Re: [TuxKart-devel] The story

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

Willian Padovani Germano wrote:

> I'll make some comments here about what may be a plot for TuxKart or why it
> is good to have one.

OK - I have to say that I am not a great believer in plots.  On existing
games they are universally (a) lame and (b) irrelevent.  I can tell you
that *none* of the kids who I meet who play video games every even look
at the story.

HOWEVER - I recognise that games designers and developers seem to set
great store by them...god knows why...but they do. So I guess we have
to have one too.

You'll notice that there is one for Tux_AQFH - right there on the web
site.
 
> That's where I'd grab a plot (we could call it a meta-plot): on the fact
> that every mascot must have his kart game, no matter what. A humorous twist:

Teehee!  :-)

I *like* that.

> Tux is a penguin, he doesn't want to drive a kart, has no skill or will for
> that. But he is a mascot, he MUST star in a kart game. So we grab him from
> where he is safe and well, warm, and throw him in a kart game.
                             ^^^^
                             No! "cool". He *likes* it cold
                             he lives at the south pole.

                             (Yes, I know there are penguin colonies
                             within 160 miles of the Equator - and no
                             penguins in Antarctica except at the coast
                             which is hundreds of miles from the south
                             pole - but this is a stereotype - so we go
                             with it)

> The other
> characters could be all very excited about the experience, to contrast with
> Tux's initial mood.

Gown:  "Ooh - ooh! Can we Tux?  Can we, can we, can we?  Puleeeze?"
Tux: "But I've just got this last function to debug in the 10baseT
      driver - I promised Linus we'd get the release out in time,"
<cut to start of race>
Narrator: "Can Tux win all the races - end the contest early and
      get back to the South Pole in time to save the 10baseT driver
      in time for the 2.4.1 kernel release?"

Yada, yada, yada...

> That's a start for the game: from the point where it is
> stated that Tux must have a kart game till when he and his friends are
> thrown in the main, central scenery, from where all tracks are accessable
> sooner or later (like that part in Diddy Kong Racing). There are many ways
> to make this intro look good.

Yep.
 
> The enemies that may be used
> 
> ( I'd go for:
> - a kiddie version of Bill Gates ( with a spirit along that boy who owns the
> ball and wants to control how/when/where/if the kids get to play a little ).
> A spoiled brat, without stressing that he represents Gates, in my opinion;

Hmmm - I'm actually a little reluctant to drag real people into it...however
subtly it's done.  I have visions of how this got out of hand in the XTux
game - where Tux goes around smashing the heads of actual Microsoft employees
with a baseball bat!  I can just see some deranged idiot doing it for real
and us getting full press coverage for incitement.  I know it can be done
with style and care - but this is OpenSource and people can modify it to
make it better suit their sense of humor - and some people have NO SENSE
AT ALL!  I'd prefer that we just don't go there.

Couldn't we do the awful Windoze dancing paperclip instead?

I *don't* want the Windoze logo directly used either (lawyers...) - I think
BSOD is sufficiently subtle to not be a problem - and a paper clip is just
that - a paperclip - so no copyrights are infringed there either.

I'd *really* like to do a parody of the 'fluttering sheet of paper' animation
that windoze does when copying files...the sheets flutter across the screen -
in a perfectly orderly manner but every now and again, you notice that
one screws itself into a little ball and falls short of the destination
- sometimes one folds itself into a paper plane and sails off into the
distance.  As you watch, more and more bad things happen to your valuable
documents as they flutter past. Some burst into flames, some are ripped
to shreds by knife blades thrown from off-stage, one gets shot full of
bullet holes...etc, etc.  Eventually, none of your files are making it
across the screen.  This process should take like 10 minutes to build
up to a climax where there are nuclear explosions going off - recognisably
Quake-like rail guns are now being used to trash documents as they go
by - the entire lower half of the screen is now a growing pile of paper
which is burning.  There should now be screaming and stuff.

Finally Tux comes on-screen and quietly places a copy of Samba
onto the floor - all the mess immediately vaporises and papers once
again flutter neatly across the screen so it can all happen again.

...sorry - that was just a vision that popped into my head - I have no idea
if it fits in anywhere.  :-)

I need to write a little stand-alone desktop 'toy' that does that - maybe
a screen saver :-)

...one day.

Phew! OK - now back to regularly scheduled TuxKart discussions... :-)

> - the BSOD, a frightening creature (even for the young boy, of course) --
> maybe a thin silver/light gray body, not short, with a monitor as his head,
> with the Blue Screen of Death on);
> - others we may add later. )

OK.  My BSOD is just a monitor with a blue screen and three white rectangles
representing angry down-turned eyes and straight horizontal mouth.  The
monitor has tiny arms and feet...but no body.

...but hey - you are the artist!  Let's do some sketches.
 
> would enter on their own, to prove that Tux is inapt for a mascot (taken
> from how they try to prove that Linux is not a good OS blah blah...). They
> could now and then make comments (written or spoken, no matter now) like:
> "these karts are hard to configure!", "this interface is ugly", "leave all
> inner detais to us and relax", "we know better", "if we made the karts, Tux
> wouldn't fit on our patented chairs (remember that Gates versus automobile
> industry episode?)), etc., don't know about Microsoft slogans, but maybe we
> can make fun of them too.

:-)

> This is a light plot, not trying to come up with a stupid reason for the
> races or none at all. It ironically makes fun of being another game on the
> genre and settles nicely the place for Tux there. But it also sets the mood
> of the game, frees us to use ANY landscape for each track (there just gotta
> be icy ones, but also other new designs would fit well) without needing to
> explain why/how they ended up on this or that terrain in the story -- think
> about it...

Yep.  Icy tracks are just fun to drive - and I enjoy the Christmas feel you
can give to them - lots of nice bright colours to contrast with the blandness
of the snow.
 
> Another point: with Tux unwilling to play, not knowing how, we can have a
> first part of the game where all of the characters drive terribly (car
> "dies" now and then, turns end up on the walls, jumps end badly, motor
> doesn't start, car runs in "spurts" (my knowledge of English doesn't help
> sometimes...). This all independent of the talent of the player, till he
> practices enough (like raising an rpg character) that Tux or the others
> actually become good racers. Of course this phase shouldn't take too long,
> and should be restricted to a story mode.

Hmmm - the code for doing all this may well be twice as complex as the
whole of the rest of the game!  (Which is not to say that we shouldn't
do it...but keep in mind that every line of sophistication we put into
the intro sequence is a line of code that doesn't improve playability,
etc during the actual game itself.)
 
> This is a way of increasing the gameplay time and fun inside a single track
> (which may be the central place I mentioned before, like in Diddy Kong
> Racing). Since playing Mario 64, finding ways of increasing game time and
> level exposure to the player has been a concern for me. There's so much more
> to see in a 3D game.

Yep - having a central area to drive around is certainly pretty easy to do -
so long as there is a 'cut' when you enter the actual race track to give
us time to dump one model, load another and swap out all the textures.
 
> Having a meta, self-referential story like that allows us to place the game
> in a virtual world that at the same time is aware of our world, the
> internet, the fact that it is a game, etc. Then there may be the possibility
> for other people to add characters and tracks. It all fits nicely, even with
> the plot. The characters 'know' they are videogame mascots of an open source
> project, that people will download their game, make additions, etc. So they
> may enjoy the appearance of new racers, new tracks to try (A character
> says:"What about downloading some new tracks ? That'd be appreciated" or
> whatever), etc. They may comment on their website, have special packs for
> christmas, anything. Got it ?

Yep - I like that.

Tux_AQFH uses the 'central area leading out to the levels' trick - one thing
that this is well suited to is allowing people to add their own levels
fairly easily - just hack the central model to add another door, whatever
and add a new level filename into a config file somewhere.
 
> So what do you say ? That's just one possibility, but as I said, it leaves
> the design more open for different tracks, characters, etc.

Yep.
 
> Ah, one comment about different objectives: during a race, there may be an
> event like: BSOD or the boy got the superuser password! Get him fast or
> he'll become a deadly virus! Then that race is possibly forgotten (in story
> mode) and it becomes a chase the pesky one game.

Perhaps adapt some of the classic childrens games.  I wrote (and later
discarded) a flying game with broomsticks and wizards (we were reading
the "Harry Potter" books at the time.  Anyway, one fun thing to do with
that (in multiplayer mode) was to do "Hide and go seek" - where one player
drives off into the scenery and hides while the other one catches them.

Also games like Tag and Flashlight Tag.
 
> There are also many subgames and different modes that can be easily
> implemented, but that's a topic for some other email. 3D landscapes with
> basic physics laws, no matter how simple, are really playing fields,
> entertainment parks, not 'just' a single game. Mario 64 told me so...

Yes - exactly.

My games allow free movement anywhere in the scenery - collision detection
happens on the full geometry - so you can go anywhere and "the right thing"
will happen.

You can build literally anything in the modeller and load it as a track
and you can drive over it sensibly.  You need to add the '.drv' file
that contains a 'centerline' model in order to get the other drivers
to actually race around it - but if they are reprogrammed to play
Flashlight Tag or something, that's a non-issue.


Anyway - I'm just about to make a final 1.2 release of PLIB (a prior
commitment that I must keep because Mandrake Linux are waiting to
put it into their next distribution CD set - and the cut is made
tomorrow.

If I have time after that then I'll make a tarball for TuxKart and
put it up on sourceforge - I'll email you instructions on how to
grab it and install...but maybe not until tomorrow if this PLIB
thing gives me any problems.

BTW: Do you have an account on Sourceforge?   If not, go to their
main web site and request one (it's free - you just have to provide
some minor details)...once you have that, I can put you down as
a TuxKart developer which will give you access to the CVS archive
so that you can modify models, textures and sourcecode if you
feel the need.

I need to build a web page too...work, work, work!  (Fun, fun, fun too!)

-- 
Steve Baker   HomeEmail: <sjb...@ai...>
              WorkEmail: <sj...@li...>
              HomePage : http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
              Projects : http://plib.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxaqfh.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxkart.sourceforge.net
                         http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net