Story Elements - LayeredPlatformer/LayeredPlatformerUnity GitHub Wiki

This page will serve as a concentrated location for the story elements, so that they aren't lost in the depths of Slack.

Minimum Viable Story

Arrive in the past, start following these clockwork things. Follow them back to the village. find the Watcher of Charity is there, then he/she/it has a fight with the player.

They win, decide to spare or kill their former ally, then the village reverts back to normal. (Perhaps a nomadic camp instead of a village after reversion)

Expanded Minimal Version

Act 1: We’re introduced to the Watchers, and see our protagonist. He sees something is dreadfully wrong on earth and goes to his master asking for help. The master insists it isn’t a problem and he isn’t to go, but our protagonist ignores Aion and travels to earth. The gameplay begins at this point. The stuff above I think we could represent with a few still images, comic-book style maybe, overlaid with text. The goal is to have as little as possible before gameplay actually begins. Even so, we do have a fairly complex concept, so I don’t think it’s safe to eliminate them entirely or else the player is going to be more confused than intrigued.

Still in act one, our player arrives in what is actually the past period of our game, be it dark ages, ice age, whatever we want. The player discovers a clockwork automatons mining and they attack him on sight. Even if he doesn’t have any dialogue, it should be clear something is immensely wrong with this, if for no other reason than he looks so shocked when they attack him ​_and_​ they seem to have a similar design.

We can use this time to familiarize our player with the basic mechanics of the game. I was thinking his primary abilities at this phase will be some kind of basic spinning-gear attack, along with a “chrono-blast”, a slow ability which will emit a blast of light that will “purge” anything that shouldn’t be there. This would mean a human enemy or a wild animal would be unaffected, but technology that’s out of place would disappear. An indicator on the screen in the direction of the next “temporal abnormality” would be super useful as a way to direct the player through the game and not risk them getting lost.

The last of the abilities I think we’ll want for this minimum viable game will be a way to jump around between layers. We’ll get to that in act two, which will be the majority of the game. Everything we’ve just talked about will probably be a single level, with some basic platforming action to acustom the player to the mechanics of their first two abilities.

Act 2: The Watcher fights through the creatures to the center of their activity. To his horror, it’s a village of primitive humans. The gear automotons have been building temporally out-of-place improvements, like electric lights or water mills, just something to make it clear to the player that the stuff doesn’t belong.

Before you can try to destroy this abomination, the eventual endboss of this Minimum viable section of the game, Watcher of Charity, arrives. He/she/it defends their actions and refuses to let you destroy them. As proof, they give you their gear and ask you to look into the future and see how much better it is because of what they did.

Suddenly the layers appear, and the player can travel through time. The watcher goes to the “future”, which is actually the “middle” time period for our game. I’ve been thinking we might be able to work with 1900s, turn of the century era here, that might be way interesting and have some simple but neat visuals we can go with. It doesn’t really matter what era we choose, not for this simple a story.

The middle period is one where the Watchers fully run the government. Out of place clockwork tech is everywhere, giving the era a very steampunk feel no matter what time period it’s supposed to be. Flying machines pass overhead, or perhaps human soldiers dressed in clockwork armor. Whatever the case, the Watcher tries to jump back in time to confront their traitor friend…

And instead they jump forward again, to our final period. The earth is is a wasteland here, a destroyed place of deserts and ruined buildings. The only enemies in this area are occasional abominations, extremely strong but rare, and the whole place should have a desolate feeling. I was thinking that the abominations might suck temporal energy from the player, so he’s got to either escape the nearby ones or kill them in order to return back in time. They’ll be a constant danger whenever he goes to the future period.

At this point, the watcher realizes he’s been betrayed of course, that he was sent ahead to die so that he would be out of their way. He has to survive long enough for his gear to recharge and let him jump back.

Act 3: The player returns to the village in the ancient past. The watcher of Charity gets their human/gear automaton allies to attack you so that they can escape, and as you fight them you destroy historically wrong things along the way, gradually returning the village to the way it ought to be. That done, you have only one task left, track down charity and deal with them.

Charity knows the land far better than you, and has fled deep into the forest. The watcher uses a combination of their combat abilities and their ability to travel through time to avoid obstacles to eventually track them down. Intense boss-battle, in which both characters travel around in all three time periods. Eventually you beat charity, and can either spare them or kill them. Maybe Charity claims that the master as the one who let them do what they did. Either way you take their gear away, returning to the fortress of the watchers to inform master Aion of what happened.

THE END

Full Story Concept

The Watcher Saves Earth from an Alien Invasion You play as a Watcher, a being whose purpose it is to protect the sanctity of time. You discover disturbing patterns in the timestream around one planet: Earth. You bring this disturbing news to your master, who tells you not to worry about it. However, you feel that you must at least investigate, and depart for Earth, contrary to your orders. As the game starts out, it seems like a relatively ordinary mission for you, as you find modern objects in the past and collect them, repairing the damage that’s been done the same way you have done before. Eventually, you encounter another Watcher (Charity?) who is perpetrating the abnormalities.

You learn from the Watcher that they are not the mastermind, merely a servant. The actual mastermind is your master, Aion. You feel that you have been betrayed. The Watchers are no longer content to merely observe; Aion has decided that his vast wisdom means he ought to be the one controlling time. You refuse to bow to his will, however, and strike down the Watcher you have encountered.

At this point, you have a choice to either kill them or rescue them from Aion's influence over them. Either way, you obtain their weapon, another gear that adds to your abilities, and even if you redeem them, they are too weak from the fight to do much to help you. But your choices will influence the ending of the game.

You continue following after the temporal anomalies, knowing that you aren't nearly strong enough to face Aion yet. Along the way, you must encounter and defeat all of your former watcher allies, all of which were more senior and more powerful than you. As you defeat each one, you gradually grow in strength and repair the timestream, until eventually you have the power necessary to confront your former mentor.

Another addition here: I would like to have a way to redeem Aion, but not fully. He has been taken over by his own dark side, finally losing a fight he had waged for ages. He took you in as an apprentice Watcher knowing that this would happen eventually, and had been grooming you to replace him. Hence your sense of responsibility that led you to fix the problems on Earth despite being told to leave it be by Aion's dark side. While you are unable to save Aion's life (his darkness is too deeply embedded) you are able to save his soul.

However, this may only be an option if you have spared the other Watchers as well. They rally with you at the end of the final battle, using their power to drive the darkness from him and trying to keep him alive. You get at least the bit about being trained to replace him if you save some of the Watchers, and nothing at all if you saved none of them.

Enemies

When we say that the main antagonists of the game are an “alien invasion” I think we want to stay away from flying saucers and the standard alien invasion story. As we learned during the meeting, it all sounds busy and extremely silly to have that going along with the time traveler elements and the watchers. It just gets too complicated for the story to make meaningful sense.

Instead, think of the invasion like the Watchers themselves are the alien invaders. Alien invaders with far more advanced technology and the ability to travel around through space and time. As such, defeating the other Watchers is fighting off the invaders. They must be fought off in all the different time-periods in order to restore the proper balance to the timestream. There a few main enemy types I can think of:

Watchers - There are seven of these beings (including you), plus the master which mean seven total bosses to fight. Though I don’t think it will ever be written or said anywhere, I like the idea of modeling the Watchers (and to a lesser extent, their levels/sections of the game) on the seven virtues/seven deadly sins. In other words, each of the watchers would represent one of the virtues, but now that they’ve become evil they represent one of the seven deadly sins instead. Let me stress: We won’t tell the players this, and we won’t call them “greed” or anything. We’ll just use it as an internal desigin doctrine to give the game some depth it might not otherwise have.

This might just mean a different color scheme, and it also might relate to the damage each one of them is doing in the timestream (for example, Greed might be stealing things while Wrath starts a war, etc). Each of the Seven Watchers (including you) has a distinct ability, which they use extensively in their bossfight. Defeating them allows you to take that ability for yourself. The Master, Aion, is the only other being who has all of the abilities, which makes him by far the most dangerous.

Clockwork Servants (Not a final name) - The Watchers have much work to do in maintaining the timestream, far more than eight people can do. As such, the Watcher of Diligence invented these clockwork beings to do the mundane tasks that were required. They’re the grunts. They appear as steampunk-esque robots in the shapes of animals or humans (vaguely), with gears as a prominent theme. Clockwork servants are not smart or powerful, though they’re very easy to make. As they’re broken, they probably fall apart into piles of gears and other clock parts.

Abominations - Abominations are what happen when you take living things and force them into clockwork servants. Most animals and even people can be changed in this way, with gears and other machine parts grafted onto their bodies. These beings have the intelligence of their former selves, and significantly added strength from the clockwork parts. They’re the more dangerous foes our protagonist will be facing, below boss level.

Abilities ideas (feel free to suggest more)

-Add combos and power to attacks
-Grab enemies to either throw them or blink with them
-From the maker of the robots, you could get the ability to hack and control the robots, but only one at a time. They then remain inactive after you release them, so you can climb them or they keep a switch pressed or whatever.
-Wall jump
-Double/Triple jump
-Hover/Float
-Teleport to somewhere else on the screen (has a hefty use cost or recharge time, and doesn't work everywhere)
-Pause/slow time
-Haste

This is the main stuff as it stands at present, from my perspective. If I've missed anything, go ahead and add it.