Quote: Original post by Estok

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
Currently proposed female magicals are Kitten, Frquency, and Mana - I think that Frequency and Mana are too similar. Shouldn't we have one female character who is fiery? That seems to be a type that appeals to many men...?

In the beginning of this thread I said that I want a character with double identity. Mana is such a character. Mana has a kind, compassionate, healing side, and a death and destruction side. Frequency has a self-withdrawn, exhausted side and a valorous, enegetic side.

I like double-identity characters, and I like Frequency in particular (that's pretty ironic, if I like your character when the other guys don't, lol). The only problem is that double identity characters would make way more sense as technos than as magicals. Magicals are supposed to be pretty blunt and straight-forward, a trait that can be seen in different ways in Skew, Lion, and Kitten.

Quote:

Quote: There's a task for 5MG and Estok: figure out what the type of love is for each of your characters.

I don't understand this task. I think I asked the same question before. What types are there to choose from? If you were to assign a type of love to Frequency what would you assign?

Argh I apologize, that's a typo! I meant to write "Onyxflame" instead of Estok there. Frequency's type of love, hmm... Well she is uncertain, looking for certainty, lost looking for a home, she wants someone to see her as unique for her personality, not her race and celebrity. How can we capture that in a key phrase... "Searching-for-an-Anchor Love", or just plain "Searching Love" is what I would say Frequency has.

Quote:

Quote: _Xenallure: A Puzzle of Hearts_ is not unusually long for a game title - look at these examples:

_Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh_
_Myst III: Exile: The Perfect Place to Plan Revenge_
_Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness_
_Harvest Moon: Back to Nature_
_Leisure Suit Larry: Love For Sail_

So Estok, why don't you submit some title ideas so we can see what kind of titles you like?

Titles that are part of a series are exempted. In addition, for the titles you chose, the subtitle phrases serve as a punchline or a catch phrase. This effect does not exist in "Xenallure: A puzzle of Hearts". For me an elaboration is redundant. For example, "Schlinder's List: The Jews he saved". Being extremely common doesn't necessarily mean that it is good.

I did a casual search and I think that most of the titles on this list have a cleaner and better stytle.

"A Puzzle of Hearts" is not in any way redundant to the concept of 'alien attractiveness', and it seems like a very good catch phrase to me. :P

Why pray tell should series be exempted? Our game might be the start of a series if it happened to be successful. Anyway, I guess what you think is 'clean' I think is 'too simple', and what I think is 'clever' you think is 'contrived'. The only title I liked on that list is _Goose, Egg, Badger_, which for our game would be something like _Time, Hearts, Aliens_... kinda lame.

Fortunately this is a simple issue to vote on - Everybody can suggest some titles or nominate a favorite from among those already suggested, and we can do a round of elimination voting to find out which is the most acceptable to everyone. How about we plan to vote on titles on friday - does that give you all enough time to come up with your own suggestions and pick a favorite?

Quote: Original post by Avatar God

Quote: Original post by Estok
Most of the time I clarify before I disagree. And for those I disagree I have reason to back them. Disagreement is inevitable in a discussion. I don't expect there to be no disagreement. For my own proposals, P24, I outright gave opportunity for us to disagree on. There are legitimate reasons to not only not interested in the character, but also to not support the development of the character.

Cool.

I suppose it would have been more helpful to give reasons for not liking P24, so here goes.

I'm not attracted to wind-surfers. And that about sums it up. Well, okay, I don't like her personality.

Regarding the timelines. There were other timelines out there, but I think 5MG was simply saying that we needed to define a timeline, and they needed to be made as seperate entries into the OPRL (though none of them were entered) and then replied to.

The idea of wind racing is in fact the biggest thing I hate about things related to Frequency. I do not relatively dislike wind racing. I hate it. But before getting to my reasons, what is it that you don't like about wind racing?

However, her personality is acutally similar to what you described here:

Quote: Unconditionally kind
Somewhat shy in groups, but still confident
Creative
Intelligent
Loyal
Self-disciplined (works to be good at things)
Passionate
(Not a wind-surfer )

So please elaborate on what you don't like. I won't have asked you to elaborate if not for what you posted here.

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow

Quote: Original post by Estok

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
Currently proposed female magicals are Kitten, Frquency, and Mana - I think that Frequency and Mana are too similar. Shouldn't we have one female character who is fiery? That seems to be a type that appeals to many men...?

In the beginning of this thread I said that I want a character with double identity. Mana is such a character. Mana has a kind, compassionate, healing side, and a death and destruction side. Frequency has a self-withdrawn, exhausted side and a valorous, enegetic side.

I like double-identity characters, and I like Frequency in particular (that's pretty ironic, if I like your character when the other guys don't, lol). The only problem is that double identity characters would make way more sense as technos than as magicals. Magicals are supposed to be pretty blunt and straight-forward, a trait that can be seen in different ways in Skew, Lion, and Kitten.

I see the double identity of Mana as a valid twist because of the very nature of the magicals. The PC is supposed to only see the healing, cheerful, kind, joyful side of Mana without further exploration.

Quote: Why pray tell should series be exempted? Our game might be the start of a series if it happened to be successful. Anyway, I guess what you think is 'clean' I think is 'too simple', and what I think is 'clever' you think is 'contrived'. The only title I liked on that list is _Goose, Egg, Badger_, which for our game would be something like _Time, Hearts, Aliens_... kinda lame.

'Goose, Egg, Badger" is one of the lamest on the list in my opinion.

I had a thought about wind-racing the other day actually - racers usually have very competitive personalities, Frequency just doesn't seem like she would care about winning races - what if instead she did arial ballet? Her personality seems like it would work well for a ballet dancer.

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
What really wastes everyone's time is when you wait till the rest of us have a general consensus about what the races are and then say you want something totally different.

In my opinion you guys are just holding on to the first thing you see without seeing what else there are. We don't have such strong consensus they way you see. You took the role of coming up with the design document, and you spoke as if there is a consensus. I took the role of coming up with the opl to show that we do not have a consensus and how we can come up with one. And it is not just me who disagrees, 5M also disagree but he says even less on what he disagrees about.

On the other hand, I also am working with what you think the consensus is. Take the character Frequency, everything fits with what we have already discussed.

Quote: Now I don't want you to feel like everyone's yelling at you, because we have kind of ganged up on you in the last few posts. But maybe you should consider that if we are ALL telling you to clearly state what you desire this game to be, maybe it really is necessary.

Of course this is necessary, and I have already done this since day one:

The game is about how humanity got splited into two races due to different philosophies on how to deal with a common threat. Due to their disagreement, they were unable to deal with the problem and the branches separated and developed in isolation. Eons later, the two branches return to the same land facing the same threat. They discovered a cryo from the past, a tragedy due to their initial separation. The central idea is how the initial separation is necessary for the two distinct philosophies to mature into their perpendicular forms in order for a synergy to exist that ultimately solves the problem. The initial disagreement and separation were not mistakes that humanity made. Due to that separation, humanity is now able to progress into something that they could not have reached.

Quote: You refraining from posting so as not to drive the design process is not the answer - what we need is Onyxflame and Avatar God to post more, and everyone to be actively creating a RNPC and their subplot, so that we are ALL driving the design process.

I don't see anyone ganging up on me. I am driving the process and I am creating characters. I did not refrain from posting or drive the design process. I refrained from driving the discussion about P21 P22 and P23. If you look back in the posts I have already posted a lot about those topics. Those were the topics that you and I created pages on of long posts that make the others unable to catch up. Yes we do need Onyxflame and AvatarGod to post more, I don't see how this can happen if I continue to reply like I did, creating pages that they can't catch up with. Therefore, as I said before, I was waiting for them to speak first, and then I would continue.

Quote: I also think it would be really helpful if everyone would do this hypothetical game review exercise, so we would all be better able to understand what each other want this game to be, and then we will be able to make better suggestons for how to compromise to make everyone happy. And it definitely IS time to compromise - we haven't added anything to the game design doc in almost a month because we are all stuck disagreeing and directionless. If we don't get that sorted out people will get sick of making no progress, everyone will post less and less, until there is no collaborative game design project and 2 months of work goes up in smoke - I am very afraid of this.

If you think that the design project is going up in smoke, from my point of view the reason is that we don't have an organized way to support disagreements. Somehow you guys think that the disagreements are making it directionless. The disagreements are the very foundation of the direction. If each idea is a dot on a grid and a compromise is the center of mass among the dots, then we need to know where all the dots are in order to make a compromise.

Quote: As for titles, we certainly know enough about what's going to be n the game to choose a working title, and we can always vote to change it later. But even as an example, _Cryo_ is an awful title. It's way too simple and short and not intriguing at all. If you don't want to create a new word, you to least need to use regular words in unusual juxtposition to each other to make players curious, and in order to use words in juxtaposition to each other, you have to have more than 1 word. _Cryo_ doesn't communicate at all the fact that the game focuses on romancing 'aliens'.

Cryo indeed does not suggest romanticing with aliens. In my description above, there is nothing about romance. Romance is a theme, not a central idea. In other words, I don't see the reason that we create a new world just to have aliens to fall in love with. The Romance theme is what gives the story a personal and emotional touch, but the central idea is something else, something that the mystery is based on.


In terms of juxtaposition, what do you think of the title "Frequency of Mana" if it is a game in which Frequency and Mana are main characters that personify the distinction between the techno and magical philosophies. The game itself is about how Frequency and Mana represent two forces that would need to be combined to yield a new, deeper meaning.

For example, if our game is purely about love (and in a cute way) and it takes place in a futuristic, techno-magical blended world, it can be called "Cintura Cafe". The game itself will be about the PC being a summoned worker for the cafe, in which he interacts with the many customers (alien customers) at the cafe, and discover their lives outside the cafe. The PC is just a poor, lazy, nobody with no particular talents working at the cafe. Your boss is someone who knew you since you were young and let you stay in the cafe helping out. There are many interesting individuals who come to the cafe, and as an employee you come to know them as an observer (and sometimes a messenger). Some of them are single, and some already have a relationship. All the RNPC are in common that they all go to the Cintura Cafe. But all have different goals and personalities, and some are frequent customers and some are one-timers, there is the one that just stand waiting outside the cafe and never comes in. The player can observe relationships being formed and broken in the cafe, at the same time able to intervene or get involved in those relationships or forming a relationship with the RNPCs outside the cafe. The game will give the player opportunities to discover the RNPC outside the cafe and to explore other parts of the blended world. The overall presentation will be humorous, light, relaxing, and enjoyable.

Quote: Here's a compromise suggestion: how about we make the PC's last name be Heartkey (the player can choose the first name), and call the game _Heartkey_, or _The Heartkey Tapestry_ or something like that?

Heartkey is too obvious.

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
I had a thought about wind-racing the other day actually - racers usually have very competitive personalities, Frequency just doesn't seem like she would care about winning races - what if instead she did arial ballet? Her personality seems like it would work well for a ballet dancer.

It was an intented contradiction. Frequency is not racing for herself, but for Case. Therefore her personality matches AG's view on being very loyal, and self-disciplined. I also though about ballet dancing because the wind race as a whole should be a mix of competition, sport, art, and technology. There should be a sense of beauty about Frequency doing the race, a sense of grace about how technology and magics are integrated, and a sense of harmony in the competition.

The wind race itself is not so much an art performance, but the way Frequency does it adds meaning to it.

In short, you can view Frequency as a dancer is correct. She is not an ego-centric racer just trying to win.

Quote: Original post by Estok

Quote: Original post by 5MinuteGaming

Quote: I am unable to reply to P20 because I don't know what timeline 5M was referring to.

I was refering to the Timelines that SunandShadow has proposed and also the Original timeline of events that I proposed and also the different avenues that you proposed and avatarGod and onyxflame.

1) Humans never left earth
2) Humans deserted earth and then came back eons later
3) proto - Technos left in a ship and stayed in space
4) proto - Magicals left in a ship and colonized another planet
5) proto - Spirituals left in a ship and colonized another planet
6) proto - Spirituals transcended from earth
7) Apocalpyse caused Mutations and formed the Three races
8) AI took over earth and war ensued resulting in the Three races

are their any that I forgot here?

Is this one timeline or eight timelines? This is the original P20:

This is in fact 8 different timelines which should be presented to the PC as the truth. So the PC will have to determine from which timeline or source to believe and whether it makes sense or whether it can make sense. Such is the way of history many historians attempt to rewrite history and fill in gaps where it doesn't make sense creating an enternal mystery that can never be solved because you simply don't know what happened or how it happened at the time.

Quote: Don't start compromising before having all the ideas out. From my point of view we are not at the position where we compromise. Your job is not to make me happy but to continue define what you want. In many ways I already gave feedbacks and told us what I wanted. For the title I think that it is too early to get one. But to show you the type of style I like, it is as follow:

The title has to reflect the central idea of the game, therefore it would require the central idea to exist soundly before the title exists. For example, if we stick to the original idea of human being frozen, I would just call the game 'Cryo'. The Technos and Magicals call these human Cryos, and the player would be inclinded to think that the title 'Cryo' simply refer to these humans. But as the game progress, the player will discover the deeper meaning, and at the end the player will understand what the Cryos are symbolic of, what is being frozen, and what is being given a chance of rebirth. One central idea of the game can be how sometimes problems cannot be solved by any effort but time. To those that want to solve the problem immediately, it would seem that those put the problem aside are just indifferent. Only through time can they understand the effort behind not putting any effort.

Well, I take compromise on an element basis. So Skew is a character and while developing skew it is neccessary to have all the ideas from everyone about who skew should be and then compromise on those ideas. I had no real expectation for a character named Skew so I simply didn't get involoved in the discussion of his character as much.

As far as the title is concerned I agree with you. But I think that Cryo would be a weak weak title and not at all as deep as you think. I proposed Frostborn and actually in my quote I meant to say "I do 'not' neccessarily" think that its a good title for what we have currently. But the purpose of Frostborn was to indirectly relate the Cryo tanks and how the humans where brought back into the world. Also it was suposed to symbolize the change affect that a human who produce on this world. Dare I say this - Like the pebble tossed into a calm pond creating ripples to all the edges. The second part "Ruins of Humanity" was meant to capture the buyers prying eyes and the idea of hmm 'Ruins' or we could make it 'Runes' or humanity which is a little tricky. So the player is thinking hmmm apocalypse humanity is in ruin. Or the Mystery why 'Runes' what 'Runes' what letters or language. Theres something behind it a mystery which they wouldn't get until they took into account then entire aspect of the game. Now I also suggested Frost-Burn: Ruins Of Humanity which would to me spark a curiosity of Burn what is Burning...Fire theres something wrong something thats still Burning from the Ruins the fire hasn't gone out yet. Now to me it fit well, but since we're not exactly using the cryo I don't think it would be as striking.

Quote: I am not afraid that my view is different. I already posted what my view are, and I continued to give ideas (Frequency). After the post on Skew's subplot the thread blew out of proportion. It was just S/S and me talking all the time. This is why I said I don't want to drive the discussion, because it ends up just s/s and I talking. And I stated very explicitly that I am just waiting to see what others' responses are what what theirs focuses are before I comment. Again, I have been giving ideas all along and suggestions in the form of "I thought it would work like this". But sometimes you just focus on the "I don't like this" part of the comments, and on top of that you seem to miss the reasons I gave behind why I don't like them.

Ah so you wanted to wait an get replies on all the things you and SnS talked about for Skew before moving on.

Yay for me just aquiring mass quantities of time!

Quote: Original post by Estok

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
What really wastes everyone's time is when you wait till the rest of us have a general consensus about what the races are and then say you want something totally different.

In my opinion you guys are just holding on to the first thing you see without seeing what else there are. We don't have such strong consensus they way you see. You took the role of coming up with the design document, and you spoke as if there is a consensus. I took the role of coming up with the opl to show that we do not have a consensus and how we can come up with one. And it is not just me who disagrees, 5M also disagree but he says even less on what he disagrees about.

I think sunandshadow has a valid point. We leave an issue when suddenly you jumped back in with it and completely disagreed with it all. And then we all tried to make up new compromises... and were suddenly back at square 1. But you are right about us sometimes misunderstanding the amount of consensus that we have - which is where the OPRL comes in handy. And thank you for keeping up with that!

Quote: The game is about how humanity got splited into two races due to different philosophies on how to deal with a common threat. Due to their disagreement, they were unable to deal with the problem and the branches separated and developed in isolation. Eons later, the two branches return to the same land facing the same threat. They discovered a cryo from the past, a tragedy due to their initial separation. The central idea is how the initial separation is necessary for the two distinct philosophies to mature into their perpendicular forms in order for a synergy to exist that ultimately solves the problem. The initial disagreement and separation were not mistakes that humanity made. Due to that separation, humanity is now able to progress into something that they could not have reached.

I think I really agree with your description of this, although I'm not sure about the "perpindicular" forms? Anyways, I do think this is pretty much the same as I see the main plot base.

Quote: Estok

Quote: You refraining from posting so as not to drive the design process is not the answer - what we need is Onyxflame and Avatar God to post more, and everyone to be actively creating a RNPC and their subplot, so that we are ALL driving the design process.

I don't see anyone ganging up on me. I am driving the process and I am creating characters. I did not refrain from posting or drive the design process. I refrained from driving the discussion about P21 P22 and P23. If you look back in the posts I have already posted a lot about those topics. Those were the topics that you and I created pages on of long posts that make the others unable to catch up. Yes we do need Onyxflame and AvatarGod to post more, I don't see how this can happen if I continue to reply like I did, creating pages that they can't catch up with. Therefore, as I said before, I was waiting for them to speak first, and then I would continue.

Right. It is hard to keep the discussion to a pace that we can all keep up with while still getting out everything we need to say. I'll try to post more and such, and hopefully this will go better.

Quote:

Quote: I also think it would be really helpful if everyone would do this hypothetical game review exercise, so we would all be better able to understand what each other want this game to be, and then we will be able to make better suggestons for how to compromise to make everyone happy. And it definitely IS time to compromise - we haven't added anything to the game design doc in almost a month because we are all stuck disagreeing and directionless. If we don't get that sorted out people will get sick of making no progress, everyone will post less and less, until there is no collaborative game design project and 2 months of work goes up in smoke - I am very afraid of this.

If you think that the design project is going up in smoke, from my point of view the reason is that we don't have an organized way to support disagreements. Somehow you guys think that the disagreements are making it directionless. The disagreements are the very foundation of the direction. If each idea is a dot on a grid and a compromise is the center of mass among the dots, then we need to know where all the dots are in order to make a compromise.

True, but I do think we need to be more clear (read: use the OPRL more) to know where we stand on things.

And while Heartkey might be too obvious, the idea behind that naming system could be fun (Monkey Island IV: Threepwood). I don't have too much preference on the naming right now, though.

Gotta run, though...

By the way, that was me... I wrote that over about three hours of doing other things...

Ok here is an idea of how we can keep things on track and allow all of us to respond to a particular Proposal.

We initially saw the format as a means to limit discussion but since the discussions that we're having have become in an argument fashion I think its time for a limit.

P25.1.F
I propose that we as a group come up with a Proposal for a specific aspect of the game and then allow each team member who actively posts replies to simple remark on the proposal. We will allow for only one post per person per revision. So basically it will work like this proposal is posted using the format we agreed on for the OPRL. Then each person will write where they agree and disagree or if they want they can rewrite the proposal. You may post only once so that everyone has a chance to reply without having to read a huge discussion between two or three people. Once everyone who is active has posted the original poster will be given a chance to compromise his/her proposal. Now we keep revising until we have a concensus and we stick to one and only one topic at a time. This will help to keep us on track and to keep us updating the OPRL and the Game Design Document. We have a lot of good ideas and we need to bring them together. Since this is a Collaborative Game Story we should not let everyone go off and define their own characters, items, places, things without getting them aproved by the rest of the members or in corporating the other team members ideas. What will make this a great game is the diversity of the writers. Our ideas are different and our ambitions are unique and putting them into one game will make it very rich as long as its organized and thought through correctly.

Comment: (should not appear in the OPRL) We should start off replying to this post in the manor it specifies. In other words do what it says above)