(Warning! Paragraphs here are not necessarily related to one another, except in that they are
all related to the subject of this thread.)
Keeping things at a level where the player doesn't
need to know about the Chrono series
(but players who do get some interesting additional subtext from the game from time to time)
probably isn't a bad idea, although it might be a difficult balancing act.
One thing that does suggest itself as a possible way to reduce the difficulty curve a little
for players having trouble would be some sort of "handbook for new agents" that places an
emphasis on passing secret messages via steganography and encryption (probably under some
heading like "How to Report In Without Arousing Suspicion"), so that it's at least obvious
that some puzzles involve looking for messages hidden in plain sight.
We need to get some general idea of who the characters are, other than Belthasar and the renegade
agent (who has, inside my head, somehow granted himself (or herself) the codename of Jaguar). I
figure the internal organization of Chronopolis probably looks something like:
(Central Regime)
.
.
Chairman Belthasar
|
|
Board of Directors
|
|------------------------
| |
Senior Agents (Research Staff)
|
|
Junior Agents (players)
Jaguar, if we decide to use him, would have been a senior agent. We'd also have the opportunity
to throw in other senior agents (some of whom Jaguar may have worked with) and any number of
shadowy Directors other than Belthasar.
That makes the plot progress something like...
1. Players join Chronopolis
2. Players carry out a few easy "missions" relating to whatever cover story we give for
Chronopolis' interest in the 21st century (with a PM playing the role of "senior agent" possibly
providing a little guidance if some puzzles turn out to be too tough)
3. A bulletin about Jaguar going rogue appears on the Chronopolis site
4. While missions become increasingly focused on tracking down the rogue/undoing whatever he's
trying to do, Jaguar starts embedding little messages of his own in places that players need
to check out for missions (and if no-one spots the first few, a "senior agent" should drop a
hint again).
5. Information gradually comes to light indicating that Belthasar is ordering experiments that
might conceivably cause the Day of Lavos, long since erased from the space-time continuum,
to be written back into history. Let's say that the only plan Jaguar's been able to come up
with for stopping the old buzzard is to kill him outright.
6. The players must decide whether to warn Belthasar (at which point they're tapped as double
agents and some sort of setup is made to lure Jaguar into a trap) or help Jaguar (which means
"hacking" into the incomplete FATE to disable key security systems which will allow Jaguar to
get close enough to do the deed).
7. Regardless of which path is chosen, Jaguar fails to kill Belthasar (although if the majority of
the players choose to help him, he succeeds in getting close). However, Belthasar, after
offering up whatever lame-ass excuses we can come up with ("Oh, no, that wouldn't
really have happened--Jaguar misunderstood..."--he might conceivably have to answer to some sort of
Board of Enquiry) decides that even careful involvement with an era as technologically advanced
as ours is too dangerous, and pulls the plug on contemporary Chronopolis operations in favour of
going back to the Middle Ages or some other less-fraught era.
One random idea I had that unfortunately isn't feasible without more programmers: what if the
Chronopolis staff made a half-assed effort to port the interface from the computers they're
more accustomed to to the Chronopolis website, and in the process left exploitable "bugs"?
It would have to be an unusual enough system that players would look at it and think, "Well,
this is weird," without it being too difficult to use--I was thinking that maybe something
based on mouse gestures might work.
