The Pains Of War (its a mech game) WIP

so far i have finished the character creation now i’m on to making the story and other stuff

the idea is that you get thrown into war and after the a couple missions the war will be over (when the war ends ill put a 7 years later or something like that)and you will start doing what you did before the war and after a bit of time another war will start up and force you back into the battlefield anyway i thought of a scene where you either have to save your bunkmate but to do so you have to disobey orders risking the failure of the mission and if you save him after the war ends he will chill at your place often because of story reasons but if you didn’t save him then because of story reasons your son or daughter will die as i’m going to make a stray round from a mech hit either your bunkmate or your child so yeah also you manage to keep your mech after the war somehow i haven’t figured out how yet.

any case if you want to throw some ideas out to add to my rough idea of the story then ill gladly take them and try to mold it into my story somehow oh and i may add romance but i’m not sure

on a side note there is going to be 10 nations to choose from each having there own bonus
and should i make the war about fighting humanoid aliens like the zentradi from ronotech or just humans as its going to be a space mech game the mechs are called P.B.A. (personal battle armor)

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It sounds interesting, looking forward to seeing your progress. :slight_smile:

Hope all goes well, and good luck.

It sounds good but you save your kid your a terrible friend
but if you save your friend your a terrible parent

Sounds good! I always enjoyed Mobile Marine which is very similar, and Marine Raider. If you could work some ranking up in? Maybe allow you to make choices later in the game that has effects for your whole squad, kinda like a squad leader. That would make the game more enjoyable to me although I think I would still enjoy it without that but it seems like you have a unit-like aspect already planned.

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sounds great never thought about adding in a rank system ill see what i can do

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trying to get the demo up on dropbox ill get a link to you guys once its up its only a demo of the character customization but i personally feel that it is quit extensive.

here is a demo i decided to not use dropbox just look for The Pains Of War and tell me what you think so far hope you enjoy it

http://dashingdon.com/play/Crav_Stienbak/the-pains-of-war(demo)/mygame/

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Friggin’ mech war, yeah !
More seriously, seems interesting.
On a scale that goes from Gurren Lagann’s mechs to gundam’s, where do you think the mechs in your story would be ? I guess they will be closer to gundam but, hey, I just love Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

here is some images ill be using in the game and mech wise think armored core for the ps2 mixed with ring of reds amazing mobile artillery mech things and the anime appleseeds swat mechs and mix that shit all together and you’ll get an idea of the mechs I’m going for preferably i want them in categories also lots and lots of choices its my first game so i want to make it the best i can with lots of replay ability oh and the prologue is just so you can know your comrades backstories and so you can preferably get attached to your daughter that you will have for story reasons plus not enough mech games you know

the last photo will likely be the cover art photo to make my game look interesting
but yeah I’m trying real hard to make is so you get attached to the characters on a emotional level i mean i want to make them feel alive you know and not just meat shield 1,2,3 that have plot armor
I’m going so if you fuck up or make a wrong call then shits going to go down plus as a added bonus I’m thinking of ways to add a completely different story into the main story one where you just go rouge and do whatever you want though that will prob be a short 1 to 2 chapter story
also two handed melee weapons And shields that range from giant tower shields that have a center piece handle for better rotation to small plasma bucklers meant to punch the enemy P.B.A.that you can wield with one hand if your P.B.A.(personal battle armor] Its what I’m calling the mechs to make them sound unique I’m trying to go all out if you couldn’t tell) is strong enough. hope you enjoy it when it comes out ill update the demo so you can play through the prologue instead of just having it end after the character creation screen

I’m truly sorry I have talked to much and if you read all this than i salute you
P.S. I’m sorry if the daughter i created for the main character doesn’t act like a 2 year old
i may be 22 but i don’t have kids so I’m just going off of what i think a 2 year old daughter would act like

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these are just general idea’s of what i want the P.B.A.'S to look like the description may paint a different story than the pics sorry if they do but the tubes attached to the head that’s what the Synchro system is going to look like you hook it up to the inside of your P.B.A. to give you better response times and a small boost in pretty much everything your P.B.A. can do but it is a dangerous system to use and it is recommended that you only use this in a emergency

Siege Zeon but no seriously i just posted a mass amount of info for ya

That’s easy. Does no one remember the original wargame? You own the mech.

Thousands of years ago, the inhabited planets were all united under an interstellar league, headed by a royal family, a council of nobles, and a general who commanded the galactic defense force.

This lasted until one of the nobles on the council executed a coup, wiping out the entire royal family and trying to seize the throne for himself. The defense force refused to support the usurper. The league was plunged into civil war as the feudal houses each sought to claim the throne, with the defense force trying to remain neutral. Finally, the executive general had had enough. The members of the defense force and their families abandoned the great houses, took their massive fleet, and left for regions unknown.

That was 900 years ago. You, the MC, are a member of the nobility in one of the great houses, and have inherited your mech as part of your estate. Much of the technology from the golden age was lost, but you can still seek your fortune in battle, conquest, and of course, by salvaging the fallen mechs of your enemies. Leadership skills and resource management will be every bit as important as your piloting and your aim.

Battletech: The only game I know of where you can run off of a cliff, land heel-first on the head of a mech twice your size, crush the cockpit, kill the pilot, and then haul the whole thing off the battlefield to add to your armory.

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just updated the game demo you can now play all the way to chapter 1
http://dashingdon.com/play/Crav_Stienbak/the-pains-of-war(demo)/mygame/

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Initial thoughts? I feel super dizzy after reading that. Big blocks of un-broken up text are not soothing for someone who just wants to read.

My second and perhaps most glaring thought is that this story is very basic at the moment, to the point of being pretty clichéd. This isn’t necessarily the end of the world, but there are already hundreds of games about piloting mech-suits in the near future, three of which are on this site alone! (Mobile Armored Marine, Mecha Ace, Magikiras)

You need to really think about what your story can add to the concept of the mech-suit that these games haven’t already talked about.

I cannot stress that enough, I can forgive any number (within reason) of imperfections in a story if that story is doing something interesting with its source materiel, but if it’s just a by-the-numbers retreat of older tropes, then there’s nowhere for those mistakes to hide.

So what this means is that you have to go down to the raw guts of your story and ask yourself What is my story about?

Look at some of the most important works in the genre, like Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein and The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, both early explorers of mech-suit enhanced warfare that used their technology to explore a more important idea. Heinlein was talking about the positive aspects of a world run more like the military, while Haldeman was talking about the isolation of being a soldier in the Vietnam War using Einstein’s Special Relativity (seriously an interesting read, that one).

So think about your world for a moment.

Why do people fight each other?

What could they need from each other when they’ve got an entire galaxy to spread out into?

Why are they fighting in anthropomorphic metal human-suits?

If you can answer these three questions, you have the bones of a real universe to set your story in, whereas right now I don’t understand anyone’s motivations or interests in this game.

The only ‘information’ you have presented is a series of unrelated pictures of robots, while I’m a great believer in visualizing characters and props in fiction, the pictures alone don’t tell me anything except what your game’s visual style would be. That information is useless because by dint of being a text game your story will have no visual style whatsoever.

Don’t confuse style with substance, you need a lot more of the second one than you do the first.

Onto the demo itself, while I’m sure you’ve probably already noticed a great number of the spelling mistakes, grammar mis-steps and general lack of paragraphing, I’m not going to talk about that because I thoroughly believe in the power of the redraft so it would be terribly unfair for me to harp-on at you about that.

However the opening page is a scant four lines before the first choice. I’m all for introducing the action as quickly as possible, but the ‘action’ in this case is your character filling out a dry personal information form…

Not exactly maximum-thrill-factor over here.

One of the questions is a choice of my home nation (or planet… or government… I don’t know…) a seemingly important decision that I cannot make for narrative purposes, instead merely picking a stat-boost for later. All choices must appear to be more than number allocation, every choice I make should help define me as a role-playing character. In short there are too many countries and not enough reasons to like one over the other.

I’m also going to assume that you’re using a lot of place-holder names until you can think of something? Unless Admiral Nelson once helmed the good ship H.M.S SpaceBattleCruiser at the Battle of Cadiz and I’m not particularly up on my history. Naming things is important, especially in science fiction. The naming of a ship can help the reader to know what kind of culture the story takes place in. What do they name their ships after? Scientists? Explorers? Generals? Mountains? All of this data is a way for you to put in information for the reader without an incongruous info-dump.

While I’m not really certain what my character is doing throughout the demo, I’m going to guess that he/she is signing up for the military? Why is he bringing a small child along? That makes no sense.

However when he/she is done signing up for the military (a process that takes about as much time as making a latte it seems) he/she is safely ensconced onboard the mighty ship SpaceBattleCruiser and has their own palatial (by military standards) apartment where the local news is playing?

That makes no sense.

How can they afford a kitchenette? I’m not even at war and I can’t afford a kitchenette! I have to cook my road-kill over a flaming oil drum and this guy/girl gets a fancy New York apartment when he/she signs up for the military?

Also the propaganda broadcast was a clunky info-dump, you should try and drip-feed information about the world more slowly.

I would recommend starting over and attacking the story from a different angle. You say in your premise that your protagonist is a veteran from a prior war, right?

So why not have your ‘tutorial’ take place during the final battle of that particular war? Instead of trying to info-dump information, have your player focus on the physical act of moving from point-to-point, taking out enemies, pursuing critical objectives, until finally the radio pipes in: The War’s Over! Hurray! Let’s go home and take iconic photographs where we kiss nurses without their permission!

Then fast forward to X years later, where you are stood-down from military service and perhaps giving an interview for a documentary about the war, where the player can organically learn a little about the world and its people in a more conversational and less confrontational setting?

This stand-down civilian life can allow you to get in some quick customization about your protagonist. Does he/she miss the old days? Or are they happier as a civilian, hoping that war never comes by again. Establish their life now, their loves, families, occupations.

All the stuff you’re about to take away when an enemy Basestar jumps into orbit and starts decimating the cities, nukes raining down from on-high to turn your world into glass.

Regarding having an excuse to talk about a past war, the advertising team at Bungie did the best take on this I’ve ever seen for a game. I find Halo games repetitive to the point of unpleasant, but I have to give major props to their marketing men. This advert is the sort of thing I’m thinking of when I say a documentary-style exposition:

I remember there were two or three ads like this that got me really interested in the world they were creating, with little human moments like an old man describing how an enemy gun worked and getting upset when asked to hold it.

Those little human moments would really enhance your atmosphere, and actually reinforce the notion that war is… well…

Painful.

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I never thought about it like that thanks for the feedback

Hey I have been dealing with some asinine stuff in RL but i’ve started to develop the game from the ground up as I found a lot a stuff that I was able to improve on so here is the brand new demo https://dashingdon.com/play/Crav_Stienbak/the-pains-of-war-demo/mygame/index.php?cb=23004

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Please give thoughts on the demo

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