Dungeon Master Forum

Howdy. I scribbled this down today after putting some thought into the clone I'm going to attempt when the motivation builds. I've been considering this for quite some time, but I never had a solid framework from which I could begin development. Anyway, if you've got a few minutes, take a gander at this story fragment and let me know how the pacing feels. It's about 5 1/2 pages. I haven't proofread it. (EDIT: I've made a few corrections on page three.)

Bridge Scene

A note on weapons: most of the designations came from other sources. The MA5B is the terran assault rifle from Halo. The AR770/M355 is the assault rifle from Unreal Tournament 2004. The NTW-20 is an actual modern anti-materiel rifle; the MKR-23 is not. The Pancor is real. The RLK-9157 is the quad-salvo launcher from Far Cry and may or may not exist; I haven't checked into it.

A note on names: I'm terrible at coming up with names, and I tend to make things up on the fly. The characters here do not represent anyone I've ever met, nor do they emulate any personalities I know from life or literature. I just sort of squished them together. Expect discontinuities in personality.

A note on the setting: this is a scene I played out in my head after we spawned the Dungeon Shock idea yesterday. I envisioned the first part of the story as the main character and his fire team venturing into the ship after it became infested with the power of Chaos. They've stumbled upon some creepy things prior to this scene — namely a hideous abomination in the hangar deck, which brutally slaughtered some of their men. You'll have to use your imagination. The bridge is one of the last places on the ship that has not yet succumbed to Chaos' influence. The fire team, of course, has not yet realized the source of the infestation.

The planet is Zalk, many hundreds of years into the future. The strange transmission they're detecting — but unable to identify — is the Zo gate, which has become partially active. I feel comfortable telling you this because you would have figured it out instantly as soon as you played the game, or at least shortly thereafter. (I intended to have a satellite view of Stonekeep, which would have been a dead giveaway. This didn't make it into the five-page fragment.)

I'm mostly interested in comments on pacing. I've never been very good at pacing, with a tendency to rush through scenes or drag them out beyond interest. Let me know if it needs to be cut or filled, or if it's okay. Remember, this is going to be converted into dialog and graphics, so it will obviously flow differently in the end, but I want to get a solid story written first. Thanks for taking the time.

By the way, this is the first creative writing I've done in over two years, so I may be a little rusty.

One more thing: I used to serve in the Air Force, so I know eight soldiers and a civilian don't constitute a full company. I used the terms "company" and "fire team" interchangeably in this story under the assumption that the remaining fire team is comprised of what used to be a full company, before the shit hit the fan and their numbers were whittled down. Their commanding officer simply hasn't had the time (or authority) to disband the company and merge the surviving files into a single squad. Please forgive my gross misappropriation of military terminology. I have my reasons. ;)

In a future version, I'm going to change the purpose of this expedition. It stands to reason that the original charters of this world would have placed satellites in orbit to observe it prior to sending a science vessel, let alone a team of personnel, to provide ground truth. So, the Longhorn and its crew and garrison would be there to check out a peculiar phenomenon that the probes detected, and perhaps repair/replace probes that had mysteriously stopped functioning.

Anyway, I'll work on it as I have time. Job, school, and female companion are going to eat up most of my cycles for the next 16 weeks. I made a few more revisions to the document, and after reading it a few times, I personally think it flows pretty well.

Sorry it took a bit to get back to you!

As a story I have no problem with it. As a snappier story that would be going to a set of cut scenes, I think some parts maybe need to be paced faster.

Since the general setting is familiar to all sci-fi fans, I think you could jump cut alot more - open with the rock crush scene even. You can have confidence your audience can play catch up quite easily.

I think the weapons run down is unneccessary and slows the pace down. If the officer turned the screen around to the soldiers and let them some 'wow' and 'hell yeah' noises, as a player you get you want to go there

I think there is nothing wrong with the science officer not carrying gun exchange, but a quick interchage for something visual would and a briefer exchance would propabbyl set it up as well - again,your audience would get the beats underneath without saying too much.

It would just keep the pace - it would be *here's your mission* *charatcer beat* *go* instead of *hear's your mission* *here's a whole scene between these two* *go*

Anyway, that's all - good luck slotting it into rl, it all sounds terribly exciting and interesting!

I don't know if this works for everybody, but I tend to prefer roles where I'm being given orders, rather than giving them myself. I can picture myself as one of the marines rather than the sergeant, milling about the room, playing with the console, and in general just sort of checking things out while the rest of the scene sort of goes on around me. This would only work the first time I played the game, of course, so naturally there should be an option to skip the flavor and move on.

I also like the idea of splitting up and relying on another team to complete their objectives while I work with my team on our own set of objectives, which of course is quite perfectly feasible since there are two fire teams in this scene, and it would be practical to split them between both lockers. (I crammed a whole bunch of stuff in there specifically to keep them together, but in lieu of suspense, and even more importantly because this story has roots in DM where you never dealt with more than four characters at once, it would be practical to split the teams.

I'm also a big fan of co-op. I hate competitive games. I hadn't intended to write this story with co-op in mind, but if I'm going to do it, I have to do it from the start. Co-op isn't something you can slap on after the game is finished, not if you want it to be good anyway. There are so many possibilities here, it isn't even funny. Four players starting together; four players starting in completely different parts of the ship. Two teams of two starting in different parts of the ship. One of them taking a command role, the others taking other roles specific to their class. Etc.

I've read this fragment several times, and while it isn't perfect — I've already polished it several times, and it still needs some work — it's paced much better as a novella than a game. Games work more like movies, except in this case we're deriving from DM, which tends to have a lot of dead air, very unlike a movie, but also entirely unlike a book.

Starting this right before the school term started was probably not a wise tactical maneuver. I started to consider an introductory sequence, but it would probably be too long for application. I might do something more akin to System Shock, where you wake up in the middle of it all and have to figure out what happened. That would save me the trouble of writing an intro, at least.

Orders are good for gameplay flow - you can have the plot driven rather than having to twiddle your fingers.

The other teams is also nice psychologically - it's nice to have a place in a team, and its nice to feel that somehting is happening while you are doing your thing. Againm good for pacng - do a certain mission in time for others to do theirs - there is a greater sense of failure if you let them down, and a greater drive to succeeding

It still sounds good, you really did pick the wrong time to start trying to do it, and worse yet announcing it to us!

Well, the reason I announced it was to get some feedback, because feedback equates to support, even if it's critical. If someone is remotely interested in the project, that gives me incentive to carry on. Unfortunately, I did pick a poor time because I'm unusually busy. However, between work and classes, despite the fact that I'm not doing any coding, I at least have time to develop ideas before summer, when I should have plenty of time to sit down and put them into action. That's assuming the motivation comes.