The Story- 3/11/2020 (SP 2 Understand storytelling concepts)
I have been tasked with writing the story for this game, here is the first finished draft that I came up with. As of the 6th November, we will be changing the story slightly to make the game shorter and to fit with the time frame we have.
Opening act:
- The player arrives at a road block with a small shelter next to it, controlling the barrier. There appears to be the sound of static and someone speaking unintelligible gibberish, intriguing the character to go inside.
- On the inside, the player finds a radio. Upon interacting with the radio, a person begins to talk to the player: The person explains swiftly that they are in dire need of help and short of time, before ordering the player to head further up the path.
- On the path there are scenes of obvious tussles, fights, past events. On the ground you find a corpse, in the hand of the corpse is a pistol.
Reaching the play area:
- Upon reaching the play area, there is a large array of bunkers as well as bandits occupying them. The person over the radio warns you of these bandits, and tells you to sneak around them or fight if necessary.
- After dealing with the bandits, the person then gives the instruction to find the rest of their team and try to find clues as to what happened to them, as well as find ‘a way down’ and to check the bunkers and surrounding areas.
- The radio spokesperson is very cryptic in their messaging, leaving room to speculate to what happened.
What is there to find:
- note declaring a discovery and a return to base, where things went wrong, death.
- note declaring ‘the run in’: government agents surface and kill a large majority of the expeditionary’s and even take three of them ‘below’, and how the expedition team disabled the power so they cannot come up to surface again, but at the cost of three team members.
- dead soldier with an audio log which he grabbed from the body of an expeditionary. This audio log declares that they originally captured this soldier and held him hostage, before he broke free and began to kill what remained of the last few expeditionary’s, as well as the code for the bunker.
how to enter the bunker:
- Head to the power house, find the corpse note with the code on it to unlock the power switch.
- Yank the lever= power restored.
- Head to the back of the angel, one of the notes mentioned ‘the rabbit hole’, look for a hole in the ground to find the sewer drain cover.
- Upon entry of the sewer, there is a door and keypad. When entering the code of the door, the elevator is unlocked and the player can go down into the base.
radio chatter:
- The radio person will still be talking to you throughout these events, explaining that they were one of the ones to get taken under, and they barely escaped death.
- Throughout gameplay they will also annotate the player’s actions with dialogue after audio logs or paper is found.
down in the bunker:
- The agents down in the bunker have powerful weapons and armour, it is best to avoid them, according to the captive. The captive then tasks you with finding a map of the base, most likely located on an agent.
- After discovery of the new map, the player is instructed to go to a certain part (TO BE DETERMINED) of the base and find the corpse of Abbie. Abbie was allegedly the person who decided to take it upon themselves to try and gather evidence of any suspicious activity in that area, when she was captured her camera was taken with her before she was brutally gunned down.
- Abbie’s body has been moved to the crematorium, two scientist-like figures will be there and her camera on the table. Grab the camera and gather evidence of what is going on down here.
- After taking photos, you stumble across the lab. In the lab is the schematics for the very thing the radio person was looking for, in her words; proof that they’re trying to make riot control a weapon of mass destruction and less ‘control’, more power.
- After grabbing the schematics you are tasked with finding the radio person, in which they then say, as you travel the corridors, they have been found. Static can be heard from the other side, and the radio speaker is presumed dead. Before long, you reach the elevator only to realise that the button does not work.
- Before long, loud stomping sounds and mechanical whirring can be heard, as well as a red glowing light in the darkness.
The end.
6/11 Story changes:
The overall flow of the story will be staying the same– so there will still be a massive leadup to the reveal of the radio spokesperson who’s been helping you this whole time and free them only to find they are killed during your efforts, however parts will be cut out or changed to make development easier and the game overall shorter:
- Instead of finding corpses, all there will be is abandoned gear and tech, leaving room to speculate if the expedition team really IS all dead or not. The gun will be found in the back of a totalled car, and notes scattered within the bunkers and shelters scattered around the above ground map. Audio logs and some text will be found on terminals.
- Bunkers surrounding the angel will be LOCKED until the player restores power to the facility, this is to better hide some of the notes and keys to unlock the bunker underground.
- Abbie and her camera will be totally removed from the game, however she will still be known in the lore of the game as one of the ones captured, and will be mentioned in notes regarding the story.
- Crematorium and scientists have been cut.
- There will be NO map to find regarding the underground, you will have to traverse the facility without knowing where to go. This not only makes more sense but adds more challenge to the underground.
How we will implement my story into our game:
Above ground:
- Sheds
- paper scraps
- bunkers
- paper scraps
- terminal entries
- audio logs
- Powerhouse
- Notes
- Through the radio person’s dialogue
Underground:
- notes
- paper scraps
- terminal entries
- audio logs
- visual storytelling
- through items with no context placed around the base
- schematics
- main objective of the game
- explained through dialogue
8/11/2020 Properly reflecting how to make the story into game objectives:
Our game’s story will heavily rely on the radio speaker, notes, terminal entries and audio logs. To make the notes work, I have to properly reflect them in a story form, from two different angles: good guys and bad guys.
- Expeditionary Force
- Notes and terminal entries from topside and underground detail that the expeditionary force that once explored the angel and its exterior surroundings arrived a mere week before the player’s presence there.
- The force notes through topside data that they had heard of an old, wrecked military outpost at the base of the angel and were wanting to scavenge for materials. After a few days, they deem it a safe enough spot to set up camp perhaps for good.
- One night, one of the camp members disappears and no one knows where he went. The next morning, his body is found lying against a tree and he is buried later.
- Bizarre sounds are heard coming from the angel, like whirring and loud thuds, this leads to group suspicion of something down below.
- During the same night as the whirring sounds, the bandits attack, they slaughter many of the expeditionary’s and also shoot a mysterious armoured figure lurking in the distance. The next morning, after the wounded and dead are tended to, the corpse of a mysterious, armoured man in uniform is discovered lying in the field. No one knows where this mysterious figure has come from, however most believe it is from down below.
- A note is found on the body detailing schematics and a grand plan, which changes the group’s focus to get them to see what all the blood shed and secrecy is about.
- That afternoon, the group find a sewer drain which leads below the angel. They believe this to be the source of the mysterious noises, and so a group climb down. When they climb down, they are greeted with a strangely dry ground in the cylindrical sewer, and a metal door accompanied with a keypad. Coincidentally, one of the members had looted a code from the corpse that morning that may have correlation.
- Upon opening the door with the code, the first is shot dead suddenly before a group of agents come out yelling at them to step back, telling the group they are trespassing on government property and they must return topside immediately if they wish to keep their lives.
- After the encounter, the group returns and tells the others of what happened, before they all plan to storm the base in the morning. Unfortunately, during the night, the entirety of the force is held at gunpoint and one-by-one executed by the agents, demanding to know of the leaders. Abbie, Carl and Cameron give themselves up to save the group, and each are taken below ground.
- Bandits attack the agents and the group during the process, causing the agents to defend themselves as the group disbanded and fled as the bandits attacked.
- Below ground, the three captives manage to break free resulting in the deaths of Abbie and Carl. The radio spokesperson is the last one alive, and they learn of the plans for the schematics and try to get in contact with their fleeing team to no avail. This leads up to the beginning of the game.
- Agents
- A detail of the plan of stripping bases, glassworks, shipyards for scarce materials can be found in the HQ of the base.
- The agents underground were fully aware of the group’s presence above ground, using security cameras and scouts. Some of the entries from different soldiers even depict them as excited that something was finally happening and they were bored.
- High-ranking official thinks that luring them in slowly with each step may lend them vital information about where they can solve their metal and glass shortages, by looting settlements, shipyards and glassworks and claiming this to be a raid for ‘illegal activities’.
- The Commander of the security force gets rather worried about the recent bandit attacks, as the more deaths may mean less information to crack from prisoners. The other commanding officers assure him that their lives do not matter, but their information does, and just one prisoner can mean the location of the base
- Documented that one of the scouts did not return from RECON.
- Security camera management informs the commander that the wastelanders were attempting to access the base, in which he and a small task force go to investigate.
- Upon his return, the commander notes his regret over the senseless killing, reflecting he is human. Nonetheless, in a few hours they would resurface, round up the leaders and interrogate them
- The plan ends up being compromised, but the mission completed. The Commander sustained a severe, life threatening injury in the process. He notes that this may be his last log.
The First batch of notes on the expedition side will be following a guy named Alex, who documents the happenings of the adventure as they happen. Down in the bunker, the Agent Commander’s notes will be following him, his name is Harrison, and documents his story through the game world. A handful more down in the bunker will belong to an unnamed Corporal, science team members (side story) and Abbie, an escapee (side story).
Side stories:
Side stories will be to flesh out not only the story but the game world, and will most likely be introduced late in production as a bonus feature, as our main focus is getting a good MAIN story done and not to overpower ourselves.
Side stories would entail the Power Armour suit which the agents are wanting to mass produce, it is very powerful yet costly and resource hungry and is nowhere near a finished model, therefore its development would make for an interesting spin within the base.
Conversations with other outposts with other agents may be a cool concept as well, to make the player ponder about the other bases and where they may be, what their plans are.
Abbie’s will: Abbie is obviously one of the three captives and escapes just as the agents execute Carl. She gets split off from Cameron, and the looming thought of her discovery and death as she hides overpower her to write a note regarding her final words and if they will ever be heard.
10/11/2020 Implementation:
I have developed all of the notes I think we will need for the topside scene.
All but one of the notes are written by Alex, a man who cares deeply about his team and the people in it, and less about the mission and objective. He believes that staying around in the area will result in more deaths, and since people don’t really believe him he slowly becomes more deranged in his logs. From sounds within the angel, to a being he refers to as ‘the watcher’, he slowly begins to lose a grip on his sanity due to the events surrounding him.
I wanted the notes to have a scribbly, makeshift design about them, if it were too formal or well put together it would be unrealistic in the wasteland world we have created. This is also in effect to coincide with the more neater, advanced notes and objectives of the bunker below.
It is worth noting that Alex’s notes fail to mention what the team would make their primary objective after the first run in with the secret agent syndicate, this is because between night 5 and the final note the first run in takes place, in which they are chased topside and frantically prepare for an attack. During this run-in, Abbie, Cameron and Carl are taken hostages after they are identified as leaders of the group.
During their kidnapping, Abbie and Cameron break free after Carl fails to comply and is murdered, not before the interrogator could get a word in about ‘schematics’. This peaks Abbie’s interests and the two on-the-run stowaways begin to draw up a plan and get to the surface.
Abbie got to the surface and delivered the note to Alex up top, not before she was dragged away into the darkness by the agents and Alex attacked by bandits. Cameron infilrates the communications room and uses the tech to connect to a radio on the surface, later used to contact the player.
To implement this into the game, I have made these two notes:
The second note is to be pinned to a wall or door and is left by the bandits looming over the facility just after the expeditionary remnants leave. The power going off is thanks to Alex, which leaves you– the player, to reinstate it.
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