J
JhohCreexul
Guest
I posted this to HL Fallout about a month ago, but I don't think they took it seriously (I wonder why!). All it is right now is an idea, and since I don't know a single person who can do mod work, I haven't bothered to hammer down the details of stuff like the world map or the dialogue or script or characters, but I could handle that stuff easily, since it's the easiest part of making a mod. Oh yeah, and I'm not married to the title of this mod.
As for the game itself. You play a twiggy little fairy who, against warnings from the other fairies, flies under the forest canopy (which is supposed to be forbidden land to fairies), out of curiosity. She gets trapped in this area of forest land (say, her wings get blown off by a stray rocket) where the creatures are engaged in a massive scale war. So in a nutshell, it's Ferngully with automatic weapons.
You end up on one side of the battle, where your main base is inside a tree. You'll have your own room for saving your game or changing equipment, and there's a store where you can buy guns, and then the leader of your group who you can take at least most of the main storyline missions from. For now, the jist is that you've teamed up with friendly woodchucks and chipmunks and a rag tag federation of other woodland creatures, who's enemies are a gang of squirrels, rats, and other insects. There would be some possibly hidden side characters like a skunk who wants you to do missions for him, a snake who wants you to act as a decoy for birds hunting him. The story isn't some heavy Metal Gear Solid type of jabbering though, it's supposed to be lightweight goofball, with a mix of hard boiled real world realism and ridiculous animal characters who want you to do assassination jobs for them, gritty street life with woodland animals and insects, in a forest world, with real world weapons, and some magic fairy spells in the mix. I guess an easy basis of comparison would be the Conker games, except less anthropomorphic (no animals wearing clothing, jumping puzzles, talking plants, less overly cartoony style). You may occasionally try to feel the pain of the trees, but no one would take you seriously when you do this (in the game or real life).
The patch of forest you're in will be a giant persistant world, GTA style, except without cars and stuff, but there will be plenty of areas to visit, secret places to discover. I'm hoping you can go into these areas with minimal or no load times, just dynamic loading (the graphics and amount of physics doodads would be as minimal as possible to handle this, if possible, to avoid Vampire Bloodlines-type loading all over the place). The character models would have to have a lower than normal poly count to handle this kind of thing, although that would probably make the job easier on a modeler. There will be areas of the world controlled by gang territory, leading to missions where you fight large scale battles to take control of enemy territory. You'd start with basic shooting missions, like "blow away the termites in the beaver dam," or holding back an invasion of evil deer ticks, invading an enemy outpost and clearing it out or assassinating a lieutenant, followed by getting paid for a successful mission and/or some experience points. Eventually it would kick up to more crazy missions involving using insects for vehicles. There would occasionally be some real world vehicles in the game, like a boat (with machine gun that you start by firing until you have to drive the boat to safety). The final missions would lead up to a massive battle on the enemy's tree base, fighting their troops, base defenses, some stealth infiltration sabotage, and then blowing it all away into a storm of flaming splinters and fire and explosions.
You'd travel around this area in many ways. By foot, by insect, and perhaps by Half-Life 2 dune buggy. Why the HL2 dune buggy would end up in this magical fairy forest land, I don't know, and neither do the characters (so don't ask).
The world would be scaled in different ways, so the trees and leaves would be gigantic of course, maybe bigger than normal, but the forest floor would (maybe) have small scale grass so it doesn't block your view all the time. The characters would be normal scale, and the guns they carry would be scaled to fit them.
Your character's journey would be third person shooting with some adventure and role playing and stat raising. You'd be able to boost your shooting skill, reloading speed, max health, armor strength, ammo capacity. There would be various ways to do this, either by buying things in a store, finding hidden items that boost these things, or just through in-game experience. Aside from that, there would be plenty of hardcore blasting of fuzzy creatures into sweet sweet ragdoll death.
The weapons will all be realistic real world stuff, like AKs, Glocks, submachine guns, rifles, handguns--stuff you can get at your base's gun shop (or some secret locations elsewhere in the game). You can have things added to your guns like scopes, silencers, laser sights (think The Specialists). Your weapons become part of your personal arsenal, and the weapon accessories can be added or removed at will once you've bought them. A laser sight would give you a bonus to accuracy, a silencer would be a necessity for stealth missions. There would be the occasional explosive weapon, rocket launcher, or sniper rifle, but that's not set in stone (like everything else in this mod). By the way, one killer handgun for this mod would be that fully automatic Glock, the 17c I think? In battle you would have one handgun sidearm, and one primary weapon, CS style, which you can change in your personal quarters, back at base. The idea would be that you should bring weapons best suited for the upcoming mission.
There would be side missions you can take from people (and by people I mean animals) at various places in the outdoor world for extra money. You might need a specific weapon for the "main" missions, which means at some point you'd probably have to take side missions to get the right gun for the right job.
I do have plenty of ideas for specific missions in the game. There's one where you're on the machine gun of a Vietnam style patrol boat, blasting bomb-carrying fat insects out of the sky, followed by an insect somehow flying an attack helicopter. At some point, the driver of your boat gets hit by gunfire (in a cutscene) and you have to floor it to the end of the stream/brook. Another mission involves that beaver dam where you blow away mites and other annoying insects (who are evil of course), a later mission takes you back to the dam to destroy it at the request of the beavers, which is a typical bomb planting mission just to watch the whole thing blow up. The few stealth missions wouldn't be hardcore punishing Splinter Cell or Hitman type stealth, you'd automatically have a cloaking spell, and all you'd have to do is not break it or leave bodies lying around. I personally don't even like stealth conventions in games but there are a few missions where it could be interesting. There would be a few large scale raid missions where you follow a team of friendlies, Call of Duty style, through the forest ground and maybe into a base or two, clearing it out. There would be another like that where you join a group of friendlies into enemy territory on the backs of rocket-equipped snakes or non-flying insects. The last mission would start with a stealthy infiltration of the main enemy tree base to sabotage some of their defense systems, turrets, power grids, which you'd be able to do in any order you want, or you could leave parts unfinished, which leads to the final battle where the turrets or countermeasures would be active or destroyed depending on how much you did in the sabotage mission. There was another mission I was thinking of where you try to fight off a gigantic human hunter in a massive scale battle of insects swarming him and stuff, but I don't know how that one would turn out. As for the rest of the missions, I have those ideas covered.
There was one play mechanic I'm on the fence about, where you get a set amount of magazines depending on what ammo carrier you're wearing (like a gun belt, or a bandolier, more expensive ammo carrying equipment yields more clips you can carry at once). You could reload in between clips but it would leave a half empty clip in your gun belt until you hit a key to manually reload the partially or fully emptied clips, using your bullet cache. This "bullet sorting" system would start off with an appropriate speed, not too slow preferably, and increase in speed with an increased skill stat. But this whole idea could go, to stay with the basic Half-Life 2 style bullet sorting, because this idea could definitely suck in-game. This would sort of work like the Firearms system, where you don't discard partially depleted clips, but you don't magically form other clips together, you would push a key and it would start reloading a clip bullet by bullet (either starting with the least empty or most empty), and your current clips along with their current capacity would be displayed somewhere on the HUD. The important part is that your beginning skill at this wouldn't be too slow.
One of my more ridiculous ideas in a giant list of ridiculous ideas would be a mini game you could play in an arcade that's like a SNES era Final Fantasy game with a 16 bit type overworld map and random encounters, but it would be a kind of parody of Counter-Strike. In the game store you could watch other people play it on a big overhead screen, or play it yourself on the big overhead screen while you can still see your character and other people in the store watching you play. You'd play it in small portions throughout the whole game, and the result would be a cash prize or experience bonus at the end of each portion. Kind of like The Wizard, and just as ridiculous. There's no reason why this would make it into the mod, but I like it. My ideas for this mod constantly change and any can stay or go at any point.
As for the mod team, I can't code or map or anything, all I have are these ideas for a mod. If this mod/TC ever became a reality, the plan would be to create a full blown single player game by itself that could be sold over Steam. Kind of lofty, huh. To complete this mod would probably take a dedicated team, or a least a parade of undedicated people.
As for the game itself. You play a twiggy little fairy who, against warnings from the other fairies, flies under the forest canopy (which is supposed to be forbidden land to fairies), out of curiosity. She gets trapped in this area of forest land (say, her wings get blown off by a stray rocket) where the creatures are engaged in a massive scale war. So in a nutshell, it's Ferngully with automatic weapons.
You end up on one side of the battle, where your main base is inside a tree. You'll have your own room for saving your game or changing equipment, and there's a store where you can buy guns, and then the leader of your group who you can take at least most of the main storyline missions from. For now, the jist is that you've teamed up with friendly woodchucks and chipmunks and a rag tag federation of other woodland creatures, who's enemies are a gang of squirrels, rats, and other insects. There would be some possibly hidden side characters like a skunk who wants you to do missions for him, a snake who wants you to act as a decoy for birds hunting him. The story isn't some heavy Metal Gear Solid type of jabbering though, it's supposed to be lightweight goofball, with a mix of hard boiled real world realism and ridiculous animal characters who want you to do assassination jobs for them, gritty street life with woodland animals and insects, in a forest world, with real world weapons, and some magic fairy spells in the mix. I guess an easy basis of comparison would be the Conker games, except less anthropomorphic (no animals wearing clothing, jumping puzzles, talking plants, less overly cartoony style). You may occasionally try to feel the pain of the trees, but no one would take you seriously when you do this (in the game or real life).
The patch of forest you're in will be a giant persistant world, GTA style, except without cars and stuff, but there will be plenty of areas to visit, secret places to discover. I'm hoping you can go into these areas with minimal or no load times, just dynamic loading (the graphics and amount of physics doodads would be as minimal as possible to handle this, if possible, to avoid Vampire Bloodlines-type loading all over the place). The character models would have to have a lower than normal poly count to handle this kind of thing, although that would probably make the job easier on a modeler. There will be areas of the world controlled by gang territory, leading to missions where you fight large scale battles to take control of enemy territory. You'd start with basic shooting missions, like "blow away the termites in the beaver dam," or holding back an invasion of evil deer ticks, invading an enemy outpost and clearing it out or assassinating a lieutenant, followed by getting paid for a successful mission and/or some experience points. Eventually it would kick up to more crazy missions involving using insects for vehicles. There would occasionally be some real world vehicles in the game, like a boat (with machine gun that you start by firing until you have to drive the boat to safety). The final missions would lead up to a massive battle on the enemy's tree base, fighting their troops, base defenses, some stealth infiltration sabotage, and then blowing it all away into a storm of flaming splinters and fire and explosions.
You'd travel around this area in many ways. By foot, by insect, and perhaps by Half-Life 2 dune buggy. Why the HL2 dune buggy would end up in this magical fairy forest land, I don't know, and neither do the characters (so don't ask).
The world would be scaled in different ways, so the trees and leaves would be gigantic of course, maybe bigger than normal, but the forest floor would (maybe) have small scale grass so it doesn't block your view all the time. The characters would be normal scale, and the guns they carry would be scaled to fit them.
Your character's journey would be third person shooting with some adventure and role playing and stat raising. You'd be able to boost your shooting skill, reloading speed, max health, armor strength, ammo capacity. There would be various ways to do this, either by buying things in a store, finding hidden items that boost these things, or just through in-game experience. Aside from that, there would be plenty of hardcore blasting of fuzzy creatures into sweet sweet ragdoll death.
The weapons will all be realistic real world stuff, like AKs, Glocks, submachine guns, rifles, handguns--stuff you can get at your base's gun shop (or some secret locations elsewhere in the game). You can have things added to your guns like scopes, silencers, laser sights (think The Specialists). Your weapons become part of your personal arsenal, and the weapon accessories can be added or removed at will once you've bought them. A laser sight would give you a bonus to accuracy, a silencer would be a necessity for stealth missions. There would be the occasional explosive weapon, rocket launcher, or sniper rifle, but that's not set in stone (like everything else in this mod). By the way, one killer handgun for this mod would be that fully automatic Glock, the 17c I think? In battle you would have one handgun sidearm, and one primary weapon, CS style, which you can change in your personal quarters, back at base. The idea would be that you should bring weapons best suited for the upcoming mission.
There would be side missions you can take from people (and by people I mean animals) at various places in the outdoor world for extra money. You might need a specific weapon for the "main" missions, which means at some point you'd probably have to take side missions to get the right gun for the right job.
I do have plenty of ideas for specific missions in the game. There's one where you're on the machine gun of a Vietnam style patrol boat, blasting bomb-carrying fat insects out of the sky, followed by an insect somehow flying an attack helicopter. At some point, the driver of your boat gets hit by gunfire (in a cutscene) and you have to floor it to the end of the stream/brook. Another mission involves that beaver dam where you blow away mites and other annoying insects (who are evil of course), a later mission takes you back to the dam to destroy it at the request of the beavers, which is a typical bomb planting mission just to watch the whole thing blow up. The few stealth missions wouldn't be hardcore punishing Splinter Cell or Hitman type stealth, you'd automatically have a cloaking spell, and all you'd have to do is not break it or leave bodies lying around. I personally don't even like stealth conventions in games but there are a few missions where it could be interesting. There would be a few large scale raid missions where you follow a team of friendlies, Call of Duty style, through the forest ground and maybe into a base or two, clearing it out. There would be another like that where you join a group of friendlies into enemy territory on the backs of rocket-equipped snakes or non-flying insects. The last mission would start with a stealthy infiltration of the main enemy tree base to sabotage some of their defense systems, turrets, power grids, which you'd be able to do in any order you want, or you could leave parts unfinished, which leads to the final battle where the turrets or countermeasures would be active or destroyed depending on how much you did in the sabotage mission. There was another mission I was thinking of where you try to fight off a gigantic human hunter in a massive scale battle of insects swarming him and stuff, but I don't know how that one would turn out. As for the rest of the missions, I have those ideas covered.
There was one play mechanic I'm on the fence about, where you get a set amount of magazines depending on what ammo carrier you're wearing (like a gun belt, or a bandolier, more expensive ammo carrying equipment yields more clips you can carry at once). You could reload in between clips but it would leave a half empty clip in your gun belt until you hit a key to manually reload the partially or fully emptied clips, using your bullet cache. This "bullet sorting" system would start off with an appropriate speed, not too slow preferably, and increase in speed with an increased skill stat. But this whole idea could go, to stay with the basic Half-Life 2 style bullet sorting, because this idea could definitely suck in-game. This would sort of work like the Firearms system, where you don't discard partially depleted clips, but you don't magically form other clips together, you would push a key and it would start reloading a clip bullet by bullet (either starting with the least empty or most empty), and your current clips along with their current capacity would be displayed somewhere on the HUD. The important part is that your beginning skill at this wouldn't be too slow.
One of my more ridiculous ideas in a giant list of ridiculous ideas would be a mini game you could play in an arcade that's like a SNES era Final Fantasy game with a 16 bit type overworld map and random encounters, but it would be a kind of parody of Counter-Strike. In the game store you could watch other people play it on a big overhead screen, or play it yourself on the big overhead screen while you can still see your character and other people in the store watching you play. You'd play it in small portions throughout the whole game, and the result would be a cash prize or experience bonus at the end of each portion. Kind of like The Wizard, and just as ridiculous. There's no reason why this would make it into the mod, but I like it. My ideas for this mod constantly change and any can stay or go at any point.
As for the mod team, I can't code or map or anything, all I have are these ideas for a mod. If this mod/TC ever became a reality, the plan would be to create a full blown single player game by itself that could be sold over Steam. Kind of lofty, huh. To complete this mod would probably take a dedicated team, or a least a parade of undedicated people.
