This is another relic design for a futuristic/fantasy RPG. It was the father design of Cryo. It is a much more straightforward design, with more apparent actions and more familiar plot and plot structure. X Zero The back story began with an incoming planetary disaster. As a last resort, a spaceship was launched to evacuate the top minds on earth. Through eons of travel, the spaceship landed in a system far away, where humanity was reestablished with the saved technologies. Many more years passed, humanity was once again lost in political conflicts and warfares across systems and galaxies. By that time, no one could care less about earth. Nonetheless, the climate on earth had settled, and there was a signal of distress, sent from the forgotten homeworld. A ship was sent back to earth, with an archaeological team. When the ship arrived, they found a crashed spaceship just like the one evacuated from earth eons ago. There was no record of a second evacuation ship. The team entered the crashed ship, X Zero (X is the Greek letter Chi), and found some human still alive in the cryogenic life support system. The team unlocked some cryo pods to revive the humans, and all hell broke loose. Gameplay The player can choose to be a marine on board or a revived human. As a small group of survivers, the PC and the NPCs will defend against the mysterious creatures and find out the source of the attacks. Each human and marine had their own story that the player will discover, and the story will reveal that some of the marines and/or humans were not human. While holding off the attacks, and gathering various resources in the wrecked ships, the player will decide who were not the humans and backstab them. Note that the pc can always liberally shoot someone in front of everyone, but if the player chose the wrong person the chances are that the play will get shot next. So if the player is not sure who the alien is, the player should do locations where the PC is alone with the NPC suspect. Note that if the NPC doesn't trust you they can backstab you also. So this is a game about trust and alliance. As long as there are more than one possessed NPC, the NPC you chose to be with will not confront you even if it was also possessed. Other NPCs are vulnerable, and you may discover later that they have been killed. Replayability In each game run there will be 15 human and 5 marines (one of the marines being the archeologist), and 4 of 20 will be possessed. There will be different NPCs randomly generated or selected from a set. There may be predetermined plot elements, or generated elements. The layout and resources of the ship may also change. Any thoughts? The next batch of ideas will be about the characters and the plots. This is just the intro.

Very interesting. The replay value is increased by the fact that the game elements are random, and more likely to change from game to game. Moreover, it is very difficult to draw a map for a changing game. Nevertheless, one can hope there will be constants, like behaviors or rooms, or anything that can help make the game familiar AND alien at the same time...

Sounds promising. Ever since Rogue, I've been a fan of games with randomly generated maps. If you want some advice and/or help on some maze generation algorithms (which could be used to design ship interiors, caves, or terrain if tailored appropriately), I can offer a couple links.

X Zero - Central Idea
The overall story of XZero revolves around "the most important quality of humanity". In this story, the disaster was used to make humanity select what they think is the most important. In this particular scenario, humanity had chosen adaptability and survivability (technology). The survivors of humanity continued to evolve into something quite different from what it would have been. Many years later, they return to see what they had abandoned.

Axes of humanity:
- Technology (Applied science)
- Theoretical Science
- Religion
- Philosophy
- Political Structure
- Social Structure
- Laws
- Ethics and Morals
- History
- Craftsmanship and skills
- Performance Art
- Visual/Audio/Literary Arts
- Entertainment

In the original story, X1 (the evacuation ship that survived) chose Technology none of the rest has immediate impact on survivability, and it is believed that the rest can be reestablished by humanity.

Note that this does not mean that the resulting culture based on X1 has no religion. It might have a religion based on what the neo-human interpret out of the situation. The argument is that such religion, if it exist, is as important as the current religion they had before, given a couple thousand years to evolve.

Similar argument go for theoretical science. It should be reasonable to understand that advancement in science does not follow a linear path. Humanity may very well interpret the universe from a totally different direction after losing one perspective.

To most people, the argument that IF humanity can only choose one, technology should be chosen, seems to be the normal solution. In this case, there is not much of a conflict created. Therefore, the story equalizes the axes by infusing each of them with enough survivability. Each of the axes will have its way of surviving through the distaster. The world before the disaster is not based on the year 2005, it is a much more imaginative and crazy world. The survivors of X1, which share a similar perspective as us (in 2005), do not think they had missed much when the left earth with their technology, until they discover X Zero.

One source of replayability comes from letting different versions of X Zero to be discovered. For the 'randomly generated' layouts, they are not simply having the stockroom placed somewhere else. The internal system and resources structure may be different. Imagine a part of the art culture that CAN survive purely through imagination and creativity. What do you think they will have in their X Zero?


Conflicts
The original story was about X1 cruelly disabled X0 for its own survivability (X1 caused X0 to crash, or so it seemed to those on X0). The conflict was about X0 taking its revenge on the derivatives of X1.

For the implementation, the inhabitants in X0 would appear normal, but there is something terribly different about them, that caused X1 to make X0 crash as the disaster striked earth. (imagine X0 being full of vampires, or, as a twist, imagine X1 has vampires, but only some in X0 knew about it, so after X1 destroyed X0, the vampires no longer have natural enemies).

Or:

Descendants of X1 came back to help X0, during the operation, X0 revealed how X1 selfishly shot it down for its own survival, just as the main characters feel sorry for them, and bringing them back to neo-earth after repairing X0. On the way back to neo-earth, the main character discovered something odd about his newly found girl friend from X0, and that those rescued from X0 were very different form the kind of human he knew. Suddenly, he found himself in this 'alien' ship surrounded by 'aliens'. All hell broke loose as the main character try to stop X0 from reaching neo-earth. Maybe X1 did the right thing after all.

X Zero - Central Idea
The overall story of XZero revolves around "the most important quality of humanity". In this story, the disaster was used to make humanity select what they think is the most important. In this particular scenario, humanity had chosen adaptability and survivability (technology). The survivors of humanity continued to evolve into something quite different from what it would have been. Many years later, they return to see what they had abandoned.

Axes of humanity:
- Technology (Applied science)
- Theoretical Science
- Religion
- Philosophy
- Political Structure
- Social Structure
- Laws
- Ethics and Morals
- History
- Craftsmanship and skills
- Performance Art
- Visual/Audio/Literary Arts
- Entertainment

In the original story, X1 (the evacuation ship that survived) chose Technology none of the rest has immediate impact on survivability, and it is believed that the rest can be reestablished by humanity.

Note that this does not mean that the resulting culture based on X1 has no religion. It might have a religion based on what the neo-human interpret out of the situation. The argument is that such religion, if it exist, is as important as the current religion they had before, given a couple thousand years to evolve.

Similar argument go for theoretical science. It should be reasonable to understand that advancement in science does not follow a linear path. Humanity may very well interpret the universe from a totally different direction after losing one perspective.

To most people, the argument that IF humanity can only choose one, technology should be chosen, seems to be the normal solution. In this case, there is not much of a conflict created. Therefore, the story equalizes the axes by infusing each of them with enough survivability. Each of the axes will have its way of surviving through the distaster. The world before the disaster is not based on the year 2005, it is a much more imaginative and crazy world. The survivors of X1, which share a similar perspective as us (in 2005), do not think they had missed much when the left earth with their technology, until they discover X Zero.

One source of replayability comes from letting different versions of X Zero to be discovered. For the 'randomly generated' layouts, they are not simply having the stockroom placed somewhere else. The internal system and resources structure may be different. Imagine a part of the art culture that CAN survive purely through imagination and creativity. What do you think they will have in their X Zero?


Conflicts and Plots

The original story was about X1 cruelly disabled X0 for its own survivability (X1 caused X0 to crash, or so it seemed to those on X0). The conflict was about X0 taking its revenge on the derivatives of X1.

For the implementation, the inhabitants in X0 would appear normal, but there is something terribly different about them, that caused X1 to make X0 crash as the disaster striked earth. (imagine X0 being full of vampires, or, as a twist, imagine X1 has vampires, but only some in X0 knew about it, so after X1 destroyed X0, the vampires no longer have natural enemies).

Or:

Descendants of X1 came back to help X0, during the operation, X0 revealed how X1 selfishly shot it down for its own survival, just as the main characters feel sorry for them, and bringing them back to neo-earth after repairing X0. On the way back to neo-earth, the main character discovered something odd about his newly found girl friend from X0, and that those rescued from X0 were very different form the kind of human he knew. Suddenly, he found himself in this 'alien' ship surrounded by 'aliens'. All hell broke loose as the main character try to stop X0 from reaching neo-earth. Maybe X1 did the right thing after all.

The central idea is still there, but it might over get out-shined by the thematic and emotional development. In this case, the 'survivability' of the inhabitants in X0 relies on the survivability of the others. They are a virus kind of a branch of humanity.

If you dig this idea, then we can move on and talk about the development of characters that will support this the overall design.

I am posting this first because the 'randonly' generated characters and environments are not completely irrelevant to the central idea and overall design. The map gen algorithms area probably needed 20 to 30 posts down the road.