Time Warp: Story! Music! Bending Time to your Will?

So it's been a while! Probably the longest between posts, 5 days! The longest I'd gone before was 2 days, but that shouldn't happen again because I have updates! Many updates! As the title suggests, there are three main topics to be covered here, but each one is pretty huge. I mean, it's basically the entire game, right? The story, the musical score and the gameplay? That's the main building blocks for it! So, what I'm going to do is split it up into a number of posts, mainly three. In this post, I'll be covering the Story aspect. In a later post, I'll be covering the musical aspect, and finally the gameplay will be talked about AND DEMONSTRATED (hype) in a final third post. Not final as in last one ever, good god no. We're nowhere near the end. But we're inching ever closer. So anyway, onto the story!

Let's start out with a small history lesson. Not any important history, like WW2 or Hitler's rise to power. Instead, let's talk about my history. Specifically, when I was a wee little laddie. I used to love trains. Like, love them. They were great. It was never the technical aspect that got me, and I couldn't care less about the pulling capacity of the ANU5-B4G steam locomotive during it's prime. I liked them cause they were huge, they went fast, and they looked fancy and cool. But you know what I loved more then trains? Train crashes. Not for all the innocent lives put at risk, but just the sheer destruction of it. Like, have you ever seen a train explode? As in, properly? Take a look:

Look at that. Look at that wonderful mushroom of coolness. If that doesn't get your inner child excited, I don't know what will. I had a train set that went around my room, and all the time I crashed the trains into each other, just cause it was cool (I'm sure it was much cooler in my head). But recently, I replayed Medal of Honour: Frontline. It was the first proper FPS that i'd ever played, and I loved it. I had it on the GameCube, and we had one in my room, so I played it over and over. But one of the levels in particular was my favourite: Riding Out the Storm. This level was set on a WW2 German War Train. Don't know what a war train is? Let me educate you. It's a train with guns, a lot of guns. and armour plating. And then even more guns just in case. And lots of troops to man those guns, plus some spares because everything is always better with spare bits.

So, you're asking is my history lesson is about trains? Yes. And why is it about trains? Because these war trains are THE PERFECT setting for something of this nature. The basic mechanics of the game basically require firefights to be kept to relatively simple encounters, taking on a number of enemies at a time, before moving onto another set of enemies. I could set this in a building, going from floor to floor in a Bruce Willis-style They-Took-The-Thing-We-Want-It-Back, but that lacks a certain...oomph. Sure, you might give a reason, there might be classified information in this building. Cool, the player is saying, what does that do for me? Well, player, it does nothing, just some off screen characters that you probably don't care about. Great, now the player has lost interest because this means nothing to them. Why should they be invested in this building, or what you're doing in it? There's no personal gain.

You know, I've just realised that I'm still not telling you the story. you've been reading 4 paragraphs waiting for it, and I've been rambling about trains. That's probably not as interesting to you as it would be to me. Anyway, the story. So, humanity. We're always fighting things, right? No matter how much Star Trek will tell you otherwise, humanity can never settle itself with anything else, even sometimes its own. This is why we have all the wars history has and such. Well, this time, it's the future, and we're at war. I know, it's a very original idea and you may need to sit down. but here's the kicker: we're actually fighting many different forces on many different fronts. Everyone's fighting everyone, so we're all left in a bit of a tiff with each other.

But is humanity united to stand against the forces who seek to destroy us? Of course not! We're humanity! There's always conflict between us, and this time it comes in the form of the Zealot Military. These people aren't very happy with the bulk of humanity, and how we handle matters of humanity-based vindication. they mostly aren't happy because of how some things have to suffer in order to fund the war efforts, mainly in the working area. Those in certain critical positions have sought to gain power through negotiations to have a stronger input on humanity's war efforts. And having been told by everyone else "can we really not have this discussion later?" they got cranky.

So, they've been taking more and more violent shots at the general human population for quite a while, getting more rowdy each day. However, this time humanity has decided that we've had enough, because theses assholes have hijacked a train. But not just any train. This one was taking vital supplies to the front lines. Mainly, hundreds of tanks and armour, thousands of weapons and an uncountable amount of other things that they'll regret getting their grubby mitts on very soon. This war train taking vital supplies has been stored in a train yard. How do we know it's there? Because it's our bloody train, of course we can track it, and it's huge. Remember how I said lots of tanks and armour? Yeah, this think is building-size huge. I think you'll like the designs I'm going for when I show them.

So, they have a train. Big deal. Use another one, surely we've got a spare somewhere, right? Well, it's not so much what they've got it, more that they're fitting it with explosives. A lot of explosives. enough explosives to crater the earth with a hole a couple of kilometres wide. The moon's radius is 1.737 kilometres, for scale. This party train is being lined up for a straight line to humanity's main base of operations, and given that this line is vital for transport to the front lines, we can't really blow up the tracks or damage them. think of it as a giant battering ram, each carriage weighing the same as a building. Not good, not very stoppable either. This is where the player comes in. Assault the train while it's in the train yard and disable it, and if it manages to get away, make sure you're on it when it does. If you are, then decouple each of the cars, leaving them open to proper disarming and stuff.

TL;DR: There's a big ass train heading for home base with many explosives, board it and disable it before it is used as an explosive battering ram on your home base.

If it seems like a lot to cover, then don't worry, it's really not necessary for the game. Most of it won't play in, and won't be flat out told to the player through some overly elaborate cut scene. Mainly, it'll be saved for those aforementioned terminals as extra world building for those who go looking for it. But how does this in any way fit into gameplay? is it all just a fancy backdrop for no reason? If i'm typing that question as though you've said it even though you probably didn't, you know it's probably wrong.

The whole train layout allows for a basic section/level-based game without it feeling disjointed. Each carriage is a level, filled with it's own unique points that make it different from the rest. Some cars are transporting supplies in crates, these are your basic firefights in an open-ish space. Some of them are used for the storage of tanks and APCs, to which the enemy will use against you, and you can use against them, changing up how the level plays out and how the player can interact with the level. Some carriages contain armouries, some will have completely open floors with walkways running above that must be fought on, with the rails speeding by underneath your feet. Some will force you to be out in the open, limiting the effectiveness of guns like the Ricochet, as they have nothing to bounce off.

Obviously these are just some examples of the possibilities that this presents, and hell, I might end up changing everything up if I find something that works better. But this is what we're going for at the moment, and the levels will be designed as such. As the carriages will have both indoor and outdoor sections, I'll have to get to work on weather certain things play into the current art style and if I can't come up with anything, Then I may have to drop the whole idea in favour of something better suited. If something with a similar section-based idea comes to mind that would be easier to visually work with while offering the same variety benefits, I'd be open to that. I'd probably use the same backstory, just keep the whole train stuff for a future game. We'll see how it goes. But for now, that's what we have! If you've reached the end of this post then you deserve a medal, that's a crazy amount of reading and you should be proud of yourself for supporting indie devs and their whack-job ideas that are way too dumb and risky for AAA studios to ever even think of considering.