Story Ideas?

[TheRandomMelon]

Hi everyone,

Looking for ideas for the story. Obviously the one Philip did was pretty bad, so how do we improve it?

A few ideas I had from before:

• You start on MS-DOS. You connect to a BBS board and meet the owner of the BBS board. You talk with him (or her, you don't know, it's text on a screen) and they send you a program, claiming it transports you to 10 years in the future. You open it and decide to try it, thinking it won't work. You end up in 1998, on Windows 98. You then have to try and find that mysterious guy/girl on the BBS board on the Internet and discover how they did it... before a mysterious trap in the program activates. (Still better than the old story)
• You and a friend are using Windows 95 in 1995 and decide to create a program that lets you travel 10 years in the past, or 10 years in the future. However, the government is ALSO trying to make a program like this, and finds out about you and your friend's efforts and tries to stop you through various methods. You have to defeat these methods of sabotage, create your time traveling program, and travel 10 years into the future.

Let me know what you think!

[AshesOfEther]

I don't exactly like either. For the first one, why would the BBS owner just decide to send you such a powerful program? How do they even know it works? It's not like they tested it, because then they themselves would at least be in the 90s. They can't have used it in 1978 to get to 1988, because MS-DOS wasn't even out by then. It's unlikely they know it works by testing with someone else, because then they would have to wait 10 years, and again, they can't have done that.

For the second one, how does one just decide to create a program that allows time travel? I certainly don't just go to my friend and say "Sup wanna create a program to break the laws of physics?", and unless I am the only sane person in a world of insanity, I doubt others do.

None of this really explains why such a program works in the first place. The two ideas basically suggest it just calls some timeTravel() function or does some advanced algorithm to create a worm hole. I suggest that it uses some special audio frequencies to trigger the time travel, by creating a time vortex or whatever it could be called.

The first one also says the player ends up on Windows 98, but doesn't really explain where this Windows 98 computer came from. It could be imagined that the software takes the player to the exact same time of day and day of the year some amount of years later. So if the player starts out at 12:30 AM March 12th 1988 and travels 10 years, they end up at 12:30 March 12th 1998. My idea is that the game starts out late at night, sometime around 11 PM-12 AM, and when the player travels in time, they end up in their own house, just a few years in the future, where the future player has likely upgraded the computer. Since it's so late, future them will be asleep, so there is nobody to interfere.

There is also the problem of why the player would need to travel to the future in the first place. It could be that some piece of information that would be needed now can only be accessed by the player, and for some reason, it's only possible for mass to travel backwards in time by as much as it has traveled forwards. This would be similar to gravity, where an object can only fall as much as it has been lifted (Ignoring things coming from space of course).

[TheRandomMelon]

Depends on what kind of PC knowledge you're talking about. Most people playing this game will likely have a decent understanding of modern-day computers, and maybe some of older ones. But they'd probably still be confused about Windows 3 not being its own operating system.

My suggestion is to treat Windows 3 as a separate OS from MS-DOS, which would make the game more accessible to people who are unfamiliar with old operating systems, while still making sense for people who are familiar.

I suppose. So what story idea are we going with here overall?

[AshesOfEther]

I think the BBS one makes more sense overall. It maybe shouldn't be the BBS owner though. I have 5 suggestions of my own. All of them are based on there being some sort of information that can only be accessed in the future, but is needed in the present to prevent a catastrophe.

1. You join a BBS and some dude you went to high school recognizes you. Maybe you use a code name you made up back then as your username. That could have been like 3-6 years before the events of the game. Back then, you were the cool guy who knew how to do pretty much anything on the school computers. Because of this, he has been looking for you, because he knows that you have the abilities to stop the catastrophe.
2. You join a BBS and find a post seeking skilled users to help someone with... something. The post doesn't really explain it. You complete all the tests, and get access to a chat room with a few others, where the post author describes the mission you're about to embark on.
3. You join a BBS where a well-known user suddenly disappeared days or weeks before. Sometime later in the game you discover that he was killed by the people behind the catastrophe, but that's not important atm. You find a secret message by them, leading you through a series of tests, and eventually find the software. You travel in time, and when you arrive, you learn that a few others completed the tests, but instead of finding the software, they found some text along the lines of "You did well, but I am afraid that were I to give more than one access to what was once here, my efforts would be in vain. Be patient. Your time will come.". They now help you throughout the rest of the game.
4. No. 3, but instead of being killed, he was about to die of some disease, and had to get someone healthier to do the job for him.
5. No. 3, but instead of being killed, he committed suicide because he feared that he would be tortured by the people behind the catastrophe.

My preferences are 5-3-4-2-1 in that order. Lemme know what you think.

[TheRandomMelon]

(see above, holy crap I don't want it to show the entire quote in my reply)

I'm personally torn between 4 and 5. 4 would be better in the way that it wouldn't mention a dark topic like suicide, but at the same time, it's also a very important mental issue that if covered correctly, would make for an intense and pivotal moment in the story.

Anyone else want to chime in? (e.g. @AdrUlb)

[AshesOfEther]

I mean, death is already dark, and if you think about it, if you know you're about to die from a disease very soon, you'd probably be in the hospital, and not at a desk with a computer.

[TheRandomMelon]

I mean, death is already dark, and if you think about it, if you know you're about to die from a disease very soon, you'd probably be in the hospital, and not at a desk with a computer.

I guess so