Plot for a game I'll never make

[Hollister Man]

I just think up things, like a lot of you, and wish I had the talent and time to make them.  Take this one and make it your own.  It's been done before, but I like it anyway.

You wake up one morning.  There is a red rose sitting in a longneck bottle beside your bed, and you don't remember how it got there.  In fact, you don't remember much of anything.  As you climb out of bed you find you are bruised and scratched badly, but that too is lost.  You find a note in your pocket in a woman's handwriting, asking you to meet her at a restaurant downtown "this evening," but how old is the note?

You manage to get to the restaurant and sit at a table for a while, until the waitress asks you where "the lady" you were with went to.  "You looked so happy," she mentions.  Interesting.

Anyway, the point comes where you start to get flashbacks, remembering who she was, what happened that night.  I'll leave the ending up to you.  I imagined it with an ending like that Brad Pitt movie where he has no long term memory, where he finds out that he IS the killer he's searching for.  But maybe this way I will get a chance to be surprised by your ending.

Here's to unrealized dreams and undreamed realities.
Allan

[remixor]

I imagined it with an ending like that Brad Pitt movie where he has no long term memory, where he finds out that he IS the killer he's searching for.  

You're think of Momento directed by Christopher Nolan, and the lead in that movie was Guy Pearce, not Brad Pitt.

Anyway, it could definitely make an interesting game.

[Andail]

Just remember that the sudden deja vu kind of narrating is far from original, even in the AGS-world

[Stickieee]

You wake up one morning.  There is a red rose sitting in a longneck bottle beside your bed, and you don't remember how it got there.  In fact, you don't remember much of anything.  As you climb out of bed you find you are bruised and scratched badly, but that too is lost.  You find a note in your pocket in a woman's handwriting, asking you to meet her at a restaurant downtown "this evening," but how old is the note?

You manage to get to the restaurant and sit at a table for a while, until the waitress asks you where "the lady" you were with went to.  "You looked so happy," she mentions.  Interesting.

Anyway, the point comes where you start to get flashbacks, remembering who she was, what happened that night.  I'll leave the ending up to you.  I imagined it with an ending like that Brad Pitt movie where he has no long term memory, where he finds out that he IS the killer he's searching for.  But maybe this way I will get a chance to be surprised by your ending.

The problem with most amateur adventure plots is the same. There's an interesting beginning and --- nothing else. The protagonist is left to dwell in a world that doesn't change, he is the only active person in the whole game. The evil guy just waits in his mansion to get (cunnigly) beaten up and the side characters stay on their originated positions and wait for the protagonist to clear up everything.

I fear this game you'll never make would've been "an interesting test" at the most, but never a true gem. Think of Pleurghburg:DA or 5das, there's more to those games than the initial setting.

Anyhow. It's good to think of different plots, though the 99 first ones will be dull, the 100th one will be a great one. And make the game out of THAT one.

[Hollister Man]

That's the problem with a lot of games.  All the characters have one or two things to tell you.  I was thinking of making a "random response" list, where they talk about their life if you ask them and they aren't interested in your quest.  Maybe you even have to listen to them a bit before they give away a clue?

And it was Momento, I just saw Pitt there for some reason.  Strange.  That's like I KNEW that Stargate had Val Kilmer, but it turned out to be Kurt Russel.  

[Penguinx]

I dig the idea of a random conversation selector. Has anyone else done this in an AGS game?

[Minimi]

That's the problem with a lot of games.  All the characters have one or two things to tell you.  I was thinking of making a "random response" list, where they talk about their life if you ask them and they aren't interested in your quest.  Maybe you even have to listen to them a bit before they give away a clue?

And it was Momento, I just saw Pitt there for some reason.  Strange.  That's like I KNEW that Stargate had Val Kilmer, but it turned out to be Kurt Russel.  

I think it's not about that, actually. It's more like, the not SO important characters change through the game, and that they have their own personality, though that they do react on the progress of the game, and things happening around. It's like you are really alive. This can't be done by random lines, because they are random, and do not have influence on the atmosphere around them.

[Penguinx]

Minimi, couldn't you then make sure that there a few different groups of random conversations that, depending on if certain events of the game have triggered them, are all context sensitive.

For instance, conversations 1-6 are available before action (A) takes place. After action (A) conversations 7-10 are options.

IE: Random but topical. Possible, right?

[Hollister Man]

This kind of goes with that thread a while ago, about searching the internet in a game.  You could possibly make a database of sorts, with the things they could say and under what conditions.  So when the game gets a request, it looks for a topic to talk about.  If it is raining, you could have a variable to see whether or not the NPC likes the rain, then reply depending on the preference of the NPC.  This way it could be different each time you play the game.

Anyway, I have seen a LOT of games that have one (or more) really stupid NPCs that always seem to say the same thing, and it does not matter what time or day it is, they are there.  They never have to to sleep or bathe, they just stand there saying "Wow look at the fountain!"  or something that is only relevant once.