Need input, completing plot outline by next Monday.

I am giving myself a deadline of next Monday to complete my plot. I am looking for feedback, suggestions, even ideas. I want to see what can happen in just a week or so with feedback, with a deadline, vs no deadline and no feedback.

Setting: Underground private research facility in New Mexico. For now the site is called 'Icarus'. This site is where the aliens from Roswell have been kept, as well as most spacecraft that has been recovered from around the world, and other bizarre creatures that nobody knows what to do with. Often, ethically questionable and internationally illegal experiments take place here. This black site has no direct governmental oversight. They bypass congressional accountability by being a private organization that receives no government funding. There are a few people in the government who know some of the details, but everything is done so nobody knows everything, as to always have a level of plausible deniability.

The aliens live in isolated white cells and are segregated by temperment. The aggressive ones are confined in a solitary block. They have no knowledge of what goes on in the laboratories, but occasionally other subjects will not return to their cells.

Those who have agreed to sell out the secrets of their technology and knowledge of the universe are brought into the Prometheus program and given more food and safety in exchange for useful information. Those with nothing to offer are subject to discipline, which is really a code word for torture.

This is the status quo. It is bleak and dire. Then everything changes with the acquisition of a new species. This species is a quasi-insectoid arthropod. It's no bigger than a cat. Nobody speaks of where it came from directly, as this is part of one of the most secret experiments within the facility. Even the player will not know until the end of the game.

This species rapidly reproduces and grows, it shoots spines from its body and molts every time it eats, doubling in body mass and spawning another 1-8 hatchlings, depending on what or who they ate. Each member of the species has a role and they operate as a hive, they morph into whatever is needed at the time, and quickly take over the base within only mere hours, establishing a queen and laying hundreds of eggs before the first day is through. It is later found out by humans that everybody in the galaxy knows about these things and nobody goes near them, they are basically the scourge of the universe. So in essence whoever helped them aquire one knew what would transpire and that it would likely damn the entire planet.

Plot Outline:

1. Go through part of the routine on your way to work in the factory.
2. Something happens and the scourge like aliens break out of the lab.
3. Alarms go off and people start panicking and running. They try to get security to stop the critters, but they have limited training and weaponry. They weren't prepared for something like this. You can hear people talking over the PA system and radios about how they are not paid enough for this and they don't have the weapons to handle these things "my last job was at a bank!"
4. You get a gun off a dead guard and start kicking some butt.
5. People are shooting at you AND the critters, it's a free for all.
6. Explore getting more weapons.
7. Find a power suit with an auto restoring shield, so more intense firefights can happen.
8. Private paramilitary force is called in to secure the facility through back channels, which means more challenging enemies and some better weapons, cover shooter mechanics become relevant and you obtain a stealth power up.
9. The alien bugs start winning thanks to their evolutionary powers and the pmf pulls out its remaining people. At this stage, you are also near the exit.
10. You finally reach the surface and enter into a shootout in the desert. There is also a helicopter that is circling overhead with a 50 cal machine gun providing cover fire for the retreating forces. Inside is the base commander, vietnam vereran, psychotic sadist and general lunatic taunting you over the PA. You have to chip away at its health with whatever you can find, taking cover when needed. Eventually when his health is low a large worm thing will burst out of the ground. It shoots down the helicopter with a red, firey plasma shot. You can't kill the worm thing it doesn't even have a life bar.
11. Where the helicopter exploded opened a hole in the outer wall.
12. Your suit picks up radio. You hear that this is gone too far. They've contacted their people in the US government, they opt to go with the nuclear option, literally. "We knew something like this could happen someday." "Our people could still be down there."
13. You have to get over a mountain pass and as far away from the site as you can before the jet arrives and drops the bomb(s) this could be a quiet segment with no shooting where you're mostly just running through a sandstorm.
14. You hear a loud sound approaching and then a familiar voice, it's the base commander again in an armored humvee. Encircling you and trying to hit you, taking shots from his window when he can. When you defeat him, the car flips over and he crawls out.
15. Another gray alien decloaks who has been there for who knows how long. He crouches near the commander.
16. "You. You did this... you showed us how to build the gateway, you knew what that creature was."
17. "A plague on the entire galaxy. As your people say, it's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."
18. The commander wants a last smoke. The alien helps him light it.
19. The other alien tells you to head East until you find a concrete building. He gives you his cloaking device.
20. Once you reach the canyon and take a few steps, you see a flash, the earth rumbles and then you see another slowly brightening white light that overwhelms everything before dying down. The canyon walls could cast intense shadows with a directional light.
21. Your powersuit will warn you about the radiation level. If you keep following the canyon you will arrive at some kind of service hatch thing you can enter. This leads into a different part of the same facility.
22. This other wing of the facility will be overrun with higher evolutions of the bugs, so cover mechanics are no longer as relevant, its more like doom now. Just shoot everything and strafe dodge globs of weird plasma/acid/whatever.
23. Parts of the facility are radioactive where the explosion of the bunker buster nuke next door has ruptured and spilled into it, and all sorts of twisted and broken concrete is everywhere and the power is mostly out, red emergency lights are on and things look a bit hellish now.
24. This part can have some random challenges and jumping portions. Also you will get your jet pack now, which will allow you to ascend and descend elevator shafts and complete difficult sections. It makes you slow and an easy target in a firefight, you will learn. But with steadily decreasing fuel and radioactive timed areas where you need to get out before it wears down your suit, it can get challenging.
25. You will come across a gateway thing eventually and have to traverse into different areas to help scientists open it, since it is the only way to escape the immediate situation. This is where the original creature came from. They believe that they can pinpoint the location of the source of the hive mind. Using this gateway, they can send someone through and have them kill the hive mind source. This should theoretically render all of the creatures docile.
26. Go through and enter into the homeworld of the scourgey creatures. This should be a complete contrast with what you expect. It is actually beautiful. Here the creatures make sense, this is their natural home. Fight your way through the alien landscape consisting of cliffs and crags, surrounded by dense vegetation, reach the lair, go into it, go deeper and deeper into a weird biological superstructure, kill some gross floating hive mind thing inside a giant brain looking thing a ma jigger.
27. You walk out and the creatures are just milling about.
28. You get abducted in a beam of light.
29. After a brief moment of suspense, it turns out to be your own race.
30. You're a hero. Those bug things were the last impediment to a unified galactic peace. The Great Primal Mind was old and demented, a new one will rise now and hopefully this time will see the value of peace.
31. They say "Earth will be dealt with."
32. The last scene is you watching a sunset on an alien planet with some cheesy matrix music playing.

That's all for the moment. Any critiques? Any suggestions?

 

That's an interesting story and I like the way you have it broken down into gameplay scenarios. Seems well thought out.

 

Seems straightforward and efficient, however what's the closure? Closure derive organically from the main stake. Seems like one of those situation that can't be solved and the planet is doomed, so the stake is not only to survive human and scourge (assuming hero is alien) but also to get the F*** out the planet, or stop the scourge AND the human from killing you, or stop the scourge and get back to the statu quo.

Now in order to exploit the checkov gun you dropped into that summary, I would use as a starting point:

Bam, even though they had higher standard of living, they still resent their condition, so they tricked human into getting one of those bug, even though by doing so they condemn themselves too, which they think is better than a live of servitude for themselves and their prisoner peer. Let's use the usual bio weapon lure.

Now while escaping you can unravel that "conspiracy" when the main rescue or meet out over fellow who lured human into that trap, in fact meeting at key moments different fellows is a great way to pace reveal and anticipation for the player:
- The first one is half crazy (because of torture? hint at worst fate possible for the main), he is hinting that everything will go down to S*** without revealing what exactly, which is before the reveal of the species.
- Introduce the species as much as a victim as you, it's a common knowledge in the galaxy, but not to the commoners alien, they have heard rumor based on the same, but don't no what it looks like, so he isn't connecting the two.
- introduce alien chatter, other commoner who banter about how they would like the species to destroy human, oblivious that the specimen they can see experimented by human is it.
- as thing go to hell, have the same fellow commoner crap their pants out, still oblivious, one dies horribly, help some other survivor to escape, which has partake to the banter
- have a "ascended" fellow point that the species is the scourge, have the survivor fellow who bantered about having the scourge on human lost is mind with anxiety, "not like this", as if he is responsible for his wish to come true, he want to live
- have another ascended working with human fighting the scourge, stoic figure with cold eyes, he silently knows there is no hope, says nothing but calm cryptic nihilism banter, he is profiting of the last instant of humanity and using the false hope he inspire to spend quality last time among human who lost their S***, he watch teh world burn. This is shown over multiple scene
- In a key scene where teh base is entirely destroyed and you escape to the outside world, after fighting a key human vilain who is responsible for the base and torture, and got defeated by dying under the mandible of the scourge, the ascended who cooperated with human, having nothing left to exploit but grinning ear to ear as he wallows in teh satisfaction of his plan, reveal he is the origin of the conspiracy with many other who sacrifice themselves to enact revenge. The banter survivor snap and punch him, and make a moral lesson, which is precious to the ascended, because that was his wish too.
- Now the hero is out, the scourge is in the nature, humanity is oblivious, and they are still alien.
-> that's a good point to have an open ending, you have closure on the premise (you where "enslaved", now you are free, but new doors and uncertainty open, there is new stakes)

That's the kind of story that's easy to serialized:
- arc Conflict about human acceptance/discovery of the alien, the main struggle to survive in a strange land
- second arc conflict over the warning over the impeding doom
- huge potential arc where the scourge is just a minor nuisance, but a build up toward them invading the word
- galactic melding as maybe an alien police force start investigating human, due to bio weapon trafficking, which can be a lauch pad to expended universe (and is the closure to the surviving arc of the main, ie getting the frak out of the planet, finding back his peer and family, etc ...)

 

Wow... this is really good. The traitorous alien who seems to be helping humanity is there to relish the dying moments of the commander and rub it in.

He could tell you which way to go, since he knows the location of the gateway. Maybe he can even give you his unique gun. I dunno.

Very cool you gave me two new characters!

 

Seems well thought out, but I would caution against following it too strictly. Writing is an iterative process like everything else. For my first novel, I had a long plan of my plot but ended up cutting large parts of it and reworking others. I imagine games will go the same way, specifically as your technical and time constraints close in. I know this happened with some of the biggest games on the market. The original mission of The Silent Cartographer in Halo was to kill the prophet of regret. The prophets didn’t even make it into the first halo game.

 

It's nice to hear that it's not just an amateur problem.

What did you cut, why? Did the story materialize a bit differently as it went? Would it have been harder to finish without the plot as a guideline?

I mostly need it as a guide, to know what the enemies need to look like, how fae through the game something occurs (10% thru... you should have starter weapons, 50% thru you have some upgrades but haven't seen the last few features yet, etc.) It will help me roll out the content better, so I can stretch the gameplay. Plus there's a need to balance difficulty with progress. Plus I just plain need to know what kind of concept art I need to draw and how many characters I need, need.