agree with a clean slate for the PC, in an "alien" world. Even though this wasn't exactly what we all wanted, we went with it because at some point, you just have to move on. At the least, it was a consensus with qualification. If it was disputed heavily, that should have been the FIRST thing to show up in the OPRL.

I did not complain about having the PC being the alien. In the original 13-tails synopsis the PC is still the clean human. The game review part of 13-tails excluded this idea because it is supposed to show the original vision, not the version after possible compromises. It is not that big a deal that the game review version does not reflect what you think the final outcome is.

Quote:And I'm not sure the argument that it would be easy to fathom a game like that is really valid. I mean, World of Warcraft is selling great right now. I could certainly have imagined that. Besides, not everybody has played as many sci-fi quasi-romance games and Estok and sunandshadow. I, for example, haven't really played any, but would like to. In particular, I would like to play this one, that combines different elements - romance, adventure, personal combat, and politics.

I am lost on what your first sentence is referring to. As a side note however I still have not get into liking World of Warcraft. There is no intuiging mystery or storyline going on, and the gameplay is not particularly exciting, not to mention what I would consider crappy 3D models and designs. No doubt there are many things to do in game and many quests, but there is no motivation behind any of that.

Quote:

Quote:Estok: The description above is formless, because it says nothing about the central idea, the actual mystery, and the conflict. I am not an advocate of the above idea. I asked many times what the mystery is, what the conflicts are, and if there is combat what is the PC fighting against. Many misunderstood that I was refering to the plot.

Well, it seems as if these might be partly dependent on plot. Still, the central goal is to discover who you are, and maybe find love in the process. The conflicts will be integral to the plot, I imagine, but also to the characters - we're bound to see plenty of conflicts with Skew, Lion, Bunny, and the PC. We're also going to see many problems between the Technos, Magicals, humans, and Spirituals just by their very nature. We've even talked about these.

What you mentioned as the 'Central Goal' to discover who you are is not acurate enough to be a central idea. What are the different 'You' that you will be able to discover? What are the significances of these different 'You's?

Quote:

Quote:Estok: We settled on the notion that each RNPC has a knot that needs to be untied. However that still does not give the overall story a form in terms of the world building. We never really answered these familiar questions: What is the significance of the fact that there are two races? What is the significance that the human has been frozen? What are the metaphors? What do we want the player to think deeply about our game world and situation?

I was under the impression that we had all answered these questions a long, long time ago. In fact, I'm sure of it. Perhaps you missed it (to be fair, quite a few posts went unrecognized - particularly 5MinuteGaming, and to a lesser extent, mine - while some debate was going on about an alternate, slightly related other situational example).

The four races (there are four, by the way, not two) - they are all related, spawned from the original humans. The humans, at some distinct juncture in response to a tragedy,

...and I'll finish this later, but I'll go ahead and post this now.

Quote:Original post by sunandshadow

Quote:Original post by Estok
Truthfully I found the idea of an uncharacterized human in an alien world unsatisfactory. I have always protested against it, if you can recall the discussion about 'speculative science fictions'. It is not difficult to envision such a game and I have already done that in the beginning of this thread. There was an ancient dispute on what I meant by sacrifice and reincarnation. I still don't know whether you understand what I meant.

Whether you found it unsatisfactory or not, that is what we as a group have decided to go with. Remember that this is a COLLABORATIVE project which requires lots of compromise, and in being a member of our staff you agree to go along with whatever the majority decides - if you refuse to do this you are not only wasting all our time, you are violating the terms of being a staff member and participate in this project.

I did go along with the idea that there is an uncharacterized human in an alien world idea, including the original synopsis of 13-tails. The game review version of 13-tails did not share this compromise because I envisioned the role of the game review was to explicitely declare our view prior to compromises. You don't see the function of the game review the same therefore I am redoing it in terms of Cryo.

Quote:There are things the majority has agreed on which I don't like much, but a mature writer can suck it up and work within constraints, focusing on the aspects which are more palatable. If you can envision a game which fits our design decisions you need to do that and suggest ways to build on that foundation, not contradictory irrelevant things which we will just reject because they don't fit the foundations.

What ideas did you suck up?

Quote:

Quote:The following idea is from three months ago. It still satisfies the constraints.(Please disregard any associates with the nouns that you might have seen else where in this thread, because the same nouns might have been overloaded in different posts and I don't want you to assume the meanings.)

Cryo:
Synopsis:
You mysteriously wake up to an alien world from cryostasis. You do not remember any thing from the past. You now face two distinct races and fellow humans that are called the Cryos. What are these two new races? How do they end up on the same planet? What is their relation to the Cryo? This is a game in which you tackle the mysteries through puzzles, explorations, and manipulating romantic bonds.

Actually this does not quite still satisfy the constraints, because everyone agreed that the best means of getting the humans into the setting was by means of a techno and a magical working together, and there is no cryogenics ivolved. But other than that, yes, please resume this idea and elaborate upon it.

The notion that there is no cryogenics is not in the design document. If you were referring to the sentence in the design doc: "The PC begins the game as a human unexpectedly summoned or revived..." I consider being awaken from cryo a form of revived. For the summoning part, there is a topic that I have thought of:

If the PC is summoned, does it imply that there is something that the PC was performing, but suddenly he is warped into a new world where he lost his memory and what he was supposed to do in the old world. The duties that the PC previously had was simply gone.

If the PC is revived from a cryo, we can elaborate on the fact that the PC is frozen for a reason, and that reason is related to the mystery behind the initial split of the human race and the search of spirituals. In addition, this idea still support the notion that the PC is revived jointly.


What is the next topic regarding the game review of Cryo that you want me to talk about?

Quote:Original post by sunandshadow
I would say that our overall story is a bilungsroman - the PC's central goal is to find his/her place in the world including political alignment, racial alignment, and romance. And to do that, lke AG says, first he/she must discover who he/she is in terms of abilities and desires. And we did indeed talk about this already.

We did talk about this but we did not settle the differences. I know that you played the sims. Do you think that this is very much like the sims? I told you before that the game review is supposed to be used to clarify what we all think of the game, and that I have questions regarding them. Do you still want me to ask you, or you ask me on cryo first or we do it at the same time?

Quote:We absolutely did answer these questions already. The 4 races are like cousins and present the different forms in which human societies can exist, each with its own benefits and drawbacks, showing that each type of society helps some types of people bloom while making others unhappy outcasts.

This is just your answer. It is not settled. What is the mystery related to the races and the fact that they splited? What is the significance of the split?

Quote:The player's job is to evaluate the RNPCs' different personality types and the different possible ways of living, then help each RNPC start living whichever way is best for their personality. The significance of the humans being summoned (not frozen) is that humans represent varied, flexible, unformed potential, which can either follow the pattern of one of the three example races or forge its own path.

If you allow me to summarize what you have just said:

In this game, the player will sample different cultures, figure out what he wants to do, and make decisions such as what culture to follow, who to be with, and how to end up being with someone.

Is this close to what you envision? Does this sum up the major motivations why a player would play the game?