Castle Paradox

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Well. I guess it's time to find out what's wrong with my story. Apologies for it's length. I've been toying with it on and off for something like a year.

The game is called "Eclipse". Currently

The protagonist is a young woman named Audrey Cessair, who's just coming off her freshman year at Caillech Academy, studying to be a mage. Sadly, she's not really doing that well in classes, and decides to spend the summer with a band of adventurers, in order to be out of the house and far away when her parents get her report card. She enlists her friend, Anna Fiontan, to come with her.

At the adventurer's guild, they meet one of Audrey's classmates, Rinesse Heartily. Though Rinesse and Audrey strongly dislike each other (Rinesse because Audrey's adopted, poorer, not a noble, and a crappy spellcaster who shames them all. Audrey because Rinesse is a bitch), she joins the group to get through the Dungeon of Trials, which is basically a few tutorial battles and an easy boss. Once inside, however, Rinesse can not resist playing up her own talents in comparison to Audrey's. Audrey tells Rinesse to shut up, and duel ensues, which Rinesse wins with ease.

Unable to get a job after that embarrassment, Audrey gets a drink while Anna looks for work. She sees a sexy man rubbing oil on his bare chest to sanitize a wound, and follows him around a bit. The man, Doran Dooley, also has trouble getting work, because he is a Moonchild, and has evil powers (represented in-battle by him draining party member's stats to power his attacks), but eventually finds employment with a foreigner who doesn't seem to know what a Moonchild is. Anna quickly signs up as well, and rushes to tell Audrey, who is less than pleased at not being consulted.

Audrey is even less pleased when she discovers the mission to to escort the foreigner, a Triexcomian named Tripweather, to the bottom of the Dungeons of Agony, in the middle of the Lake of Sorrow, right past the Forest of Doom on Mount Terror, while protecting him from the thieves guild, which wishes to assassinate him. Audrey wants to quit, but the danger of the mission appeals to Anna's sense of adventure, and Anna eventually convinces Audrey to go along. Soon after, the fifth and final member member of the group a cleric named Nevin Gallagher, joins up.

After stocking up, they set off to the Forest of Doom, which turns out to be somewhat over-hyped, as Anna predicted. Character's are developed as they camp. Doran smolders with generic rage, but a lot of it is him just trying to be cool. Nevin wants to help women by protecting them, an idea Anna finds condescending. Tripweather is unused to Breenan traditions, and seems to have difficulty understanding that monsters can actually hurt him (he's not a party member). Trip eventually gets to close to a killer monster, and a boss is fought. Trip seems legitimately surprised that it hurts him, explaining that he'd always thought the monsters were illusions, as they were in Triexcomy.

They climb the Mount Terror, and sleep at an inn there. At dawn, they are awoken by a thunderous "CRACK", to Trip's surprise. Nevin explains that every night, the moon god attempts to seduce the sun goddess, and every night, she rebuffs him with a rock. Hence "crack of dawn". He seems intrigued, and the religious backstory of the world is explained to him. In italics: (This will probably be playable)

A long time ago, not quite in the beginning, all things were under the dominion of the moon. The moon was a tyrant, and enslaved the race of men. For eons, the men lived beneath the earth, mining silver to build the moon a mighty palace, only venturing to the surface when the moon slept and there was darkness.

The moon warned the humans, however, that if they ever entered the mine on the hill, they would be destroyed in holy fire, and the moon would withhold the rain to kill the humans.

One night, as the moon readied its bedchamber, a miner named Amemet creeped through the forest to the hill in which the forbidden mine lay, for the hare had told him of great treasure within.

Amemet ventured into the mine on the hill, and made his way down to the deepest depths. There he found a wall made out of gold, which frightened him, for he had never seen gold before, and thought it to be fire. He ran out of the mine, but in his panic went home through the valley and not the forest. The moon saw this, and was moved to anger. He slammed shut the windows of heaven, trapping the rain, and chained Amemet to a great stone facing the mine on the hill, so that Amemet could see that which caused his destruction. As the moon readied his fiery spear, the hare was filled with shame and grief at the misery his tongue had caused mankind.

The hare spoke to the moon, and told it of a great game that the rabbits would hold in His honor: a fight between the strongest warriors in the hare clan. The Moon was intrigued, and decided to put off the holy fire until later.

While the moon was distracted, the rat freed Amemet from his chains, on the condition of having a fair share of the treasure in the mine. Amemet agreed, and the two went again to the golden wall. This time, Amemet was not afraid, knowing that what lay behind the wall could not be worse than the moon's fury. When Amemet touched the wall, it shone brilliant, and disappeared. Behind it lay a woman so beautiful than Amemet caught only a glipse before being blinded. The woman kissed Amemet on the cheek, and flew out of the mine into the heaven.

The men on the earth were startled by the light of the woman's beauty, which filled the whole world. Even the cold heart of the moon was melted, and He lost all interest in the hare's duel, and ran into the arms of this woman.

Who hit Him over the head with a stone of gold taken from the mine.

The Moon fell from the sky, and the woman became the new ruler. But the hare who had risked the moon's ire had been killed in the fight. When the woman learned from the men how she had been freed, she took the hare's soul, and Amemet, and took them with her into the heavens where they live among the stars. She even took the rat, but his share of the treasure was only to occasionally streak across the sky with his children.

The men of the world rejoiced, for the woman was a much kinda ruler than the Moon had been. She made the earth warm and bright, threw open the windows of heaven, and drove away the more vicious monsters that roamed the world. In further gratitude for her emancipators, she named herself Ameter, from the Ame in Amemet and the ter in Tetheter, which is the word for Hare in the language of Kaikoura.

But after some time had passed, the Moon returned, and Ameter fled from the sky. The moon fumed, and raised new monsters of the shadows, but soon calmed and pined again for Ameter's beauty. Ameter slowly rose again into the heavens, and again the Moon tried to seduce her, and once more Amemet struck him down, for she would not lie with him whenever he wanted.

Such as it is every morning, the moon attempts to seduce Ameter, the sun, and fails. Sometimes, when the Moon is starting to get wise to Ameter's game, she takes him, and we call it an eclipse. But the moon is a slow learner, and that happens but once or twice a year, like most married couples. To keep the moon from discovering her rule, Ameter left half the world, Breena, shaped to the moon's will, but kept the other half, Kaikoura, for herself. She also made the clouds to cover the windows of heaven, so that that moon would never know they were opened.

In the world below, alternating between light and darkness, the humans were able to build a life for themselves, and they forever held sacred the hare that had given its life to save them, and slightly less sacred the rat that had done it for money.

Trip is excited by this, and wants to change plans and get his autograph signed by the gods. The party is juuuuust on the brink of talking him out of this, when Nevin mentions a rift to The Burrow, home of Tetheter, in his home city of Naomh.

Despite Nevin's protests that The Burrow can not be entered by humans, Trip is adamant on going. Audrey kind of wants to go too, because she's getting sick of the adventure, and wants to be in a city to celebrate the upcoming Bell Day, a religious festival of games and silence. Doran will do what Trip wants, and Nevin and Anna are outvoted.

In Naomh, they come accross a school that was the target of an attack by the Sunslayers, a fanatical group of moon-worshippers that have been committing acts of terror across the country. Trip decides to wait until after Bell Day to see The Burrow, because he's curious. Bell Day is basically a carnival, except you're not allowed to speak. Minigames are had by all, and Anna tries to be alone with Doran for a while. As the party is distracted, Trip is grabbed by a kidnapper, which is only noticed by Audrey, who calls out for him and runs after him.

......




It goes on. Writing it down like this, I wonder if I'm making a story too big for me to make. I realize a lot of these paragraphs are basically a few dozen text boxes popping up (I'd be surprised if all that italics stuff comprised more than 20 minutes of gametime), but I feel this is a solid 3 hours of gameplay. I'm looking at a 10-15 hour game, I think. It really depends on how long I make those dungeons. I'm kind of hoping to get collaborators, as well, but I figure I'll need to have at least a pretty sweet demo out before that's even a possibility.

I've scaled down a lot of the planned story to try and make it more reasonable (there was, originally, time travel elements here. The story was written as a webcomic, and imported into a game script. It still has a wide, epic scale that I'm not entirely sure is reasonable, though a lot of it can and will be cut). Anyway, enough self-flagellation for now. The two of you who managed to actually read that. Thoughts?

[Moogle1]

[Joe Man]

Man, you took the name of the game I designed years ago before I scrapped it, realizing it was absolute crap.
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"Everyone has 200,000 bad drawings in them, the sooner you get them out the better."
~Charles Martin Jones

Last edited by Joe Man on Fri Dec 13, 1957 1:21 am; edited 2,892 time in total

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[Moogle1]

I hope you realize my reaction is due to the name being almost identical to "Rinoa Heartilly," the love interest in FF8. Anything that departs from that is an improvement.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

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[King Sasuke]

Sounds good.
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Sasuke the Ninja.How cool am I!