Wrapped up the Lego minigame tutorial, and moving on the the FPS one. Thinking the big takeaway is to make a toolkit for developing levels and interactions first, such that the level building and manipulation process is as streamlined as possible early on.
Over on the Mad Genius Club there was an interesting article on writing blurbs. Tried it out and got some solid feedback. The first attempt was far too cryptic. I need to figure out how to talk about the Mother Elf, without actually using its name. That shouldn’t be hard after its introduction, provided the intro is good. For all of its cutesy name, the Mother Elf is a synthetic god, with all of the doomsday potential that entails. I’m thinking the characters view it the way people in the 50’s and 60’s viewed the atom bomb.
On the one hand, it ended, forever, the threat of Sigma. Finally the Reploids and Humans can be free of that influence. On he other hand, it is the sword of Damocles hanging over every Reploid’s head until the end of days. But the player has no idea what they’re being all euphemistic about, unless they’ve read the lore for the Zero games.
I’m thinking that should be easier to convey in a cut scene that pure written word. The cut scene would probably be a voice over of an image of the Mother Elf floating on a black stage, mid screen, eyes closed.
I’ll have to work the dialog later, but thinking the narrator goes over the origin of the Mother Elf, and what it does. When it gets to the Mother Elf being activated, its eyes pop open, glowing and a white flash bursts from it turning the screen to pure white light. If it needs more, oomph, the view can switch to outside the facility, which will see a giant bubble of bright light expanding rapidly outwards from it, everything falling within it vanishing from the eye. Lean in to the atomic bomb imagery to tie the two concepts together.
I’ll have to think more on this for the blurbing.
Voyager's Games 