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Untamed Sun Meadow
5ad4a7
Okay so, I had two ideas for quests before I realized that I'll never have the gumption to go through with them and I don't really have enough skill in art or game/puzzle design to do them justice anyway.
I only want to talk about one of them here, though, because the other one is really plot-centric and if I said it here, nobody would be able to steal the idea. If anyone's interested in hearing it and maybe running it (I don't think anyone's tried this kind of twist in a quest before), go ahead and ask and I'll contact you on IRC.
So, Time Skip.
It was going to be a puzzle-based quest, where you control a time-traveler/chrononaut/time scientist with a damaged timesuit, crash-landed or drifting in space in a damaged spaceship. The damage to the suit caused his consciousness to be split between four different time periods with environments linked up so that events in one directly affected the others. In essence, the time periods were just different representations of a single true environment that you could not interact with directly at first- the damaged timesuit would not be able to stabilize the MC's consciousness in his native time. Because I am not imaginative, the time periods were going to be stereotypical prehistoric-era with a caveman version of the MC, medieval era with a knight, 20th century with a military soldier, and of course the space-future/present. The goals of the quest would progress past repairing the timesuit's various functions to fixing up the ship you were in and heading back to civilization.
Initially, the chrononaut would only be present in one time period at a time, and have no control over when it switches to another time period. I'm not sure if it would be fun for it to switch every update (which would generally require puzzles to be solved in any era at first) or only switch when it'd be convenient for the plot or puzzles(which would mean I could have the first puzzle's solution cause a switch, explaining that mechanic)... Or how soon to allow suggesters to switch at will. Difficult design choices like that are part of why I abandoned the idea, despite having developed it considerably. Another difficult choice was how to even start the thread. A cutscene introducing each era's version of the MC, with the true era being a garbled mess? Or should it just start off with the caveman and introduce each era with every "timeskip"? Is the ship crash-landed or is it adrift in space? Is the MC trapped in a room or floating outside an airlock? What caused the damage to the ship and the timesuit? I liked the idea of "Timelock" technology that would disable time travel in a large area, which would allow for piracy of timetravel ships.
I did have some mechanics nailed down. The caveman would be strong, the knight would be immune to damage, the soldier would have a rifle, and the repaired timesuit would have all three, as it would be revealed that the timesuit has strength augmentation, a forcefield, and a blaster cannon. However, even after you repaired the timesuit, there would still be reason to view the spaceship in the perspective of other time periods. Every object or obstacle in the ship has a parallel representation, which could be interacted with differently in each era. A leg of meat to feed the hungry caveman would be the holy grail to bring youth to the old knight would be a medkit to heal the soldier's head injury would be a battery or something to repair part of the timesuit. Cooking the leg of meat would be the same as filling the holy grail with water, refilling the medkit with supplies(or opening it? is it locked or sealed or what), or recharging the battery, even if it was impossible to do so in one or more of the other time periods. Perhaps some items could be unique to one time period, but once picked up could be taken into other time periods, where they would morph into a new, more-appropriate item? Maybe fully repairing the suit would let you view time periods with the "wrong" character, letting you bring in the caveman to the medieval period where you needed raw strength for a task. Bringing the full timesuit into any era would be boring though, so that would be disallowed, at least until endgame. I also had the idea of the structure of a time period changing depending on what the current goal was. Like, certain objectives would end at dead ends, but in reality that's at a corridor or intersection in the ship, so you have to decide on a new objective and so the view would rotate to a new perspective to allow progress to a new part of the ship.
Anyway, I don't have the drive to go through with it and plan out all the puzzles and environments alongside figuring out how to not suck at drawing it. I'm not completely awful at art (I mean, I can draw past stick figure level) but my cheapass tablet('s pen?) broke and I don't draw enough to justify buying a new one. So it'd have to be mouse-drawn, which would take forever to look passable. Also, I play videogames a lot.
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