the story of Manus Lenoni

[overdhose]

Some day (hopefully) I'd like to bring this story alive, silly as it is. It's my own vision of what a dungeon keeper 3 could look like. I read the debate of story Vs Sandbox, here's a wild and time sinking idea : why not offer both? Like a portal that takes you to a story dimension... Again, you could even make it a part of the game, where you have to unlock the story mode somehow to start your own.

Once upon a time there was a purple hand called Manus Lenoni. Manus was purple and, in a world of badass dungeon keepers, made fun of a lot. However, Manus proved to become one of the leading keepers, with some strong pack leaders, enough so to become a threat to the legendary bullfrog hand. Manus was ultimately defeated by Bullfrog, but not completely. Just before the dungeon heart was destroyed, his magical tome managed to relocate the core, but almost completely drained it of it's power. Manus and his tome were trapped deep inside the earths crust and slowly awaited the day the core would gather enough energy again to start building a dungeon again and take revenge... And today the core is preparing to summon it's first minnion.

 

[Cervator]

Haha, that's a great little story

And yeah, I think via game modes we could do both. Like the "Tao" mode for some story-based stuff, free build, survival, DF, etc

 

[woodspeople]

See that was kinda my point with "vanilla is a flavor" - if "what everybody thinks is the game" is both the game (if you play it that way) and not the game (because it's a flavor that can be swapped out, if you care to) you get the best of both worlds. For example we were just looking at a game called "Towns" last night and while it looks fun, I don't want to do the part where the goblins lay seige to the town. Because you can't turn that part off - it's vanilla, but it's not a flavor - the whole game gets dropped off my list. That happens with so many games that would be really fun IF you could take out one stupid part (stupid only to me, but everyone has their own stupid). There was this game for the PS2 that had flying dragons and I was like wow, flying dragons, and you get to ride them! But in fact we had to kill like ten thousand really stupid orc things before we GOT to the flying dragons. Why should I, as a user of the game, not be able to check a button that says "not excited about the orcs, can I just fly the dragons please?" I ask you this.

 

[woodspeople]

Forgot to say, I like the story, if and only if it is not the only story.

 

[overdhose]

hehe I'm glad you like the setup, I wouldn't dream if making it the main story ark, I do hope to present you with a nice portal to it at some point though

 

[overdhose]

Manus Lenoni : The spirit system.

Having talked a little about the whole minion system etc now, I felt like talking a bit about a system I had planned for my whole Manus Lenoni story. While there still are some gaps in it, it's a mechanic I would have liked in the game if it ever got some shape. I don't know if it would fit in Terasology, but I'll still share the idea here. What happens to it is for the future.

If you read the introduction, you know Manus was defeated and only himself, his tome and a dungeon heart had survived. My idea was that Manus would start encountering "spirits" of his old servants / minions / commanders throughout the game, and, that there would be a pool of mindless minions etc joining him, but to "take control" of a minion, he would have had to "fuse" a spirit into a body. This is because I really enjoy games like jade cocoon and Persona, where you get to "breed" some companions, not unlike the whole pokemon frenzy. Just like I'm still waiting for dungeon keeper 3, I'm still waiting for Jade Cocoon 3.

It's usually a bad idea to mix and match to much elements together, as most of the game, this results in 2 unpolished games and resulting in a bad game. But I'm hard headed so I would try anyway. So, the idea behind the system was that fusing a spirit and a minion would result in a merge of stats / skills, and that depending on which type of minion you would merge a spirit with, the spirit in it would level up differently. Another idea was that depending on how well the spirit got used to it's "host", the more it would boost his skill, making for some tough decisions along the line of : do I fuse my spirit with this new mob I found which seems like a perfect match for it, or do I leave it merged as it is really boosting the current one decently and i need it.

It's something I never got to test out yet but has been stuck in my head for quite a while now, so I just wanted to check if anyone thinks the mechanic seems like anything remotely viable, and whether it might be something we might opt adopting in some form. The main reason behind the system was handling minion death. If a host would die, it's spirit would be released again, ready to be fused in a new host while preserving some skills etc, at some cost of course and an "adjustement period" to let the spirit adopt to it's new host. And yes, I do realize it would be a nightmare to balance out and might possibly make the game to "easy" at some point, and complete party wipes resetting you way back and prone to total defeat.

You can shoot the idea out of the water starting... now!

 

[Cervator]

I like it. But then that probably doesn't come as a surprise...

I had something somewhat similar in mind for equipment and structures - the "save something after destruction" anyway. For items many games just incrementally upgrade the stuff you get, leaving old stuff useless. Would be nice if you could infuse old stuff into new stuff to keep "something"

Likewise for structures you wouldn't want to leave players completely out of pocket if something they like gets blown up, especially if they're offline when it happens. Leave a ghostly imprint behind, like a blueprint, and make some limited options in interacting with / recreating it somewhat.

Spirits plus hosts might be more apt for a low-mob situation, while I see lots of little helpers running around the players estate doing things. But maybe if helpers die they can leave behind a spirit to diminish the loss somewhat, with the spirit then useful for something else like that.

Exploration as a concept hasn't been discussed a lot, but I could imagine the player with a small group of helpers along. I wonder if the mostly-sentient races with specific needs would be very applicable to the sort of "collect and breed creatures" gameplay tho. It could be its own thing eventually, maybe your sentient-type helpers could even themselves engage in breeding creatures.

So - nifty concept. If it makes you happy to work on it, go for it. We might need some more basic stuff more, but I bet there'd be some indirect benefits even working on a more distant feature

(It could indeed also mesh well with the multi-world approach, if one world was sort of like the Jade Cocoon world)

 

[overdhose]

Ow yeah certainly for later, and not something I see a need to create some base structure for, it should lend itself to easy integration regardless. Best to define basic creature structure in something solid first and then build from there I think.

Glad you seem to know the jade cocoon universe, it's one of those games I dust off once and while (together with my ps2) to play again, and that says a lot about a game.

 

[Cervator]

Sorry - I actually don't, I just rely on Wikipedia a lot, hehe

The setup seems familiar tho.