"If you do go with the temple idea, I reccomend you deeply Native American cultures (at least ones that built temples) before doing too much. That could help with the immersion, and may provide further inspiration."

I think you mean Meso-American cultures and not Native American, since the Native americans didn''t build elborate temples, they where a mainly nomadic tribes.
The Meso-Americans build large elborate stone settlements and had faily advanced technology.

As for basing on it a meso-american culture I would go with Maya, but thats just a personal opion they where rather an interesting civilization. They had writing, roads, astronomy, advanced mathmatics as well as havily religous society that involed ritual scarfice. They also built pyramids...

Interesting side not the inca had no written languge instead they had a system of record keeping that involded tieing diffrent kinds of knots in diffrent postion on a piece of rope. Unfortunatly scientist have yet to find a means to translate them.

As far as back story that should be fairly easy to determine since there are lots of possiblites.

How about this:
The box is an interactive record, left by species of aliens who brought civilization to the earth eons ago. Each cube represents a diffrent civilization that the aliens guided. Only by unraveling the aliens invloement in each civilization and uncovering there grand design can you escape the hypercube.



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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

I wasn''t aware there was a distinction. That''s the fun of Politically Correct terminology I guess...

Native americans refers to the peoples living in north america.
While Meso americans lived in southern and central america.

They are significantly diffrent both in culture and the regions in which they inhabited.



-----------------------------------------------------
Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

My thought: Parallel plots, one in nonlinear-time hyperspace and the other in the traditional linear-time real world. How it works:

We can have two parallel storylines, of which only one is the player aware. One takes place within the protagonist''s own head, in this hypercube. He can travel through time because he is essentially moving through memories - but memories viewed through the lens of insanity. The goal is to recapture sanity.

The parallel storyline takes place in the invisible real world, in which time marches on linearly. Actions taken by the player in the hypercube translate into actions in the real world. They took place in the real world in the order in which the player performed them. He could have been within his head inside a recent past while performing action A and a more distant past while performing action B, but in the ''real world'' action A nevertheless precedes action B.

Since the player''s warped perception of time differs from ''real-world'' time, the pattern of perceived causes and effects that he has built in this psychological world is different from the actual causes and effects of those same events, because in reality they occurred in a different order.

Once the player somehow returns to reality (at the very end of the game; this is victory), the true nature of what he has been doing is revealed to him.

That''s it for the basic concept. Now a few details, most of which work even without the parallel-plots idea:

The "sky" could perhaps give the character a way to determine what mental time he is in by using a simple dawn-noon-dusk-night metaphor.

Re the phone: The protagonist believes that he is talking to Chinese interrogators (or, if you want to go with the Stargate theme instead, Aliens) over the phone when he is really talking to himself, or to some other person central to the plot in the real world (his not-really-dead wife?).

Hope this idea was interesting.

actually, I have not decided to completely separate the rooms with walls... after all, the skybox would have no walls at all. I think it wouldnt be too hard to construct the hypercube with less and less walls... it would just be more and more confusing for the player, who may see the same room from 3 different angles simultaneously.

Actually, TerranFury, the people on the other end of the phone should be the voices in his head. The hypercube is just his now insane mind''s way of reorganising things. Throught the game you do not know you are insane though. Something has to happen at the end of the game which causes you to realise that you are insane.

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I am the master of stories.....
If only I could just write them down...

the more I think about it, the less I like the theme of insanity... by its nature, the hypercube is a highly ordered structure.

I have an idea for one of the puzzles that I don't think is stolen from any of the myst games, although its just a reincarnation of an old logic puzzle. You have some sort of very ornate fountain, with different points that fill with water. By opening and closing certain gates, you could be required to fill one of the pools to exactly a certain level. If you overfill it, it triggers a sensor that drains all of the water and you have to start over.

The control mechanism could be something like follows: The tub is on a balance, and the water in it pushes the balance down, forcing a door open. But there is also a floating bobber that when raised above a certain point will flush in the exact same manner that a toilet does.

[edited by - origamiman64 on December 6, 2003 4:37:16 PM]

That''s a good idea, and it could fit with a meso-american look/feel too.

So, how big will this hypercube be? Having seen "Cube" the movie, and bits of "Hypercube" its sequel, I have an inclination to think of it as consisting of rooms of that size (about ten yards across). But in thinking about it more, and imagining the inside/outside cubes as "above" and "below" the six "main" cubes, I think it might even work as a large, even a vast landscape. It could be plunked in the middle of a desert or something (they have those in mesoamerica, right? Maybe a Jungle would be better), and on such a scale that it would just seem like curiously looping terrain unless you got within a few hundred feet of one of the vertices. The "inside" cube could be where the sun is, and the "outside" cube could be a network of tunnels or something underground, connected by structures throughout the other six cubic sides (maybe a structure at each vertex of the outside cube?).

This would even jive with the theme idea, since each cube could have a "theme environment", so you'd have a desert cube, a jungle cube, a mountain cube, an ocean cube or two, etc etc.

And who says it has to be a geometrically perfect hypercube? How about a hyper-rectangular-prism? That way, the six "surface" cubes could be broad and shallow, while the upper and lower cubes could be broad and deep. Like a squashed cube's 2D surfaces.

EDIT: Or even--get this--a hyperCYLINDER. It could coincide with our universe on one vertical line of its circumference, making for a 2D portal, but there would be no edges as you walked around its perimeter. If the "sun" was dead center in the top circle (sphere, really, but it's easier to imagine it in 2D-3D than in 3D-4D) it would always seem to be directly overhead, and if you "dug" into the bottom circle you'd eventually come out on the opposite side of the cylinder, but upside down. It would feel like being on a very, very small planet with a sun that chases you. It doesn't allow for any of the fun-filled geometrical gimmicks that a purely interior hypercube doesn, but it would be neat, for sure.

[edited by - Iron Chef Carnage on December 7, 2003 1:39:58 AM]

Giving more thought to the "portal" idea, I think it would be most feasible to have one of the hypercube''s faces coincide with the surface of reality. That way, the cubic "window" would just be about a hundred acres of wilderness, and instead of a bizarre portal, it would just be an area of the jungle/desert/mountains/ocean that is eight times as big as logic and cartography says it should be, and changes depending on the direction in which you approach it. If you make it big enough, and in an unmapped and largely inaccessible area, it could go unnoticed for thousands of years. Even satellite imagery would have a hard time detecting it, since the satellite would always see through the top "window" of the portal, and so would never see the "sides" of the portal.

I''m reminded of Niel Gaiman''s story called "Soft Places", which appears in one of the Sandman books. It''s about the unexplored regions of the world, and how being lost in an uncharted region is more than just not knowing where you are, it has to do with not being anywhere. It''s a super story, though it ony hints at the metaphysical anomalies that make it work, but it''s still a good reference point.