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Re: A2MT Plot thread

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morsel/morceau
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by morsel/morceau »

I want everyone to know that this thread has more words in it than your typical novel.
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Money
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Money »

So I've been thinking of what the Artist would say after you beat him, and something like this is what I came up with.
Artist: ...What have I done...
...I let my longing for the perfect creation cloud my judgement...
...How could I be so selfish?
...Demo, my daughter, I am so, so sorry to have put you through all of this. Through everything you had to go through. I am honestly, truly sorry.
Demo: But... but you're not really my dad! You just created me so you could have perfection!
Artist: ...Yes. Yes I did. I don't have the right to be called your father. But... but now I realize how foolish I was, to put my desires ahead of caring for my creations.
Now I see... All along... I shouldn't have neglected you, or your siblings.
Please... Please forgive me. Before I go...
Demo: ...I forgive you, my father.
Artist: Ahhhh... Thank you, Demo. *sniff* Thank you so much, for letting me realize my error.
Farewell, Demo. I'm... I'm sorry.
Demo: ...Bye... Dad.
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Paralars
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Paralars »

If I may say, plot is an important thing as well and we need to do something about it, but this thread is goign nowhere.
I mean, it's good for people showcasing their dialogues and what not, but considering the activity in this forum, an actual discussion about the background story should rather be done in chat and it SHOULD actually be done.
And since everybody has different ideas on the very background story, there should probably be a kind of "council" that discusses about the plot and then settles that as long as nobody has any major objections.
I see no way of agreeing on a story the way it is right now, so I thought this was a solution.
I think this really is something that has to be taken care of some time.

And actually settling with something shouldn't be that hard since we already have a lot of overlap of opinions and we already came up with some good ideas and kind of acommodated each other with that.
It's basically just a little bunch of back and forth discussing that has to be done, that's why I suggest doing this outside the forum.
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by limepie20 »

Well we have an a2mt irc channel. We can set aside a date there to discuss plot if necessary.
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by raocow »

Now, this is the story all about how
Her life got flipped, turned upside down
And I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there
I'll tell you how she became the prince of a ship called Bel Air

In West Philadelphia, born and raised
On the playground is where she spent most of her days
Chillin' out, maxin', relaxin' all cool
And all shootin' some B-ball outside of the school

When a couple of goopas who were up to no good
Started makin' trouble in her neighborhood
She got in one little fight and her boss got scared
And said, "You're movin' with your aunty and uncle in Bel Air"

She begged and pleaded with him the other day
But he packed her suitcase and sent her on her way
He gave her a kiss and then he gave her her ticket
She put her Walkman on and said, "I might as well kick it"

She whistled for a cab and when it came near
The license plate said fresh and had a dice in the mirror
If anything she could say that this cab was rare
But she thought now forget it, yo home to Bel Air

She pulled up to a house about seven or eight
And she yelled to the cabby, "Yo holmes, smell you later"
Looked at her kingdom, she was finally there
To settle her throne as the prince of Bel Air

----------------

There. This is the story. She's on a homocidal rampage to claim the spaceship Bel Air as her own. 'The Artist' is just an innnocent duder that got caught in the crossfire, the ending can be a picture of the Twin Towers with a crying birdo with the words 'never forget'
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Servant »

The only debate that I think of that is going on is how to handle Iris, the reason behind The Artist wanting to kidnap Demo, and the actual text that will be displayed to the audience. There's a lot of agreement behind the plot that is taken for granted, the only thing that is necessary is to codify it, but I am not sure whether we need to resort to an IRC channel discussion to do such codification.

On an unrelated note, I'm going to guess that it's going to go horribly schizophrenic because different people will be writing different snippets, but what can you do?
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by raocow »

Which is why each given character should be quoting from the repertoir of a different artist or group! If it's going to be disjointed, EMBRACE IT!
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Paralars
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Paralars »

oh man raocow, in my local TV station they just started to show the Fresh Prince again like a day ago and I was sitting there watching the first episode after like 5 years and quickly check the talkhaus and there you go and write that.. :geek:

No but seriously, the problem I see is not that the plot will be somehow discontinuous, it's that nothing is really reliably settled and the way the forum, and especially this thread, goes right now, this isn't going to happen like on its own..
I mean, it's not a ton of work at all, it just has to be done some time, and why procrastinate it?
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Lobster_Horde »

If I may chime in, I would like to argue against the use of song lyrics and such. For one thing, despite sounding like a funny idea on paper, it would likely get annoying real fast. Second, it horribly limits the things that can be said.

The plot may be disjointed(and that could be mostly fixed with, say, a final review of the text in the game), but that's no reason to intentionally make this simply a bunch of references. References are cool and all, but basing the entire hack around a TV show's theme song? Really?

Finally, I would support the IRC chat idea to ensure everyone is on the same page regarding plot, and also suggest more use of the plot section of the wiki. We should consolidate everything we've got on plot there, make sure everyone's happy with it, and from then on simply edit it when a consensus is reached regarding plot.
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Paralars
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Paralars »

Lobster_Horde wrote: References are cool and all, but basing the entire hack around a TV show's theme song? Really?
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but yeah, getting the stuff settled and on the wiki is basically all I asked for, right now, almost nothing on the story page is any reliable
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by raocow »

I just hate the fact that peeps here take the story OH SO SERIOUSLY.

And no matter what I say this never seems to register.

And I'm not sure how that is supposed to get 'annoying really fast', because, honestly, I repeat this, TEXT SHOULD BE MINIMAL. MINIMAL. This is a platformer!
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Money
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Money »

That is why I proposed a while back that you should hear most of the backstory and plot through the parrot when you bring him Parrot Coins, so people who want to just play a game can play a game, and people who want a plot can have one too.
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Lobster_Horde »

raocow - I'll admit that I may have been a taking the plot a bit seriously, but the way I see it, if nobody takes the plot seriously, it'll just be an afterthought, and I for one wouldn't want to play a hack that just has the intro screen say something like: "Go beat the levels now" and then just dumped you at Yoshi's house. Also, not necessarily every plot detail would become text in the game(I think).

That said, I can totally see your point about this being a platformer. In my opinion, Moneyman's idea would satisfy both of us.

Edit: also, regarding the IRC, I would request that we do it later on in the day because I'm heading to college that day and I'll be temporarily cut off from the internet while traveling there.
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Paralars
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Paralars »

Well I'm not gonna argue with you here because all this arguing is what slows everything down, I'll just say that in my opinion a quality hack needs an at least basic story to some degree to give it, you know "flow".

But what I persist on is that there should be more conversation done on this project via Chat, because forum discussions are so terribly slow when people just check the forum twice a day and then reply on every thread (that is somehow relevant to them) once each visit.
And then people wait for discussions to come to a conclusion before they continue working on that stuff or they request feedback or ASM or GFX or something and until they get that they can't go on so there is like 4 days of time where nothing happens.
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by limepie20 »

I'd like to propose that if we go chat on irc, we do it tomorrow because I'll be away from my computer for a bit after tomorrow.
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by VideoGuy »

After reading through the posts here I honestly don't understand why there has to be such a big division between "no plot/joke plot" and "embedding a book in the game". Plot can be done fine if it's kept minimal. Very short cutscenes/textboxes/dialogues, written with the intent of being concise. With some of the proposed dialogues I've read here, I kept thinking "basically this could be summarized in two sentences". Any opportunity where we can do that, we should do that. I know it's a platformer and the levels are the main focus, but honestly I think having a plot, no matter how simple, makes the game a lot more memorable, and gives the endgame an actual feeling.

Since Vip5 is a hot topic right now, I'll use that as an example. No plot whatsoever, and as a result the ending was just like "Oh hi, I'm Julius, fight me." Had there been some sort of storyline, some prior introduction of Julius, I think it would have been a lot less anti-climactic.

And as an older example, I think TSRPR did it exactly right. Yes it was just a Bowser plot, but working in the whole second reality, thirdspace, ending Bowser world, etc. made the ending feel a lot more special, more than just "level, level, level, level, boss, credits". I suppose the music contributed a lot there too (I still love TSRPR's soundtrack). But were there five-minute cutscenes? No. Hundreds of message boxes? No. It got a plot across with barely any text. FPI did it, so why can't we?

All I'm saying is, don't throw the entire concept of a plot out. Considering most of it's already written, it would be a shame not to use it. Just something to think about.
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Servant »

I'll try to make it over there to the chat, but no guarantees. Also, for those who wish to join, just use flameofdoubt's sig to know where to attend.
flameofdoubt wrote:So yeah it turns out we have an irc channel, who knew. If enough of you hop along to #asmt on CaffieNet we could get some decent activity going, showing off good or new parts of levels and discussing ideas for the game in general.
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by S.N.N. »

Because most of the people who post in the collab forum hate the Talkhaus's IRC server and its users, and were as such offered to host the channel on Caffie instead. DaxterSpeed actually set it up and such, but it never really took off.

(not to mention the channels would be close to people who could help out with coding stuff and whatnot.)
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Paralars »

Ok so, I think there was a bit of confusion about what has been thought of earlier.
And since I think I witnessed most of the discussions about the fundamental plot, I summed up what we had agreed on and filled it up to a somewhat consistent plot. It might look complex, but trust me, it's quite basic. We don't need huge dialogues everywhere, I think in the end we can pull that off with about 4-5 sentences per station (Demo doesn't need to talk much at all, she isn't characterized) and a cutscene for the intro and maybe end.

Now I think we can use this as something to begin with and make changes to it, if nobody has any problems with it or cares, we can just take it as is.

And I think nobody should have any major objections to the very "base frame" of the story because most of this stuff was already silently agreed on
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Money »

Wait... I thought that you would fight Iris's guard person in the place of Iris's "End of World" fight, and then you would fight Iris in the final world and learn plot stuff
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Servant »

Yeah I thought so too and used the ASMT Wiki as my source (fighting the Guard first, and then Iris again in the last world for the final plotdump).

I am also not really that comfortable with Iris already being on the ship, mostly due to continuity reasons (Iris was never mentioned or even hinted at in ASMT1, and one of the quotes in the OP before it was erased even speculated removing Iris because it was hard to fit her in), but it's rather likely that is on the ASMT wiki too, I just neglected it because I thought we moved on beyond that.
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by kilon »

As one of the plot guys for ASMT1 I can say that the reason you don't hear about Iris is because it isn't important for the plot of that game. Demo goes and gets vegetables. Fine, she doesn't need a sister to help her.
This doesn't mean that Iris isn't on the ship in the first place.

Also I can say that I kinda like where the new direction of the plot is going. But I still don't care anymore.
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Paralars »

I pretty much ignored anything on the wiki because the story page there is just outdated and unofficial.
What I used for this plot are the discussions we had here scattered over 3-4 threads, okay, I only have like 70% of that in mind but oh well, it's something.

What I don't like about fighting Iris at the artist's world and then learning background information is that
- learning things about the plot afterwards in a dialogue or something makes the whole thing complex again and a lot of people said they don't want that.
- I don't see why the developments around Iris should be on the same level with the other siblings on the one hand (fighting the guard) but then be something super special on the other hand (fighting her at the Artist's place), and since we can't have only 7 sibling endbosses, Iris should become an "end of world 1-8" fight, so therefore not an endgame fight.
That is my view, we can discuss that on the IRC if you want.
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Servant »

To counter the second point, I always thought that Iris is indeed fought at the end of "World 1-8", where Iris is defeated, give away the plot, and then tell Demo to go to the Artist's homeworld. So, no, I don't invision Iris to be an "endgame" fight as you understand it.

I don't know how to counter the first point though. Maybe instead of having the "big reveal" at Iris, we should just have each sibling reveal a part of the plot as well (for easy digestion), with Iris just revealing the coordinates to the Artist's homeworld.
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Re: A2MT Plot thread - UPDATE 02/06/2010

Post by Paralars »

Servant wrote: I don't know how to counter the first point though. Maybe instead of having the "big reveal" at Iris, we should just have each sibling reveal a part of the plot as well (for easy digestion), with Iris just revealing the coordinates to the Artist's homeworld.
That's about the way I intended it, but you need to consider you can fight the siblings in any order, so it is possible to fight Iris as the second boss, so you can't really let her give out any crucial information yet.
I find it just fine if we thought of a couple of sentences for every sibling that he/she could tell about the Artist and the space station, Iris can still get a little special something
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