01 Nov ... more silly ideas.
This is more of an idea for a "fake" tutorial ...
It would be in several parts, and give me some
practice at doing dialogs, cut scenes and so on ...
Basically, its just a farce on dragon training ...

Tut01 - Introducing yourself to your new dragon.
You walk up to the dragon and it eats you :)

Tut02 - Feeding your dragon.
Dragons like to eat sheep. So, you walk up to a sheep,
bring it over to your dragon, you and the sheep get
fried with fire and then ate ....
Dragons like toasted sheep :)

Tut03 - Housebreaking your dragon.
The dragon sits on the house, breaking it.
You walk up to the dragon and smack it on the nose
"Bad Dragon", then it eats you.

Tut04 - Teatching your dragon tricks.
You walk to the dragon "Roll Over" and the dragon
rolls over you crushing you.

yes, eventually, you get to flying lessons and such.
Not that those are hard or anything. The landing
and take-offs are tricky and of course the combat
training ... Maybe have this as a "secrete" level
for players to find after they have "captured" a
dragon.
***********************************************************
Your idea to change from a room full of wizards, to the inn
shows lots of story options. The INN, such as it is, is just
a test platform for me to test out collision data and play with
some scripts until I get the details worked out ...

Anyway, I had this "vision" the other day on some interesting
story ideas .... maybe more of a back story, as it really has
no direct bearing on the overal plot, but does provide for
some really awsome .... "what the fuck was that?" problems ....


Picture this ...

opening scene:
Lots of blackness (blank-ish screen mostly)
a few scattered lighting thingys moving about the screen

Voice over:
In the biginning, there was me ....
Then, there was you ...

The lighting forms a ball of lightning ...

Voice over continues ...
So tell me your story 


The Game Begins ....
The character wakes up in the room (inn or magicians ... no dif)

************************************************************

the real story, that NOBODY MUST TALK ABOUT ...
The player is a Time Lord, like in DR. Who.
He has come to this island to battle another Time Lord.
But.... important, he has forgotten he is a Time Lord :)
Possibly from a previous battle with this lord.

In the final battle against the Time Lord, the player must
actually loose. Not a big deal to accomplish actually, but
at the same time, players like to win. This cunundrum is handled
because Time Lords exist outside of time. Here are some examples
of the "WTF" problems a player will encounter ...

1 - Most players will die repeatedly trying solve a problem
or trying to kill a creature. There will be multiple game saves ...
What if the saves were played out of sequence? More on that in a minute.
Whenever a players saves the game, the ligntning sequence goes again.
Sometimes, when a player replays a problem spot, a voice-over
comes on saying "explain that part to me once more ...."
During early parts of the game, players may become used to such
nonscense .... but wait, there's more :)

2 - First Major WTFWT:
during a period when there is nothing happening, and after a few saves,
the voice over come on saying "Shouldn't you have been taking this
time to prepare more for things to come?" If the player should answer
with anything other than "No, this is how it happened", the
lightning ball forms around the player, the world fades, the
final battle starts .....
The player dies quickly of course ...
more lightning ...
voice over "You see, you were not ready for things to come."
player returns to where nothing was happening.

3 - Second major WTF
After a very complicated battle with many game saves ....
Lightning ball ....
Voice Over "So, explain how you did that again ?"
the Player returns to initial start of the battle ....
NOTE: player can skip this if he
1 - saved a spot a at the end of the battle,
2 - When sent to the start , player reloads last save ...
3 - If player does this,
Voice Over "Maybe another time then ..."

4 - Final battle with other time lord.
By this time, hopefully the player understands that
he can exist outside of game time. The game saves
are actually part of the game. The other Time Lord
can do the same thing. The player should encounter
the time lord several times during the game. Not
all conflicts are violent. Bear in mind the player
does not know why he is here, and neither does
the other time lord. So, maybe they meet just in
passing, or maybe as hunting partners, or as traders.
But, at some point, they become rivals for something.
Maybe the player witnesses the Time Lord doing
something that keeps the people on the island as his
slaves or something .... (Like in DR Who)

If the player should defeat the time lord in the final
battle, Lightning Ball --- World Fades ---
Previous encounter with the time lord begins,
with hostilities this time .... If player wins again,
Go to previous encounter ... and so on,
If other wins, player can opt to reload game from any
point as normal, but additions save points are listed
showing other encounters with the lord.

After about 6 or more battles (won or lost, doesn't matter)
Lightning again, world fades ...
2 balls of lightning this time ... other lord in one ...
Voice Over ..."That was an interesting story. I think the rest
is rather dull, but maybe you can tell me the rest later ..."
World slowly returns ,
The player is inside a cathedral
The ball holding the player vanishes leaving the player
in the center of the room, facing a large book case.
The second ball, gets smaller, then fades,
the small statue of the other time lord is placed
on a shelf with many others .....

game continue? message prompts user.
If player chooses to continue, no other interuptions
will happen. The game is over, just the player is returned
to open-ended game play. Whatever bad thing the other
lord did, is undone it seems.

**************************************************************
I want to maintain open game play, so the player never
really has to fight the other Time Lord, unless he wants to.
For example, the player may find some artifact, but before
claiming it, the other time lord steals it and gets away ....
Now they are adversaries, but maybe not mortal enemies.
Or maybe he hires a guide to "help" you, and this "guide"
steals the best artifacts and gives them to the time lord.
Only, the player finds out about this later ....
**************************************************************
other ideas ...
I just learned how to make movies from screen shots.
For practice next week, I'll take a few shots of some
animated creatures and add some backgroud music and sounds
and upload that somewhere. I want to see if it will play
directly from a webpage or if it requires a download.

I was wanting to see if I can do an animated web page.
A contact person here (Phil, my land lord) is a professional
web consultant. He doesn't actually make web pages, he has
employees that do that; he supervises the big issues like
marketing research, monitoring search engines, and such.
He says, to get a web page into the top ten spot for a
product requires various things ...
1 - content ( what he comes up with )
2 - links from other sites not connected to your site
3 - and of course, your meta tags ... ( what he supervises )
4 - and the site must be actively updated.( what his staff does )
5 - time.

So, if we had game related movies such as animations of creatures,
animated screen shots , maybe show a few special effects , that
would serve as lots of content. Links could show up by placing links
in our signatures that we use in discussion forums ....
Easy marketing strategy. Meta tags ... not at all sure on that one.
I don't even know the game name to use. I called it ArchonRPG
just because I want to have a FPS level where you can change
creatures during the fight with others ... But, overall,
the game play is very open. The player can do anything. As for 
continous updates, that is the easy part for us. We just need
an actual site that is easy to access. 

I want such a site to go "live" in November at the latest. 
Sence my internet access is sorta limited to a few hours on
saturdays, most of the website work will fall on either you,
or someone I hire here. Ideally, I can handle the uploads to
the site, but, if we have problems, I may need to upload to
my yahoo site, have you download it from there, and re-upload
to the correct site.

As to actual layout .... Well, I am no good at html code. but,
I was thinking of something like the dungeon keeper site ...
www.dungeonkeeper2.com
or maybe like the FPSC website
www.firstpersonchootercreator.com ?
if that's not it, you can find it at ...
www.darkbasic.com
and there should be a link to it somewhere from there.
They have movies on how to create levels with it and so on.
Also, several demos and games created using it.
Be warned the minimum system specs for FPSC are high!!!
256MB 3D card minimum with shader support for 2.0 or newer(3.0 recommended).
And the PC spec .... P4+ running 2Ghz or faster 

My specs: 16MB card, 1.2G celeron .... not a chance at FPSC.
But, they have a nice website, but then they have lots of money too.

If you can't come up with a layout or even a good name or webdomain
(they really need to be the same for a comercial venture), no prob.
I'll see if Philip can hire me someone to design one. As web designers
here get paid $4 per day if they are excellant ... that may be the
best way. Also, we need a live website before the game is finished,
but not too soon, because #5. For our site to hit the top ten spot,
we need to be live for a few months. 

So, I think in november, I should
have a simple demo level AKA Duel and some movies available for download.
I would also like to have my Archon Level also available plus
a simple walking around demo (tutorial ?) to show off what can be done.
I'm thinking that one of the best selling points with this game will
be the vast editing options. From a script, you can edit the map,
edit any creature, change sounds, and many other things ...
This works already :) So, we are pretty much down to just writing
some scripts, and creating the media to use in the game ....


