The Game: Round 3

[koboshi]

Welcome to the third round. In the first two rounds Samwise has taken over this game, first with a TKO over Schild, then with a decisive one vote victory over ajax34i and myself.  This round, as voted, will be to create a Story for the game, but before that, let’s recap the game so far…

The lone survivor of a quantum physics experiment gone wrong is a cat that wandered into the accelerator.  You.  Inexplicably blessed with the ability to travel freely through time (Quantum Leap style but within your own body) during the hours leading up to the accident, you are now the only one who can stop the universe from being annihilated, unraveling the threads of causality like so much yarn.  Mrow?

...and the winning gameplay submission from round 2…

The basic control scheme is FPS (from the ground-level POV of a cat, of course).  There is no (or very minimal) HUD, since there is very little combat.  Some of the FPS-style challenges the player encounters in the course of the game might include:
·   Jumping/climbing puzzles (e.g. getting to an air vent by jumping/climbing between shelves and filing cabinets)
·   Stealth (e.g. getting through an area you're not supposed to be in without anyone spotting you)
·   Physics puzzles (e.g. knocking stuff over to make an area passable or disable a machine)
·   Simple/one-sided combat (e.g. chasing and killing a rat, or biting a human on the leg and then running like hell)

The flow of the game resembles an adventure game more than a standard FPS, though; rather than going through a linear area and solving challenges in an obvious sequence, the player must explore the environment, work out the dependencies between different objects and events, and line them up one by one to complete the "puzzle".

The game world consists of a smallish area (several rooms) and a span of time on the order of an hour or two that is broken up into smaller segments (let's say one hour broken up into minutes). 

The state of each object and character in the game, including the player, is tracked across that entire span of time, like a series of savegames in a standard FPS.  The player is permitted to freely jump to and from any point in time (a bit like loading a savegame).  Actions taken in earlier points in time will automatically propagate to later points; for example, if the player jumps to 11:05, knocks over a glass, and then jumps to 11:15, the glass will be broken (or potentially cleaned up by an NPC, if an NPC with that behavior would have been present in the intervening time).

The player's overall goal is to manipulate pivotal events (I'll call them 'linchpins', after the game Chrononauts) in the game's plotline.  For example, if Dr. X and Dr. Y are alone in the breakroom between 11:10 and 11:20, a scripted event is triggered in which they have a conversation about modifying some parameters in the experiment (Dr. X is a corporate saboteur and is trying to dupe Dr. Y into creating a catastrophe).  This will lead to a linchpin at 11:50 where Dr. Y will fiddle with some settings if he's present at the control panel (which he will endeavor to be), culminating in a "YOU LOSE" at 12:00.  However, the player can undertake actions to alter the linchpin at 11:15, perhaps by distracting Dr. X and/or Y, or getting Dr. Z to happen by at a fortuitous time and overhear the conversation (triggering new linchpins later).

As the player witnesses certain linchpins, they are automatically added to a "timeline" display that the player can call up to get feedback on his progress (sort of like a quest journal in an RPG, or the auto-map in some FPSes).  When a linchpin is upset, this will be indicated by the creation of a new fork on the timeline (giving the player instant feedback that whatever he just did was significant) and everything that will now not happen being grayed out (this may invalidate actions that the player has taken in later parts of the timeline, in which case the player may have to do them again a different way).   Eventually, the player will flip a linchpin that causes the final event in the timeline to change from "YOU LOSE" to "YOU WIN" (e.g. the saboteur is discovered and the mistake corrected, ending the time loop), at which point the game is over, you're a normal cat again, there's a nice cutscene, and the credits roll.

If at any point the player "loses" (i.e. dies or hits the end of the timeline without fixing the problem), they're presented with the timeline screen and told to pick some point in the past to travel to.  There is never any need to start from scratch, no arbitrary cockblocking, et cetera.

So in this round players are charged with writing the story for this game.  Your submission should be no longer than a page in length. Take the above as rote, that means that there will be many different avenues that the story may take, you can try to cover all branches, just go through the correct path, or you can cover beginning and ending and simply layout examples of the intervening stories.  But keep it down to a page, you aren’t getting paid by the letter, and more importantly we aren’t getting paid to read anyone’s novella.

 A quick recap of the rules:
1)  Your entry must be one page or less.
2)  Only one post per player.
3)  Only post submissions in this thread.
4)  Submissions will be taken until midnight Wednesday.
5)  The game described must be about the time traveling cat described in Samwise’s submissions.

Fight!

[Samwise]

The protagonist: Algernon (Algie for short), the mild-mannered mascot/mouser of a cutting-edge quantum physics research facility.

The premise:

At Zero Hour, a particularly cutting-edge experiment went horribly awry.  Algie happened to be at its epicenter because while the shit was hitting the fan, the cat slipped in undetected, saw a glowy thing, and decided to try to pounce on it.  (This can be told to the player by having a few quick cat's-eye-view cutscenes that show you behaving like a normal cat and going about your business in the lab, perhaps with a bit of foreshadowing/hints about plotlines you'll have to unravel later, culminating in a scene with you going "rrow" and pouncing on the glowing thing right as a scientist spots you and yells "Algie, NO!  BAD KITTY!")  The rip in the fabric of space-time has created a temporal loop a la Donnie Darko or Groundhog Day, outside of which time no longer exists.  Algie's unique position in the middle of the accident has mysteriously given him the ability to send his consciousness freely throughout the temporal loop, retaining his memory of previous versions of the timeline all the while.

Now that the damage has been done, simply preventing the experiment will not correct the damage (that would be too easy).  Instead, the experiment must proceed correctly.  As it turns out, the original accident was caused by a confluence of multiple errors, and Algie will have to track each one down and fix it for the experiment to proceed and time to be restored.  Luckily, he has all the time in the world.


The premise as outlined above allows for an arbitrary number of different (potentially independent) plotlines to be set up.

Possible plotlines:

 * Mice have chewed through an important cable, at a point far removed from the experimental apparatus.  Algie can figure this out by noticing that one of the LED indicators on part of the rat's nest of cables winks out before the experiment, and then follow that cable through ducts to locate the mice and their nest.  He can prevent the problem by finding and killing the mice at some point before they destroy the cable.

 * One of the scientists is a saboteur and is attempting to subvert the experiment in various ways.  Algie will need to undo or prevent whatever damage he has done, and ultimately manuever things into a position where he can be discovered and apprehended.  This will likely be the "main" plotline that will occupy most of the player's time.

 * Another scientist absentmindedly slips on a spill about halfway through the time loop, which puts him out of commission for the experiment.  The slip can be prevented by preventing the spill or getting someone less absent-minded to notice it before the accident.

(More to come if/as I think of them.  If anyone wants to build off the premise I've given above and add their own independent plotlines to the mix, be my guest, since this isn't exactly a competition.)

[Glazius]

The premise: There was nothing wrong with the experiment. There was, however, something wrong with the universe.

2450. Mankind has taken to the stars. Boredom sets in. The Holodeck is invented. (Call it what you want, but it's going to be the Holodeck with its numbers filed off.) Waiting inside the program is the latest step in an escalating prank war, dating back to the college years of a skilled programmer and a skilled hardware engineer, who were roommates and immediately hated each other. The prank has been sitting dormant for twenty years now - the hardware engineer is the only one alive with any interest in a 400-year-old quantum physics experiment, so the programmer figured it would be hilarious to put code that would hard-lock the system in the simulation. The engineer blacks out during testing, the programmer poses him in a humorous position and takes shots, and the war continues. But the engineer never tests the sim, and the programmer forgets about taking it out.

2465. The engineer is Chief of Engineering on a starship of 1500 people. When the system hard-locks, it takes most of the ship with it. Step 1 is to call up a personality replicant of the programmer c. 2450 to fix his own bug. He promptly finds out his old nemesis is chief on a starship, goes further ballistic (they recorded him just after the engineer locked him out of campus buildings during the worst rainstorm in a decade), and integrates with the holosystem to screw things up further. Step 2 is Cat.

The protagonist: Cat. Cat is the admin console for the holosim, so chosen because a random cat would not be out of place anywhere throughout history. Cat is fully configurable within limited size and realistic color patterns. Even noted ailurophobes will not be particularly averse to Cat because of some top-level programming. Cat has no name - people give Cat whatever name they feel would suit a cat. Cat in this case begins being piloted by the associate chief of engineering, who is the only other person on the ship who understands 21st-century quantum theory. Cat's admin powers extend to sensory-level omniscience and a limited ability to alter the timeline of the sim.

Plotlines. The game's main plotline begins with attempts by Cat to stop the experiment. The sabotage has limited Cat to normal catlike interaction with the simulated world, so the first part of the game is Cat's attempt to find its limitations. Eventually Cat succeeds in stopping the experiment, but the universe still hard-locks when it's time. Something else in the sim must be doing it, but what? At this point Cat can get different "pilots" - holosim-savvy people from the ship's equivalent of coding and HR. The chief engineer and some other crewmen he'd talked into viewing the sim are playing different characters, and the programmer's personality construct is in there as well.

The assistant engineer's path involves "waking up" the engineer - the admin console is extremely high-level, and replaying the sim literally replays the thought process of people having the sim. Cat can break people out through prolonged content - the initial hint is that his name is something a 21st-century person wouldn't think of. With the engineer's help (he resets every sim, and can be "put back under" if he meets the programmer's construct) Cat can figure out what parts of the sim aren't behaving exactly as they should, and inferring what actually needs to be done to stop the hard-lock event from occurring.

The coder's path involves "waking up" as many people as possible, keeping them active in the sim, and giving them objects to interact with. On a high level this will enable the coder to find the code causing the hard-lock and squash it.

The counselor's path involves making peaceable contact with the programmer's personality construct, and convincing him to set aside his feud with the engineer for the good of the starship.

--------------

Not sure how well that actually works, but there it is.

[koboshi]

  The game begins with a black screen.  A muffled voice breaks the silence, indecipherable in the distance. A slit of blinding white light cracks the blackness.  Shapes form in the bright light and the eyes open slowly to reveal a scientist.  He turns to the camera (to the cat) and addresses it. The voice speaks gibberish but the word ‘Snookums’ is clearly heard. A sultry female voice responds with, good morning Dr Snookums, and the words are clear and seem to reverberate. The voice begins to complain about how busy it has been around the lab, while the Doctors mumbling continues in the background.  The camera moves to the wall and leaps to the window, a dark night and a barbed wire fence can be seen in the distance and in the foreground staring into the camera the reflection of a white cat.

  The control is then freed and the player can examine the room.  As cat looks at different parts of the room she comments on their significance to her or to Dr Snookums, the places she likes to take naps, the chair that’s her favorite scratching post, the Dr’s toys and what he does when he plays with.  Then her eyes fall on a cage.  The room goes out of focus except for the cage and the camera slowly zooms into the cage. Images of horrible cruelty swirl in the periphery of her vision and cat’s voice can be heard screaming for mercy.  The scene clears and the cage is just a cage again.  Cat ‘s eyes then turn to Dr. Snookums and she professes her undying love for him for saving her from that world.  As she speaks Snookums picks up cat and carries her across the room. It is only when the cage door closes that cat realizes she has been put into the cage. The fear in cats voice mounts to terror when she sees the needle in the scientist’s hand. But with a weak, ’Ouch’, the world tips sideways and fades to black.

  Cat awakens to an unfamiliar room.  The player is allowed to explore the vaguely football shaped room discovering a number of creatures each in their own pen.  After a minute a window slides open as a part of the wall rotates out of the way.  Dr. Snookums and two other doctors cat identifies as Dr. fleabag and Dr. Darling sit in a dark room, their faces under lit by monitors and the glow from the chamber.  The clock on the wall reads one minute to 12.  Cat begins to call out to Snookums and at hearing her cry out the other creatures begin to call out in their own ways.  Then at 30 seconds till a voice begins to count down in the human’s undecipherable language, and all the other creatures grow silent. The lights in the room suddenly go out, leaving a hither to unseen beam of faint green light stretching from the point on one end of the room to the point on the other. The beam of green light grows in strength and as it does it begins to hurt Cat.  Sparks fly from the part of the wall that covered the window as it lurches in place. The pain grows and Cat can no longer be controlled by the player, she begins to shudder violently and falls to her side. Through her spasms her eyes finally settle on the window where the scientists are standing, their screams and shouts mute through the thick glass, their faces masks of abject horror.  The light turns crimson and grows to a blinding red. The last image burned onto Cat’s retina is the image of Dr. Snookums pointing to cat with a shocked expression on his face. The image slowly fades to black, and a faint mumbling is heard as if from a great distance.

  Cat’s first order of business upon waking is to escape the room before Snookums gets a chance to put her into that dammed cage.  Once she’s free her mission is clear, kill Dr Snookums, the doctor who betrayed her.  Once this revenge has been had however cat realizes that she cannot stop the end without him.  He isn’t the true threat; the true threat is Dr. Fleabag, the saboteur.  Fleabag is such a thorough saboteur that she has destroyed 12 key elements of the experiment, all of which must be repaired, replaced, or circumvented by midnight.  The final sabotage is in the reactor and can only be fixed from inside. In order to stop the end Cat must let herself be placed inside the experiment. Can she survive this final task? Well... yes and no.

[ajax34i]

Human plotline: 

The scientists at a high energy physics laboratory (complete with a small particle accellerator) came upon the idea of using a small quantum computer (new technology, still in development) to speed up the processing of data from their experiments (intro scene can show this as a TV infomercial).  Something got hooked up wrong, and the computer (size of a room) interfaced with the particle accellerator (size of a building, underground) and created the time loop (this can be shown as a video conference with some scientist yelling it and then yelling at the screen to "Cut the POWER!").

Lead scientist is an old gentleman who's doing these physics experiments for a shot at the Nobel prize (or whatever).  His top aide has links to the government and is looking for possible military applications for the experiments.  A few grad students also help out, two of them like each other.  There's also a (small) team of engineers on site to maintain the accellerator, and two techs to support the computer.  The quantum computer lead tech wants complete control over the processing side, and the sys admin (for the regular computers that the scientists were using prior to their brilliant idea) hates his guts and is resisting implementation at every step.  The maintenance guy hates spiders and absolutely hates one of the alarm sounds that the accellerator makes, but won't quit cause it's otherwise a good job with good pay.

Hooking up the computer to the accellerator was a multi-step process with scientists, techs, and engineers all involved (lots of wires and pipes, given the relative sizes).  Who's ultimately responsible for the accident and why, and what must be hooked up differently, that's for the cat to figure out.


Cat's plotline: 

The cat is hungry, and on top of that, whatever the humans did, it prevented her getting the morsel.  They talked and banged on things and then yelled over the intercom just as her owner (the lead scientist) was about to give her the weekly clipping of catnip.  He got interrupted by the yelling on the intercom and turned around and the world flashed white and something's wrong, and she's hungry.  Things must be fixed.


NOTE:  Both are kind of boring, sorry, I'm not good at this.  The two plotlines must be put together by using color for objects and movement of interest to the cat, and muted (almost b/w) tones for humans and devices, a la Pleasantville, in order to distract the player and accentuate the cat point of view.  So, sudden movements, toys, food, its owner, people calling its name, as well as plot-related dialogue and devices, and pathways that the cat can take to navigate, would be highlighted, sometimes unexpectedly or all of a sudden.