I don't understand why you can't write your own instead of tokeing someone else's?

Those are probably things you want to avoid unless you're going for satire.

When I was about 12, a friend and I decided to learn how to RPG Maker 2000. We made this silly little game, before the age of the indie game took off. I wish we had uploaded it somewhere, because neither of us still has it.

The story started off with the main character's window being smashed in by the village bully (the main character's rival). Through a series of ridiculous encounters, and the addition of over-the-top generic RPG personalities, the main character accidentally gets wrapped up in a plot that everyone but him sincerely believes to be a campaign to save the world.

We didn't originally intend to make a game that parodied RPGs, but being 12 and having very little in the realm of actual experience with writing dramatic storylines, we wound up making the most ridiculous series of overly-dramatic out of control escalations in the storyline.

A quest to earn enough money to replace a pane of glass before your character's father returns home from his travels with the merchants' caravan exploded into a complex chain of trade quests with dangerous locales trying to swap unique lost artifacts for simple goods.

Eventually, the character gets wrapped up with a group of inept would-be heroes whose goal it is to overthrow the "evil king", but actually wind up doing more harm than good in their "grand quest".

Looking back, the entire project was quite fun, and the spirit of the project gave us the ability to use a lot of generic plot elements from a ton of different games, and wind them together (albeit poorly) into a narrative that poked accidental fun at the RPG genre.

What I think helped that little game project stay fresh, was that every week or so, my friend and I would lose interest in the project, and we'd end up writing in a minigame or using our 12-year-old attention spans to go off the rails, jumping trains of thought to a new idea whenever we ran out of ideas.


My advice would be not to create a serious storyline. Right now, the gaming community is lamenting the death of the 2D RPG. People are clamoring for a crunchy 2D RPG that makes them remember the fun they had playing the final fantasy series, zelda, harvest moon, and all the other great, grand little titles of the jRPG era.

Today, I'd say innovating the 2D RPG can best be done by NOT innovating, and simply recombining the systems that people loved in old games with genre-referential humor.

After all, it's easier to remind people why they liked other peoples' games by imitating them, than it is to reinvent something that people are craving. I think the next two years are ripe for big-little indie RPGs to explode, and people are starting to realize just what the commercial games market can't give them anymore due to the focus on open-world, intense 3D graphics, and poor voice acting.

TL;DR: People already know what they want. Don't try to give them something new. Make them something that will remind them of the games they already liked.

There's a lady stuck in a castle, you have to go on an epic quest to get to the castle...even through time...Once you get there, there will be a green guy with a giant nose on a horse, you need to kill him to win the game.

I've always liked the following idea:

You're a nobody, a peasant, one of the small-folk, etc., and one day, you run into a crazy witch that tells you that you are going to be responsible for stopping an evil tyrant from conquering the land.

So, you start off on an epic journey to increase your strength and ability, and eventually amass an army, and establish a stronghold to stand against the coming threat.

You think that you're all set (mid-to-late-game), when the old witch comes to you again to tell you that you're not even close to stopping the tyrant.

So, you push yourself, and the land around you even further. You recruit more soldiers, take more and more resources to keep piling up your military might, go out and fight some local robber-baron types and monsters to improve your own strength and shore up your own kingdom from within, etc.

Then you start getting word of neighboring kingdoms that are building their own military power, so you launch campaigns to crush each one as it comes up, believing that any one of them might be the evil tyrant's kingdom.

You bring these poor abused kingdoms under your leadership, to make up for destroying their military and ruining their lands with war.

And then, in the end it hits you...

SuperSaiyanGokuX wrote:

I've always liked the following idea:

You're a nobody, a peasant, one of the small-folk, etc., and one day, you run into a crazy witch that tells you that you are going to be responsible for stopping an evil tyrant from conquering the land.

So, you start off on an epic journey to increase your strength and ability, and eventually amass an army, and establish a stronghold to stand against the coming threat.

You think that you're all set (mid-to-late-game), when the old witch comes to you again to tell you that you're not even close to stopping the tyrant.

So, you push yourself, and the land around you even further. You recruit more soldiers, take more and more resources to keep piling up your military might, go out and fight some local robber-baron types and monsters to improve your own strength and shore up your own kingdom from within, etc.

Then you start getting word of neighboring kingdoms that are building their own military power, so you launch campaigns to crush each one as it comes up, believing that any one of them might be the evil tyrant's kingdom.

You bring these poor abused kingdoms under your leadership, to make up for destroying their military and ruining their lands with war.

And then, in the end it hits you...

This was a good read. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It reminds me of a game idea I had a while ago for a side-scrolling futuristic base-building/tower defense type game.

When you start the game, you are told the basic backstory. Distant future, limited resources, destroyed biosphere, etc. Humans built robots to work on the surface for them, and to set up underground cities for them to migrate to after the limited resources of an area run dry. Enemies are attempting to stop you and take the resources for themselves. Your goal is to establish your base, and protect it from the invading forces so that you can make a safe place for the humans.

However, when your "generators" are built, they are blue-ish tubes with fogged glass. Something looks to be growing inside of it slowly. If you manage to keep a generator online long enough, you'll see a large object eventually fills the tube. You can't really see what it is, just a shadow.

When the enemy forces invade your base, (as they do periodically through the tower defense phases) if they manage to get to a generator, they will always attempt to destroy it.

If they encounter a generator that has one of the largest shapes in it, a fully grown, naked human being falls out, and is taken away by the enemy forces, who you now notice look an awful lot like armored human beings, unlike your insect and crustacean-like robotic tools or your defensive turrets...

And that's when you realize that the backstory told the truth... It only told you the initial goal of the machines, not what they have been doing all this time... Following the prime directive: Protect their humans, and use all resources available to do so. At any cost.

Not so much an RPG, but still, the idea of the mindfuck alone was amusing to me when I thought of it, and yours reminded me of it. Never had much energy to pursue the project, though.

I did, however, mess around in MS paint for a few hours and turned out some fun concept art for the perspective and visual style:

So it's a "gay disease" but the cure is collecting 20 dildos. Sounds similar to the method of quitting smoking by smoking 20 packs in one sitting.

Best Story You'll Ever Hear: Part 1

You wake up, as a nobody, get ready as if it were a normal day; go outside and have a woman bump into you before falling to the ground. Once you help the lady up, she stares into your eyes with a crazed look and begins ranting about how you're going to help her save the world. You call her crazy and walk off; later the world ends. End of game.