WestonSmith wrote:Here's an exercise for y'all. Can someone summarize the plot of Episode 1 for me? Pretend I know literally nothing about raocow, Demo, etc. I'm an outsider looking for a wikipedia entry explaining what this game is about.
Can someone provide such a synopsis?
We need this and character bios for level creators to be able to reference. Not to dictate, but to inform. That's an important part of any good story bible, it's what I recommended they do back when the idea first came about, and it looks like it wasn't an area they decided to focus on.
I'm not saying we have to go into the level of detail I did with my bios, but certainly more than they did in the story bible.
Imaynotbehere4long wrote:Ok so the games chronologically go Asmbxt - A2xt - ASMT
But ASMT is referenced in A2XT's hub: the Chargin' Chucks talk about how they "don't work for King Charles anymore," (and why would they mention that if Demo hadn't met them?) and I'm pretty sure King Charles himself makes an appearance saying that he turned good after ASMT.
By the way, how much of the story bible will be ignored? I've even heard talks about changing who the player characters are, but has anything been decided on yet?
According to
the TV Tropes page:
According to one of A2XT's story writers on the forums (to explain why King Charles appears and claims to have been defeated by Demo even though the game takes place before ASMT) there are a lot of different King Charleses and Demo has a habit of just happening to defeat a lot of them.
So either Dem or darky handwaved this bit and
at least one website already considers A2XT a prequel to ASMT.
Hoeloe wrote:SAJewers wrote:To be honest, we should kinda wait until levels start getting accepted, then work the plot around the levels. I wasn't a huge fan of the disconnect between the plot and the levels in Episode 1.
I think there are some major story elements that should be at least vaguely planned out in advance (such as the allegiance of the Uncles, how the plot ties in from episode 1, etc.), and then shape the details based on the levels. There's a problem with either extreme here. Writing all the plot first and shoving unrelated levels in creates a disconnect between the levels and the plot, which is what happened in Episode 1, but similarly, creating all the levels first and then trying to write a plot around it will almost invariably end up with a totally nonsensical plot. The happy medium should probably be a vague idea of how things could play out, which gives a basic story structure, but is still malleable enough to twist to fit the levels.
As an example, an vague plot idea could be "Uncles are using Demo and friends for their own gain". This isn't particularly detailed, and can be easily twisted to fit the levels, but at the same time allows the plot to have some focus and not just end up as random non-sequiturs.
No matter how we go about it, we should try to keep the momentum of the plot fairly consistent this time around. If I remember correctly, with Episode 1 we started out with a massive infodump, and then in Worlds 2 and 3 not only did much of the major levels and cutscenes have nothing to do with the story arc that World 1 established, but the ones that did were nothing but exposition dumps. Then, come world 4, that plot is mostly forgotten in favor of the siblings and they take the focus until the final level, which hastily ties it back to the super leeks and the instability of reality and all that.
The silly non-sequitur levels of episode 1 were cool and memorable, but they did disrupt what flow the story had. I propose that big and cool non-sequitur levels like
Sheath Partakes in an Interlude,
The Good, The Bad and the Stupid,
The Castle of the World, etc. be made bonus levels for each world and we make the end-of-world levels after the worlds have been established.