Chrono Spiritual Successor Brainstorm Session (Come and join the fun!)

[Kodokami]

I haven't been able to say much (been out of town, still am), but at this point I think we should really follow Thought's idea for homework.

Go online and find a short game to play, something new and unheard of. Take note of fresh ideas and concepts. Tell the Compendium, play another game, etc.

I'd say more but I'm out of time.

[tushantin]

No offense to anyone here, but we're going nowhere with the conversation. Story, plot, characters, and writing in gen
I know that no one here is purposely trying to be a jerk or insist that their way is the only way, but unfortunately with extensive debates like this focusing on subjects that even the "pros" argue themselves (don't even start the story/plot snafu), it's not hard to come across as a know-it-all ass. The important thing is to put our heads together and focus on compromise, even on subjects that you hold very dear, to achieve a cohesive end result (or hell, even get started). No movie, video game, novel, or any creative product is perfect. Creating something purely via one's own thinking will give you a flawed result. Creating something via a group's thinking will... also create a flawed result. The important thing is that we work together to create a result in the first place. After all is said and done, if the end product isn't amazing, it's still a better than nothing. And I'm not saying "Make something crappy just because", I'm only encouraging more focus, more cooperation, more compromise.

Put simply, if any of us are "right" in our individual arguments, congratulations, but it doesn't matter. Moving on now.

Good point. MOVING ON NOW...

Let's say we were to simplify Viewtiful Joe gameplay, but with time-travel. Here's how we'd begin:

Story: (Source: Wikipedia) "Edison sold candy and newspapers on trains running from Port Huron to Detroit, and sold vegetables to supplement his income. He also studied qualitative analysis, and conducted chemical experiments on the train until an accident prohibited further work of the kind. Edison obtained the exclusive right to sell newspapers on the road, and, with the aid of four assistants, he set in type and printed the Grand Trunk Herald, which he sold with his other papers.[11] This began Edison's long streak of entrepreneurial ventures, as he discovered his talents as a businessman. These talents eventually led him to found 14 companies, including General Electric, which is still one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world."

An aspiring economist named Tobias Edison believes that the world weighs down upon him and he can't move further to accomplish his dreams, and perhaps experienced events in his childhood that gave him the Freudian Excuse to do stuff that makes the gameplay and game-mechanics. Now, Edison decides to go on an espionage mission to steal patents and acquire intellectual properties that may make him rich (and powerful) beyond his wildest dreams.

(Yes, feel free to laugh at that)

Gameplay: It's fairly 2D (but can use 3D models and environs, like Bad Piggies did), resembling a Platformer. The navigation could either be much like Dark Avenger (Android game), or Gesture-based -- not unlike Angry Birds, but where sliding across Edison and target would make him "travel" there. Edison starts off with just a few abilities at first -- probably even just one -- but as he passes each stage and beats bosses, not to mention steal patents, he gains more abilities to make use of. Some of these abilities can be blinding people with a light-bulb (much like how the Men in Black do it), lighting up dark passages with the same device, sending messages across maps (perhaps to Graham Bell?), creating "illusory substitutes" or clones via Movie Projection device, Magnetic powers (let your imagination fly there), syphoning enemies / money / patents via a vacuum apparatus, creating batteries to power giant mechs (why the heck not?), etc. We have no limits! At some point in the game, Edison may even have power over Copyright and may be able to "summon" Law Enforcements to help him in his battles (AI's that travel with Edison everywhere for a limited time).

Since Edison is an anti-hero of the story, his antagonists would range a myriad, such as good people (like Da Vinci) and evil people (like Graham Bell, Edison's "Just-as-evil Twin").

But wait: you ask "where is Time Travel" here? Here's the thing -- Edison is not unlike Magus from CT, and would go on a cut-throat adventure to seek patents for Time Travel, so that he could... er... save his hypothetical sister from a hypothetical scarlet fever / tuberculosis? Anyway, he realizes that Nick Tesla was once visited by a Time Traveller called "Einstein", and wonders if Tesla got his hands on some information regarding that invention. At the end of the story, the final "dungeon" passed, he realizes that Tesla wasn't given the information and patent on paper. That information was right in his mind, like almost every blueprint of his inventions. In order to get that information, Edison must beat the final boss Tesla and extract the information (with the patent of "feather-tickle torture") before Tesla erases the info from his mind. (Time limit battle)

Goal: To be filthy rich and rule the world. And possibly save some hypothetical sister.


EDIT: Character Design!

[Thought]

That looks suspiciously like a sonic screwdriver...

Anywho, I took a look at two games (Vulpine Adventures, Outernauts), partially because they are quasi-pokemon re-imaginings (and I have fond memories of when the series was new), but also because CTDS had quasi-pokemon elements.

Outernauts is really just pokemon in space, although quite fun, partially because enemies are visible on the world map, you get a nice level of customization (dress up your character, decorate your home world, and not only can you affect your creature's stats, you also can affect traits that will determine how they grow).

Vulpine Adventures focuses more on a single creature and it's development, with equipment. Both are fun, though outernauts has a lot to it, while Vulpine can be beat in a half hour.

The separation of player v battler also got me thinking about Final Fantasy: My Life as King. In that game you're the king of a town. You design it, build it up, and send heroes on quests (they bring back the stuff you need to expand the town further).

So I tried to think of how to smash those together with CT and Time Travel (since TT is a key element of CT feel, I wanted to make sure it was specifically addressed in my thoughts, hence why it's not just a mashup between the games and CT). The end result was something I'll call "The End of Time: The Video Game."

A short little adventure about a future historian/scientists who attempts to craft a device that can look through time (to put historical debates to rest: gee, can you tell that I'm a historian?). Device goes wrong, opens up a time portal, and sucks him to the End of Time. To return home (Quantum Leap reference?) he has to change time so that his experiment never went wrong (yeah, paradox, but this is a game, so that's okay). I'm imagining he does this via the use of tiny time portals (too small for him to fit through) and temporal goo native to the place that responds to his thoughts (thus, becomes alive).

The game would focus on sending this goo on missions via the portals to change the past (giving us mini story-lines: what if the french revolution didn't go guillotine happy, what if Trotsky, not Stalin, came to power?). While the goo is on a mission, the player goes around and build up a home in the end of time, so then be able to access later missions.

That's, of course, a first pass at the idea: as I've said, to get to something really great, one has to drill down a few layers to the originality. But perhaps this can be mashed up with yet something else.

EDIT: Instead of real world history, I could see a somewhat philosophical game develop on affecting one's own personal timeline.

[tushantin]

So.... Nobody wants to get jiggy with Tobias Edison?

....So, more cake for me then?

[Thought]

Well, to try to spark further discussion, perhaps a humorous take on your idea? Instead of "cool" inventions, T.E. keeps getting the bottom of the barrel stuff, like hair in a can (acts like a disguise, letting T.E. sneak by foes), parachute pants/jackets (let's him fall from great heights), bump-its (lets him break blocks, Mario-style), or Chia Pets (summons a chia familiar to attack enemies).

[idiotekque]

There are some really cool, interesting ideas floating around. On their own, as a gamer, I'd definitely give them a whirl.

Unfortunately, I'm not getting the Chrono vibe. At all. We started this whole brainstorming session in the hopes of first, reinventing Crimson Echoes, and then moved onto a grander objective, creating a spiritual successor to the Chrono series. Thomas Edison and little blobs of goo and whatnot are awesome. Very interesting ideas. But I'm sorry, nothing about them says Chrono. There are loads of stories with time traveling in them. Does that make them feel like the Chrono series? Does Doctor Who (as much as I love it to death) feel like the Chrono series? No, not at all. Time travel =/= Chrono Trigger/Chrono Cross.

I realize we aren't making something exactly like the Chrono games. Totally understand that. But it really feels like these ideas are traveling into totally different realms that have nearly nothing in common with the Chrono series. Now I'm not trying to jump in and say "All these ideas are junk, here's my better idea",  but rather I'm just trying to steer the ideas in a much more Chrono...y direction.

Okay, brainstorming, you (the protagonist) wake up in a small, modern looking town. You're a young teenage girl with flowing lava red hair and a knack for martial arts and swordplay (we've gotta pay some homage to a certain red-headed swordsman). While the setting looks modern, lets say that technology in your time is still very limited (limited electricity, no firearms/or only muskets and the like, no big cities, town guards and such to keep monsters in the wildernesses away, etc). The protagonist has somewhere to be, a festival, a concert, a fencing competition, I don't care. It would just be somewhere a good amount of people are. While you're there, a young man around your age in fairly odd clothes befriends you, and before you know it, you're whisked through time and space to his era (a much more medieval settings, with knights and wizards and goblins, etc). He explains to you that time is damaged. People and places in his time have been disappearing, and before long, the realm will be in a state of chaos and anarchy (perhaps he took drastic measures and pulled you into his efforts because members of the royal family have been disappearing). He carries an artifact that allows him to traverse the time lanes (he can't choose where he wants to go, he can just travel through time rifts), which brought him to your time. Unfortunately, that rift has since closed, and you have no way of getting home (perhaps you have a personality as fiery as your hair, and this creates a love-hate relationship with the young man). Why did he choose you? Maybe this isn't clear, I'll leave holes on purpose because this is a pretty barebones idea, I'd love for people to fill in the blanks.

What happens from here? I think it would be a cool game mechanic to find time rifts near where people and places have gone missing. You travel into the past, fix what's broken, and the jump back when they're resolved to admire your handiwork (some of these could be vital to the story, some could be sidequests that help people and families, repair civilized areas, nature, etc, for rewards). Now, through your trips through time, you come across a mysterious cloaked figure who tries to thwart your efforts. He's clearly not a good guy, because you're trying to bring people back from the bowels of time and restore their rightful place, while he wishes them dead. Is all of this because of him? Further into the story, maybe the king or queen dies suddenly? It comes out that the time traveling young man is actually the prince. He's completely convinced that time is damaged and the king/queen's death must be changed in time. You fight to change things and succeed... but in doing so, you alter a key event in the planet's history. Time retaliates and tries to correct itself, leading to the very rifts you worked so hard to repair, perhaps even further damage, and you're hurled into another, completely unknown era with no way back (maybe the prince's artifact is damage or lost). All along, perhaps the cloaked man was trying to let the time rifts persist because they were time's way of compensating for the damage you caused through saving the king/queen, and now that you restored them AND irrevocably damaged time, the world is plunged into darkness and destruction.

All of this idea is open to "construction", but especially what happens after this. I could see perhaps that the twisted shell of the world after this point leads to that king/queen who was supposed to die living on, and becoming a powerful, evil tyrant (perhaps this would have happened anyways, hence why they were meant to die, and perhaps it was the cloaked figure who killed them in the true timeline and the prince saw this). Your goal at this point in the game is to kill the very overlord you thought once saved, and in killing them, are able to restore time to its natural balance. And it's sort of thrown in there, but I think it would be interesting for the prince to actually be from another time, sent to his resident era for an unknown reason, carrying the artifact that allows him to travel through time, when he was a baby. Why? I don't know, this whole story is open to construction, new reasoning, etc.

And like I said, I'm not set on saying "My idea is best", and I'm inviting people to take it apart, smash it, and put it back together. The point I'm trying to get at is creating a world and storyline that really feels akin to the Chrono series. I think this general idea could really hit on that mark, and wouldn't be something that is all that difficult to MAKE as a game (I really think it should be a classic RPG like Chrono Trigger as far as gameplay goes).

Any ideas? Pleeease chop this thing up and put it back together.

[tushantin]

Unfortunately, I'm not getting the Chrono vibe. At all.

Unfortunately, based on FaustWolf's idea, we can't hope to accomplish bigger projects at our first go, so we'll have to start small and can't afford larger and more ambitious plots. Tobias Edison is actually a small starter game that will eventually expand into a larger, Chrono-themed storyline. But I won't tell you why just yet.  

As FaustWolf explains it, "Focusing on the inventor of time travel could be interesting; it would almost be like Chrono Trigger starring Lucca." Though, ironically, I actually modelled Tobias after Magus / Janus, even though he has Lucca-esq traits.

Your story idea gets interesting in the second-half explanation! Though the first half lost me... while I get the homage to Crono bit, I think the beginning only seems to be a mashing-up of CT and Doctor Who (which you'd agree as something even more restraining than my previous suggestion of Crimson Echoes remake). But let's say we develop on that anyway: how do you intend to adapt it into a simple game that's not as complex as CT, but still has a similar flair?

Just a simple request to everyone participating in the brainstorming session: Use a short-format for your pitches as I've done, and you'd find it not only easier to structure and explain much with few words alone, but also make it enjoyable for everyone to run their imaginations with a bit of stimulus. Something like what I did in my first post:

Inspiration Source: (Optional) Where did you get this idea and why?

Pitch (Story): Two to Three sentences only (four or five only in dire cases, but not more). Doesn't have to be perfect, but enough to explain the central concepts.

Platform targets (Optional): Two sentences should be fine.

Gameplay: Feel free to make this a short paragraph. But only one paragraph (two only if it's really important).

Misc Data: Another paragraph or two to explain the overall.


So based on this format, I can (with a bit of idea editing) summarize your pitch as follows:

A Red-Haired swordsman happens to attend the Dragon Fair at Turn-of-the-Century China and meets a dashing / ugly young man, with whom she accidentally finds herself falling through time (Fushigi Yuugi, anyone?). Stranded 600 hundred, her knowledge of history (and unique clothing and speech style) make her seem as a Prophet or an eccentric witch, until she realizes that Time itself has become unstable and people are beginning to vanish without explanation. With the help of her friend, she must not only try to set things right and fix the disturbances in Time, but also survive and find her way back to the Dragon Fair where her family awaits. Otherwise *SPOILERS* she'll end up like Amy Pond.

The Gameplay is much like what I described in the Tobias Edison post, but with a tiny bit of difference: the gesture platformer will also help you travel back-and-forth in time, changing the elements in the levels and at the same time influence your gameplay. Instead of the Epoch, we can use a magical artefact (acquired in the middle or late in the game) that can help you "Time Jump" between eras, but only to a limited scale, as you'll need to recharge in between.


Which brings me to a criminally overlooked game with a story of vengeance...

[youtube]SW7AOmKJR6Y[/youtube]

[idiotekque]

Eh, I don't see the Doctor Who vibe in my suggestion. Chrono Trigger has even more of a Doctor Who vibe in my opinion with Lucca, who's got that quirky Doctor quality about her, and is the one who gets you fired through time in the first place.

But like I said, I'd like to see how people chop up my idea and tweak things. I just don't feel like American human history (even tweaked human history) fits the Chrono vibe with Tobias Edison and stealing inventions and whatnot. Not saying it isn't a nice idea for a game, just doesn't feel like a Chrono successor.

[alfadorredux]

@idiotekque: Personally, my problem with your suggestion, as presented, was that the first bit was less an homage to Chrono Trigger than a ripoff of it. Anyone recognizing it might think that the rest of the game was similarly derivative, and discard the entire thing before getting to the original parts.

My problem with tushantin's suggestion is that platformers in general don't do much for me—but I acknowledge that as a personal idiosyncracy. That and, while it's a neat idea, I suspect the end product would end up feeling more like Shadow Hearts: From the New World than any of the Chrono games. That isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but it doesn't seem to be what most people here want.

[idiotekque]

That's kind of the point though. It's basic on purpose so that people can swap things out and tweak it. I didn't even specify where she was going, and waking up isn't exactly much of a ripoff or something that absolutely had to happen. If you think that part is a ripoff, I encourage you to change it. I'd like to see what people come up with.

I am attached the redheaded swordswoman, though. I think that's a nice homage and still interesting.

[Mr Bekkler]

Hey guys, interesting conversation!

I just thought I'd pop in here and give a shout out to an element of the Chrono games that seems not to have been discussed much: the tropes! By that, I mean that a big part of what made the feel of the Chrono games was how it took the the archetypes, the cliches, the symbolism, all of it taken from a variety of other sources, and then tweaked, compressed, and combined it all to help realize its own world. Where Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest had several iterations and something of a mythology built up, Chrono Trigger had no precursor and thus its architecture was literally an amalgam of what the developers thought would be cool and mesh well. The key is variety, that is, drawing from several very different sources of inspiration, different cultures, mythologies, codes of ethics and beliefs, etc.

Of course, you can't forget the other most important part: the twists! Think back to when you first found out the connection between Lucca and her mother's condition, or the relationship between Magus and almost any other character, how blown away you were or how driven you felt to keep the story coming. It's like how you were supposed to feel after finding out Lynx was Serge's dad (I keed, I keed). That feeling comes from taking the said classic archetypes and tropes, and throwing a fresh spin on them, sometimes a twist or just something simple to subvert expectations and deliver something new. To me, these qualities are essential for a game to feel "like Chrono".

When it comes to the plot, really anything will do, as long as it involves something wrong with a timeline, a fake-out big bad boss at the mid point, and a real big bad boss at the end whose defeat ensures salvation for the world. For characters, you need a somewhat normal main character through whom the player can experience the world anew, a friendly companion and/or romantic interest who is also normal for story tension, and a small variety of non-human or at least non-normal team mates that cover a broad spectrum of the fantasy genre. They each have their shortcomings they can overcome over the course of the plot and they don't have to all get along, in fact if they bicker at first it might be better and drive the dialogue.

I suggest if it's supposed to be kept small and simple, but still actually work as a spiritual successor to the Chrono series and involve time travel, you'll want to use at least three eras: past, present, future. If you're worried about having too much story or the game getting too big, you could always release in shorter episodic segments, so that you would be able to keep each part small and manageable and everyone could quit any time without having all the work go unreleased.

And lastly, as for the gameplay genre, I don't see anything but RPG working for this concept. A side-scroller might work as a game with Chrono characters, but nobody is going to play it and think "man this makes me feel like I felt when I played Chrono Trigger/Cross the first time".

Them's my two cents. Good luck ladies and gents! Wish I could help, but I'm busy  

[idiotekque]

Nice points, Bekkler.

I don't really understand the thought behind an RPG similar to Chrono Trigger being too difficult to accomplish. I seriously doubt we could make something as good as Chrono Trigger, true, but as far as game development goes, creating something similar to a decades old SNES RPG isn't exactly the biggest undertaking in the world. Time-consuming to make it as grand, yes, but not out of reach at all.

Also, I don't know if anyone has played the game Fortune Summoners, but that side scrolling action RPG type of gameplay could work as well, I'd say.

[Mr Bekkler]

One final suggestion, it's the last one, I SWEAR. Combine the ideas. Alfador redux's prince flung forward in time is the man who meets Idioteque's redheaded swordswoman. He's trying to find his betrothed, but starts to fall for the swordswoman in their travels together. They go to the future and meet Tushantin's wild-eyed scientist who is on the run because he's already been stealing inventions. They team up and end up finding some kind of automaton team mate (like a robot of clockwork or a rock monster or a living wood carving a la pinoccioand) and a fantasy beast (maybe a person with an animal head or some sort of small magical creature), and they need to be working together for a purpose, so maybe they're traveling through time involuntarily but somehow stuck together because of the real big bad boss.

[idiotekque]

That's not bad, actually. Tushantin's scientist kinda pays homage to Lucca, in that regard.

We shall call it... Franken-Chrono! 

[Mr Bekkler]

I think the name is obvious. Time Break. As in Chrono Break, but without the copyright or intellectual property attached to it.

And yeah, it's pretty much gender-reversed CT but whatever it sounds cool.