My Ideas: Pirates of the Video Gamean

Ah, the good stuff. We return to the good old fashioned video game ideas that make me so interested in writing this stuff. Today, we talk about a game idea I had some years ago, but it started someplace completely different. You may remember an earlier post, where I confessed to using random trait generators to create new characters, primarily in the game Ascension. However, I used earlier for simpler ideas and just training and practice. I would randomly generate traits, and then I would use those traits to make the main protagonist and an entire game idea

In this case, the three traits were...well, I can't remember specifically. I think they were electricity-using, power absorbing, and animating? It was something like that. At any rate, the idea I got from it was using a robot warrior in a dystopian world. The robot was a simple soldier or maintenance worker who was thrown out of the city of the elites for some offense and abandoned in the increasingly large piles of debris and rubble that formed under and around the city. The game was about him wandering the junkyard and, I guess, defeating evil. His powers revolved around draining electricity from the mechanical garbage and either using it for his electrical powers or charging the functional or slightly broken robots to create an army. It was basically a real-time simulator with a more powerful main character and resources to make new units drained directly from most enemies. Imagine Pikmin but darker and edgier. It's a moot point, because this isn't the game I'm talking about. I moved on to some more complex ideas.

And then Pirates of the Caribbean happened.

And so I was obligated to make a pirate-themed idea. It was the law, after all. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time also came out about this time, and the skillful, acrobatic, and witty hero (before the sequels made him angsty,) also appealed to me. The game idea that I had started with these two ideas. I created the idea of Derek Seawince, an adventurer and dungeon explorer of the Indiana Jones/Lara Croft variety. Sands of Time's abilities include a magic dagger that could reverse time, letting him reverse deaths and effectively replacing the "lives" of normal games. Similarly, Derek is a limited psychic who could see the future events of actions. As long as the power lasted, whenever he died, that didn't really happen; that was just a psychic projection of a mistake he could have made. It was a fun ability for cut scenes as well; he enjoyed saying the stupidest things possible to the violentest things possible and making that a psychic projection should the obvious happen.

It was fun, but he's still not a pirate, so we had a problem. This was rectified when I remember my electric-using robot and decided that if it worked there, it could work in the fantasy world equivalent. In this case, Derek discovered an ancient shrine containing the Weapons of Spirits, supposedly ancient artifacts. He manages to get in, but his methods caused the entire temple to collapse. Luckily, he found one Weapon called the Staff of Force moments before the thing fell apart. He was crushed instantly, while the other weapons were sent out of the shrine entirely, falling off the cliff into parts unknown. Fortunately, while his body was destroyed, Derek's soul was stored in the weapon, hence the name. He nonetheless was stored in suspended animation until the shrine was excavated almost 1000 years later, and then the staff created a new body out of its power, letting him effectively live forever and create new bodies as needed as long as the staff itself remains intact. He was shocked by how much the world changed in that time, though. For example, as he put, "And that ocean wasn't there the last time I checked, I can tell you that."

Yes, the local land flooded in the ensuing centuries, Wind Waker style, for reasons unknown. Lacking any land-based way to travel anymore, and discovering that the world is led by corrupt governments and even more corrupt bands of pirates attacking innocent travelers, he decides to become a pirate himself, though a pirate that only attacks the other pirates and other unjust authority. This was a tricky decision for him, as Derek has always gotten terribly seasick, and that is one thing his magic staff isn't capable of fixing.

An otherwise competent adventurer pirate hero who just happened to be seasick is a pretty neat concept. As for the whole "electric robot" thing, it came into play through the staff's magical powers. By fighting enemies, he gained overall and stored magic. The overall magic was used to give Derek new powers. My favorite was a "teleport" move where he threw his staff, turning off his body as he did so, and then catching the staff again by making a new body where the staff ends it flight. The stored magic is used to animate magical constructs to serve as his crew. He's a seasick pirate with a pirate crew of magic robots. I love this game idea.

There are so many little things that make this game so fun. For example, the Staff of Force is used to send enemies backwards at incredible distances. My favorite move? Hitting enemies off the ship so hard that they repeatedly skip across the ocean! Most of his other moves were, as you might have guessed, based on one of the only universally recognized good scenes in Matrix: Reloaded.

And the characters! I loved making characters for this one, from the names to the general ideas. Derek's allies included a number of other Weapon of Spirit users, like the gun-toting and extremely angry warrior woman Anny Celeshearer, or the centuries old weather and great sword user Mallan Weatherware. All had their own Weapon of Spirit theme, though none of them could skip enemies across the ocean, which is a downside. Enemies included Rillaum Menoit, the last good cop in a corrupt empire, but one who's attempts to catch the notorious Derek that these days, he's happy just making his eternal foe look bad for a while. The main villains for much of the game are the Order of the Terribly Bloody Blade, pirates gone corporate. Some are still warriors, like Pandemonium Carnage, the hilariously overblown demon-summoning sorceress, but others focused on the business. My favorite is Cameron Velica, captain of the Crimson Paradigm, who ran the pirate's marketing campaign and PR ventures. And not all the Weapon of Spirit users are good, either...Dun dun dun!

Ah, I missed these things, especially for my favorite ideas like this one. I'll probably focus on the game ideas more, possibly even going into further detail on some of them once I go through all the standard ones. But one step at a time. And tonight the step was ironic pirates.