Hello everyone, I'm part of a group currently developing a point-and-click adventure game. We've got a half finished game engine already, and we have pretty much all the manpower needed to actually finish this game - complete with voice actors, graphical artists, musicians and all. What we don't have is a solid story. Yeah, I know. We are kind of backwards. This is sort of the general idea that we're currently toying with. Naturally all names are just placeholders.

Quote: Intro You are Foobar, normally a happy and cheerful soul who currently just happens to be trapped at a place he considers hell on earth: BazCorp. BazCorp is an average mid-sized office company. What it actually does isn't clear but it is obvious that most of their employees are unhappy and stressed. Back to Foobar: His main task while at work is to handle handle heaps and heaps of paperwork given to him by Mr.Grumpley, his boss. Mr.Grumpley himself is slightly sadistic and presumably has some experience as a soldier from his younger days. He loves to make his employees' (and especially Foobar's) lives feel like shit. CHAPTER 1: Another day at the office It is a regular but particularly stressful day at the office. Foobar has his hands full with paperwork when Mr.Grumpley storms into his cube and gives him hell about the "Elderstein Project Report" that was supposed to be done and on Grumpley's desk two hours ago. Telling Foobar that he has "15 minutes to deal with this garbage or he's outta here!", he departs the office. Foobar panics, since he has no idea what the "Elderstein Project" is or even that he was the one that was supposed to do it. Foobar starts off asking his fellow workmates if they know anything about the Elderstein Project. To get answers from them he needs to help them out with their various issues, like getting items or talking to other people for them. By piecing together small bits of information that he gets from each of them, Foobar finally learns that Elderstein was a project funded by the government to search for presumed subterranean sources of energy. The review that Foobar was supposed to write was supposed to evaluate the efficiency of the first two years of the project. Foobar is told that he should take the elevator down to the cellar and search archives for more info about the project's mysterious chairman, Thor Sebonto. Foobar enters the elevator and pushes the button for level 0. As the elevator slowly starts going down there is a brief blackout and a weird sound. Our hero tries to calm himself and shrugs it off as "nothing", until he sees that the current level indicator has already passed 0 and is now increasing on the negative side of zero. "W-What is this?!", Foobar cries in agony as the elevator picks up speed, continuing to rush downward. Chapter one ends with a blackout and a loud crash.

When our hero wakes up after the crash, he will find himself in a sort of subterranean world inhabited by some weird folks. What happens after that is still undecided, but obviously our hero's long term goal is to get back up to the surface. What I would like is for you to give me your thoughts after reading this draft. Our aim is to make this a fun and light-hearted game with as much humor as we can possibly fit in there. If you have any ideas on what could happen to our hero as he explores this underground world, please post them. As we don't have a dedicated writer, and haven't really discussed the story in depth, we don't even know where the story will take our hero, so any input is appreciated. This is a free, open-source game project available on all three major platforms (plus any other platforms with Python and Pygame). If you are interested in the project, be sure to check out our project at Github or follow the development on my blog.

Hooks for you:

1. On the other side of the crust is another office environment, led by subterranean office workers and a subterranean boss. Maybe they do the same thing Foobar does, but maybe not. If it's a good office environment, then Foobar learns how fun his line of work can be when it's with the right people, and once he returns to the surface, he confronts Mr. Grumpley about his ineptitude. If it's a bad office environment, perhaps it's a dangerous one, and Foobar has to save the workers from... doom? Who knows.

2. Foobar slowly discovers that the subterranean energy sources are the key to subterran existence - maybe the people down there eat it, maybe it's a key point in the ecosystem (it purifies something, or decomposes something, or both, which makes food edible/digestible for the subterrans or the things they eat), or maybe it's basically their gasoline. But their world would crash if surface-dwellers started trying to harness it.

3. The subterranean people are the energy source - instead of having darkvision like most cave-dwellers, they glow like lightbulbs.

Plus any other ideas, or in combination somehow.

Quote: Original post by bardbarienne
Hooks for you!

1. On the other side of the crust is another office environment, led by subterranean office workers and a subterranean boss. Maybe they do the same thing Foobar does, but maybe not. If it's a good office environment, then Foobar learns how fun his line of work can be when it's with the right people, and once he returns to the surface, he confronts Mr. Grumpley about his ineptitude. If it's a bad office environment, perhaps it's a dangerous one, and Foobar has to save the workers from... doom? Who knows.

2. Foobar slowly discovers that the subterranean energy sources are the key to subterran existence - maybe the people down there eat it, maybe it's a key point in the ecosystem (it purifies something, or decomposes something, or both, which makes food edible/digestible for the subterrans or the things they eat), or maybe it's basically their gasoline. But their world would crash if surface-dwellers started trying to harness it.

3. The subterranean people are the energy source - instead of having darkvision like most cave-dwellers, they glow like lightbulbs.

Plus any other ideas, or in combination somehow.

Thanks for your reply. I was beginning to think that the "Writing for games" section of the forum was completely dead. :P

I'm not quite sold on your first idea, but I have actually been thinking about number 2. I just haven't really written it down and formulated it in a proper way yet. Number three introduces an interesting twist, that might merit some discussion with the rest of the crew.

Either way, the last two ideas could both lead to something really cool, I think. It introduces an ethical dilemma for the players. Even if we're not going to allow them to choose which way to go (we are telling a story, after all), one can always get the players to think about whether or not it would be worth it to make an entire species extinct if it meant that the energy problem would be pretty much solved.

Keep the suggestions coming. I'm really liking them so far. And please, feel free to elaborate on any ideas that have already been posted. Even bad ideas are a lot better than no ideas! :D

Just thought I'd throw my two cents in here: I liked bardbarienne's first idea. When you said weird subterranean folks, I immediately pictured mole men, and then I got mole men in white collared shirts and ties. Perhaps Foobar could be press ganged into wage-slavery through a mole men staffing agency when he regains consciousness from the elevator crash. He's forced to engage in underground office politics in order to make his way to the surface and/or find out what the power source really is. Ethical dilemmas are well and good for serious games, but if your focus is comedy, I'd stick to being funny.

For some reason I'm getting some unintentional Phantasmagoria 2 vibes from this, you've got a point-and-click adventure in an office setting that's not all that it seems. If you want some more ideas, you might find this Let's Play of that game a good source of inspiration.

The co-workers in Foobar's office need to be rather crazy. Task-finding in an office doesn't sound like the most interesting thing to do, unless you're looking for crazy things, for crazy people, so that they can do crazy things. What if someone needs a stapler so they can stick it in the microwave, cause it to explode, and then claim workers comp? Amusing things like that would make getting things more fun, and give a humerous reward.

If you go with subterranean office route, what if they're more normal than the people on the surface? At least at the couple glances. Perhaps they're more normal personally, but they're all working together to acccomplish some large goal (perhaps take over the upper office).

So, up top you have people in the 'better' position, but they all have petty problems and are all messed up. Down below, in the 'worse' position, are people with larger problems but far more functional.

Perhaps Sebonto has become sympathetic to them, and is now their leader, and is the opposite of the boss in the upper world.

Those are some of my thoughts.