The great Lone Wanderer's idea and question Megathread

The great Lone Wanderer's idea and question Megathread

Postby Lone Wanderer » Tue Aug 19, 2014 12:59 pm

Hello once again dear forumlings.

I am the Lone Wanderer; come have a seat, let me offer you some tea and relax. Tonight I am going to reveal what I've been brainstorming on since the last few days. Now let's go on and get this megathread started. Since this thread is going to be bigger one, I'm going to section it in a few parts:

1. Ideas
2. Implementation and synchronisation with existing content
3. Discussion about existing content
4. Future plans and direction of my work

1. Ideas:
I feel intrigued by the whole idea of an apocalypse where everyone just gets turned into a rabid monster. It opens up philosphical questions as of what is human and who is allowed to have which rights and how to you judge the ones who have lost their minds. The whole freedom about being able to break taboos also adds a nice flavour to all the possibilities in this environment. Don't worry, I'm not going to make a psychoanalytical Nietzsche-like interpretation of everything. Instead I wanted to add a new character. May I present you ... the Hunter.

Short description:
The Hunter is a sadistic antagonist who doesn't hesitate to kill the infected. When advancing down his paths he will develop an interest in the player character and hunt your guy/gal/(or any other iteration of your gender) actively down to either kill or abuse the player character. The abuse encompasses non-sexual content as well.

Background:
He is an experimental super soldier of the military, made to combat everything which isn't human. Since we are in an environment where there hasn't been any known cure or help for people who succumbed to their infection it is safe to assume that people outside our little playgrounds are pretty paranoid and scared about infected. The fact that the entire Earth is also endangered of being turned into grey sludge makes matters seem even more hopeless but I digress.

The Hunter came into existence by modifying a soldier with a new type of nanobots - coded differently with multiple failsafes in order to prevent them from disfiguring the host although.

The Hunter got shaped into a humanoid reptile. You don't get to see much of his actual skin, since he's wearing armour all over his body. The armour is segmented and has a futuristic look to it. He was also given a special rifle by the military. That gun fires bullets imbued with a new generation of nanites. What I didn't mention before is, that the new generation of nanites actively seeks to destroy the older ones. In other words, the rifle is able to kill infected just for the nanite injection they get.

Reason why the military decided to develop that rifle was that the military has troubles killing infected with their superhuman regeneration.

I have to admit, that I'm not done with his design yet. Ideas are welcome here.

He underwent years of being disciplined trained and now transformed, he adapted his new codename and was ready to move. When he arrived in the mission area, he cut off all connections with the military. This is the point where the player will step in by getting intel on the Hunter by the mysterious lady in white.

Actual Content:
I'll just give you a short list about what I want to do with him:
  • [Event]: Meeting the lady in white in the outside area for a short debrief/warning. Requirements to meet that event should be to have completed Dr Matt's or Dr Mouses' questline.
  • [Event]: Introduction event of the Hunter in the outside area. After that the Hunter is a random encounter.
  • [Encounter]: Throwing the Fight: The Hunter beats up the character
  • [Encounter]: Submission:
    > Male: Hunter will play with the player
    > Female/Herm: See Throw Fight
    > Neuter: You will be given the option of being changed into male
  • [Encounter]: Win: You can either beat him up or make him feel uncomfortable based on how many times you've lost/threw fights before.
  • [Event]: If you submitted a lot of times he will take you to his hideout and will offer you to go help him with something.
  • [Event]: If you won or lost a lot of times he will tell you that he will invite you to an area. In that area you will have the final encounter with him which has 3 possible outcomes.
Thoughts behind the character:
The Hunter is what I would call an experimental character. There haven't really been many characters who you would consider an antagonist or otherwise malevolent characters yet. Dr Mouse is pretty much the only character you would rather want to avoid if you met him in person.
Regarding of who will actually read what I wrote: I think that most people will avoid him anyway, since I will keep him M/M themed for the sexual stuff. I don't want to exclude the other genders, but I won't write any sexual interactions for anything non-male.

Now that we're through with the overthought character, let's move on to the critters.

Critters:
A folk of only male creatures who form a two layer civilization. They consist of the <INSERT NAME 1> and the <INSERT NAME 2>. The first mentioned all wear chastity devices and go on to hunt for new people to add to their ranks. Although their hunt also yields the selfish goal of pleasuring themselves with their prey since they aren't really able to do so themselves with all the restrictions they have been put under. The second caste, which is the the higher layer doesn't wear chastity devices and consists of basically the leaders. They dominate and sex up the ones from the lower tier.

The problem I have with these is the design as well or which creature I use here at all. I thought about making them Aztec/Mayan frogs first but then I had a different idea I could do with frogs. The reason why I have a problem is, that I wanted to pick the species later - one that I would feel was underrepresented in the game. I'm open for ideas here.
Another problem that I would have with these would be to add the character initiation to the lower caste which wields chastity devices. Restricting the character in their sex for the rest of the game sounds like a little bit of work but I guess you can get it work with some Inform magic.

Now that you've also seen the little critter that I've planned, let's move on to the last part:


Implementation:
The problem that I have is, that I want to reintroduce the lady in white. With the former author gone, she is kind of collecting dust right now and I had the impression that she was one of the major characters in the little plot we have. So in other words: Since she isn't my character, I can't really just go ahead and write whatever comes up to my mind. As it seems she was a character to do little detective work about the nanite infection and was also a delivery girl as well. So ... my idea was to re-add her by first just making her meet the player to warn him about the Hunter first. Later as the little story which I have in mind progresses she tells the player more and more about the Hunter.

Maybe I'll do more stuff with her once I feel more comfortable tackling other people's characters.

But aside from the lady; how do you feel in general about the implementation of the Hunter? What I added here in this thread was mostly stuff about what I think the military would do in a nanite infection apocalypse. Would you feel fine adding a Deus Ex Machina weapon that can destroy mutants on the go (Although normal guns can also kill humans easily ...)? Although if the development of new nanites would break the story too much you could just say that he uses the grey goo nanites instead.

Discussion
There's a few other things which I wanted to get a little bit more intel on:
  • How far do the lore of Multiplayer and Singleplayer overlap? Are they both playing in the same world?
  • Is it possible/okay to add a temporary area? For the Hunter I would've liked to add one in the final encounter at least. Since I didn't look into Inform too much yet (Yeah, I've just written down things via pen&paper or notepad so far) I can't tell how much effort it would be to do that.
Future plans and direction of my work:
Since I am gay myself I'll exclusively work on either:
  • story related stuff where I'll be indifferent about the gender
  • or stuff involving males if it is anything else
  • "Ambient events": One-time events or small event-chains just to add to the world a little
  • odd critters and other underrepresented species
I'll keep you updated and hope to be showing off something soon (as soon as I finally muster the guts to sit down and just learn how to use Inform). And last of all: I am welcome for any ideas and feedback on my ideas.

Thank you for reading and I wish you the nicest of days!
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Re: The great Lone Wanderer's idea and question Megathread

Postby TigerStripes » Tue Aug 19, 2014 3:23 pm

Hunter:
I've read through your idea and have found it pretty interesting overall, but there's several points which I think Nuku's going to have to look at and give his approval on or require be modified, as chunks of this tread beyond the game's normal content and may conflict too much with the universe.

That said, I do want to point out that I've been handling material dealing with the main storyline for the game and that I'd really prefer it not be tread into. I have plans for some military response and interaction, though that does not automatically preclude some form of your hunter idea from occurring separately.

It is also important to note the city in the game is by no means the only outbreak site, though the player and the city's denizens do not necessarily know that. Isolated as they are, they may get that impression and feel that way, but it is a nationwide problem. Much of their forces were lost at the moment of outbreak because the bases happened to be within activated bubbles. As such, the remaining military's ability to respond and just how much resources they can and will throw at this one site is much less than all they've got left.

Overall, this is also quite a sizable project and not the sort of thing you want to think about doing during your early projects. I'd strongly suggest you focus on making a basic critter or two, a basic NPC or some events for an area in need of some fleshing out. You'll want to start by getting a handle on coding in Inform through some less ambitious projects. While it's not that hard to pick up, there's a lot of little intricacies you'll need to pick up. Trust me, a big project like this is going to require a lot of experience behind it and the other devs are simply too busy to monitor numerous big projects from new devs on top of that. We can help, spec-check and provide info on how to implement certain ideas, but taking on something like this will require a lot more than that, especially if you face it too early. If you want to make it happen, work yourself up to it and you'll have a much better chance at success and it will also be a much better final product for it.

Lady in White:
As well, who is this 'lady in white' you're referring to. I'm not sure what event or NPC you're talking about, so I can't really give much feedback on her.

Chastity Critters:
The critters themselves sound interesting, though I expect some will find them frustrating thanks to the chastity belt restricting the possible fun with the hunting class, especially when they've defeated them. This isn't a deal-breaker, but it'll require some careful coding and wording. As long as there's a good degree of fun to be had with them, it shouldn't be too bad. I'm sure some people will pipe up from time to time asking for a means to remove the chastity device so they can get fucked by them, but if there's plenty of other good stuff for player loss/victory, it won't be too bad.

Locking away the player in any form of chastity device for long-term would be prohibitively difficult. You are asking for every single scene in the game which might contain sex or refer to the player's genitals in any way to be altered, usually extensively. No amount of Inform magic will get around this. And before anyone suggeest it, even forcibly changing a player's gender to neuter to represent being locked up would result in loads of conflicts and would come into conflict with any scenes, feats, items, etc that change a player's gender or adjust their genital size values. Also, some player's equipment would require quite the mighty chastity belt to contain it. :) I expect most players would find this more annoying than kinky-fun, as the game's largely about transformation and having sex - and this would restrict the TG portion of the former and cut almost all of the latter. Chastity belting the player beyond the length of the current scene cannot be done and would have to be kept only during the realm of the succumb ending.

Discussion:
- Multiplayer and Single-Player take place in the same world. Mulitplayer is now a few years in the future from the events of SP and advancing in real time. Single-Player represents events happening in what is now the history from Multiplayer's perspective. They occur in different cities, but both occur in SoCal and some NPCs and critters are common to both. While not everything in Single-Player adheres to the rules and regulations of Multiplayer and some fudging is allowed, majour deviations from the timeline or Nuku's rules on how the infection works and other stuff are to be avoided. Some of the stuff you see in the game already has been grandfathered in because they were written before Nuku'd provided better insight into how things work, but that's no excuse for not following the rules now.

- I'm not quite sure what you mean or want with a 'temporary area' for use during the finale with the Hunter. If it's all to take place within one 'scene' and the player doesn't actually have to input actions beyond picking options, there is no need to build a location. If it's going to be more of a 'The Deadliest Game' scenario with multiple rooms to move through and the player having command access, then yes you'll want a location for that, but that also hugely complicates your project even further.

Future Plans:
- Ambient Events: Please read this thread and keep the points it raises in mind. We have a lot of events in the game already and many areas have enough or even too many as it stands.
- Odd/underrepresented critters: This'll be nice. Variety's always good. What sort of things did you have in mind?
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Re: The great Lone Wanderer's idea and question Megathread

Postby Wahn » Tue Aug 19, 2014 10:03 pm

On the event front, maybe expanding on some of the older ones might be a valid option? There are some that might deserve a going-over for improvements, while others could support addittional stages added on to them.

As for a temporary location... you might not need one, if you embed the action in an event... but nevertheless, setting up some rooms and simply not connecting them to the rest of the game except through events should be pretty simple to do.

@Stripes: Maybe a short canon bible might be in order. I mean... I have played the multiplayer and still only know some stuff by hearsay. People who never visited the MUD will have no idea about a lot of this stuff. What definite commandments do we have from Nuku anyways? I know of only two:
1) There are no aliens.
Exception: ...but there are people who think they are aliens.
2) Nanites to not make animals intelligent. No mental uplifting.
Exception (?): Magic might do the trick?
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Re: The great Lone Wanderer's idea and question Megathread

Postby Xenophiliac » Tue Aug 19, 2014 10:46 pm

@Stripes: Maybe a short canon bible might be in order. I mean... I have played the multiplayer and still only know some stuff by hearsay. People who never visited the MUD will have no idea about a lot of this stuff. What definite commandments do we have from Nuku anyways? I know of only two:
1) There are no aliens.
Exception: ...but there are people who think they are aliens.
2) Nanites to not make animals intelligent. No mental uplifting.
Exception (?): Magic might do the trick?


That would be really nice to see. I've never entered the multiplayer, so the only lore I have firsthand knowledge of is off the forums and from ingame. It'd be sweet to have an all-encompassing lore book to reference when I have no idea what's going on.
Man ideas are weird.
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Re: The great Lone Wanderer's idea and question Megathread

Postby nukuv » Fri Aug 22, 2014 5:56 pm

Animals were not affected by the nanites. They were made for peoples. There are no aliens, but there are crazy supernatural things(like the tanuki).
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Re: The great Lone Wanderer's idea and question Megathread

Postby AnOne » Sat Aug 23, 2014 10:29 am

Lone Wanderer wrote:He is an experimental super soldier of the military,
I don't think this will work, if only because according to Nuku pretty much nobody except the programmers of the Bubbles (who, depending on the time of day you ask him, were either Chinese Spies or "Talented but Poor Programmers") had any idea what the nanites did. RSX knew enough to know those working on the project or in contact with them would want to be treated in case something went wrong (surprise: it did!), but even that was about the extent of their knowledge. As such, unless it was an unrelated-to-nanites super soldier project, probably hard to justify. Alternatively you could have them be the product of remaining military scientists scrambling to figure something out after the outbreak (like that one certified genius on Campus who learned how to shape his own nanites into a desired shape), but that may cause some complications with other Military thematics in the works.

Lone Wanderer wrote:made to combat everything which isn't human.
Also as a note, unless you went with the "post-outbreak project" schtick, this would make little sense as to the best of our knowledge it was only the Spies / TbP Programmers who specifically coded with the intent of making people into the sort of ferals roaming Fairhaven today, the main project more focused on material applications (ex: Laser Pistol in Multiplayer) or features like the improved healing and reduced aging. "Combat everything that isn't human" seems more like something another Bubble programmer might make (again, assuming this was pre-Outbreak) after catching a glimpse of what's on the other programmers' computers and realizing "Uh oh they're going to make things bad for a lot of people".

Lone Wanderer wrote:The Hunter came into existence by modifying a soldier with a new type of nanobots
I'd argue against this since the two existing varieties of nanites ("plain" and "mako") are probably good enough to resolve any differences. Why are these nanites more dominant than those in average ferals? Someone probably tweaked a little mako nanites in to supercharge 'em.

Lone Wanderer wrote:The Hunter got shaped into a humanoid reptile. You don't get to see much of his actual skin, since he's wearing armour all over his body. The armour is segmented and has a futuristic look to it. He was also given a special rifle by the military. That gun fires bullets imbued with a new generation of nanites. What I didn't mention before is, that the new generation of nanites actively seeks to destroy the older ones. In other words, the rifle is able to kill infected just for the nanite injection they get.

Reason why the military decided to develop that rifle was that the military has troubles killing infected with their superhuman regeneration.
This is a lot of R&D being done in just a few weeks, especially considering the immediate chaos. Are they intended to be a late-game / -day encounter, or one you can meet early on?

Lone Wanderer wrote:The Hunter is what I would call an experimental character. There haven't really been many characters who you would consider an antagonist or otherwise malevolent characters yet.
I'm not entirely sure why you've classified them as malevolent after describing their background as such? I mean, it doesn't take much to justify reasons someone might go around beating up the average mutants from Fairhaven, and "is trying to beat you up / hurt you too" isn't especially malevolent compared to, well, most every encounter in the game.

TigerStripes wrote:As such, the remaining military's ability to respond and just how much resources they can and will throw at this one site is much less than all they've got left.
So far, anyways. Judging by the fact that Matt radios in for more time, you only temporarily repel them by launching globs of infected material at forward scouting camps, and so-on, my assumption has been something along the lines of the mainland military remnants slowly but steadily going town-by-town on a path towards New York City (the place Nuku said most of the Single Player NPCs are evacuated to, its inhabitants having fought of the automaton-based mutant constructs and the city now something of a fortress) picking up refugees and resupplying along the way. Does that sound about right?
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