concept: timespaces
Our story is primarily about a group of pilots exploring an unfamiliar world. The primary appeal of the project is how it plays, how it moves, how enjoyable it is to explore and navigate the world skillfully, to soak in the vibe. Consequently, the audience needn't be concerned with minutae about precisely what's going on. The world simply exists, our pilots and their aircraft exist, and hopefully it's all coherent and implicitly interesting, creating an easily understood context to adeequately explain the main action and to sustain the audience's interest and imagination.
After a little while, as the audience spends time exploring the project, they're bound to get curious and starting asking 'why X, why Y'...
"Why are we exploring this planet? What are we hoping to achieve? Who are these pilots anyways? Where do they come from? How come my aircraft doesn't seem to obey realisitc physical laws? When these pilots sleep at night, what do they dream about? When these pilots are chatting around a campfire, what stories do they tell? How does it feel for them to be on this adventure? Is it scary? What kind of person embarks on an adventure like this? What do they eat? What are the living conditions like on this planet? What languages do they speak? etc"
As creators, we might as well think all of this through from the audience's perspective, dream up interesting and thematically congruent answers to these questions, and then look for elegant ways to weave these ideas into the world to support the core experience and vibe we're after. This 'lore' will help shape the audiovisual style, the design of costumes, vehicles and objects, the reasons for certain situations and locations, help carve out the characters and possible stories. As the player explores further and further into their project we would be wise to keep their curiosity and imagination alight with interesting, surprising or even epiphanic glimpses into what's going on.
To dig into this lore we'll need to expand the scope and look at what happened before the 'now' where our story begins. We need to ask who are our pilots, what is their culture, and why. We also need to look at what might happen after - if this was a TV show, we would need to ask what the season finale might look like, and what the series finale might be (note: this process isn't as straightforward as dreaming up a story, because we need to keep in mind that the audience will be given freedom to roam, to make their own decisions, and while we can look at a broad progression of events, we will have a tougher time attempting to tell a specific story).
Some relevant reference points: Terence Malick's film Tree of Life is about growing up in small town Texas, but this story includes the origin of the universe and life on Earth, shown in a stunning sequence about half way through the film. The TV show LOST is about a group of people exploring and surviving on an island after a plane crash, but the scope of the show expands considerably as the histories of the characters are presented in flashbacks. 2001: A Space Odyssey is primarily about two astronauts on a mission of discovery frustrated by a malfunctioning computer, but the film includes an extended vignette touching on the evolution of intelligent life.
So this focus on lore will help us carve out the experience we're after, but it's also worth mentioning that this broad scope is a key aspect of a science fiction epic. By crafting a narrative that spans hundreds, thousands or millions of years we're putting the audience in a contemplative state of mind, snapping them out of the usual lifetime-dependent time scale and forcing them to consider processes that occur on much grander timescales. This contemplative frame of mind is an integral aspect of the vibe and meaning we're interested in constructing. For more time talk there's an in-progress reading called 'Time For A Science Fiction Epic'.
It's worth mentioning that time is interconnected with space, and we'll be aiming to do similarly horizon-breaking things with distances.
With all of this in mind we have dreamed up five distinct eras with related locations, we're going to call them 'timespaces' until a better word comes along.
The main time/space divide in our project involves a thousand-year journey through space from a cradle world to an unfamiliar new world. What happens before the journey on the cradle word is The Past, what happens after on the unfamiliar planet is The Future. Let's address these two core timespaces first.
The Past & The Future
These two timespaces are accessible from the start. The Past is primarily focused on flight school on the cradle world, The Future is a about exploring and surviving on an unfamiliar planet.
These two timespaces will be very much 'in-play' in that the vast majority of the audience's time will be spent exploring what they have to offer, flipping back and forth. These two timespaces may function narratively a bit like the 'now' of the island vs the various flashbacks in LOST. For our project, the 'now/island' bit begins as our pilots make planetfall and start to explore an unfamiliar world in The Future. At pretty much anytime, our audience can choose to skip backwards a thousand years and access a vignette with the slightly younger pilots back on the cradle world attending flight school, learning the ropes.
The events in The Past have already happened, so those stories and situations can be a bit more specific, more contained, more like a series of vignettes the player can access in almost any order. By contrast, the events in The Future are happening in the moment and play is therefore open-ended, so if the audience wants to see what happens next they'll have to survive to see another day.
A new player hopping into The Future may become overwhelmed or lost, and when this happens we can bring this player back to The Past for a more guided experience where techniques are learned, the mission goals are made more clear, the audience's abilities and knowledge improve and their narrative interest deepens, so that the audienece feels emboldened to return to The Future and progress into that vast undiscovered country.
While the controls and mechanics in The Past and The Future will be more or less identical they will feel like two interestingly distinct videogames. The Past will probably feel a bit like Pilotwings or even Motorstorm. The audience will be able to quickly queue up an event, launch into it, and in three, five or ten minutes the event will be done and the audience will have a score or a standing and feel a sense of accomplishment. Drop in, drop out, instant action. Events would be designed to indirectly teach a particular technique, to flex a particular muscle, or to focus on a particular style of play. While participating in these events, the audiene would have the opportunity to take a look and optionally explore various locations on the cradle world, and in the process they would get a sense for the culture, why this 'pilot program' exists, who these pilots are, why the colony mothership has been built. As well as deepening the audience's investment in the world and sharpening their abilities, time spent in The Past would uncover opportunties for cosmetic customization and other minor bonuses and extras. For example, as a reward for completing a particuarly intense rescue mission, the audience might be given the option to change some aspect of the coat of arms that appears on aircrafts and flags, or to suggest a different paint color for the aircraft. Or perhaps the audience is rewarded with a mixtape, or some ornament for thier cockpit. When the audience skips ahead to The Future they'll see these minor alterations reflected there.
So The Past is a more guided, more contained timespace designed for three, five or ten minutes of action. By contrast, The Future will offer the audience quite a bit more freedom, and more time would be required to make progress, starting at fifteen minutes at minimum and going up to thirty or forty five minutes. We would use the day/night cycle of this new planet to time-box the audience's session, so from the first light of dawn to the last light of dusk might take 45 real-world minutes. The audience could continue to play in darkness, but our systems and tasks would all be designed to reel the audience back in towards dusk so they are incentivized to return to a bivouac or base camp.
The most obvious ultimate goal for the castaways on LOST is to be rescued, and their secondary goal is to figure out what's going on with the island. For our explorers in The Future the ultimate goal is the establishment of a colony, and most of the drama and struggle in The Future will predictably be about overcoming various obstacles in order to accomplish this task. The secondary goal for our explorers, as with LOST, is to figure out what's going on with the planet.
With regards to the ultimate goal in The Future, there are a variety of obstacles. When our story begins, the motership in orbit above the planet has deployed a scout ship to get familiar with the planet's surfae. The initial touch-down location for this scout ship isn't appropriate for a colony for one reason or another, perhaps the ecosystems aren't favorable or there are unforeseen dangers presented by the elements or by the various lifeforms, and it's up to the audience to guide the scout ship and eventually various other explorers through a series of challenges, gathering food and materials, escaping danger, investigating various phenomena and eventually carving out a location for the colony.
Once a location is chosen, a series of events are set in motion where the mothership, still in orbit, deploys various payloads which, after re-rentry, become buildings, one of which is home to some number (thousands?) of sleeping colonists who awake from their sleep. Perhaps there are still dangers to contend with before the colony can be said to be stable and safe, and perhaps our now veteran surviving pilot plays a role.
Once stability has been reached the way is cleared for the colony to take root, for the colonists to start to reproduce and adapt to their new world. Perhaps at this moment our pilot chooses to 'go to sleep' in case he or she is needed in the years to come, and perhaps on this note our story ends.
Quietly, a suggestion of the existence of The Far Future may be introduced somewhere in the project at this point, with no details. Or perhaps nothing is said. With the first Star Wars film, the story ends on a note of triumph, the Death Star destroyed and the heroes honored in a throne room, and there is no indication that the story will continue on... this might be the wisest strategy.
Of course, there's also an opportunity for a head-spinning LOST style reveal of The Far Future... but there are downsides to doing this. Leaving the story on a cliffhanger would make The Future less of a standalone short story, which might lessen its initial appeal, and it might come off as tacky if it all seemed like a set-up for a sequel or a follow-up. For a free TV show, cliffhangers are ok. For a videogame, where a sequel would cost the audience money, it could come across as cheap, and it might rub people the wrong way. We think it's always better to under-promise and over-deliver rather than setting up needless expectations. With that in mind, it would be preferable if the announcement and reveal of The Far Future occurred months after the release of The Future, when The Far Future is ready to launch. Still, it's worth looking ahead and considering what The Far Future might be so we know how it would fit in with everything else, just as everyone wished the writers of LOST had a satisftying answer for why the castaways were on the island.
The Far Future
Hidden and probably witheld from the initial release. The Far Future would be made possible by successfully establishing a stable colony in The Future.
A dedicated audience member might learn what they need to know from The Past in order to overcome the challenges in The Future and establish a colony, once this colony is stable the story would end. The existence of The Far Future might be suggested. It's likely that The Far Future would not ship with the initial release, instead it may appear months or even a year later. The Far Future might have a very different tone, style and structure from The Future and The Past.
So what does The Far Future look like? Who knows! One key idea is that the location chosen by the audience for the establishment of the colony is up to them, within certain parameters. Towards the end of The Future the audience can settle at a river mounth, in the hills, beside a lake, along the coast, on an island. We as creators would imagine a few different possible energy and food sources, a few different building materials, and try to accommodate a handful of location types. So when our pilot awakes, perhaps summoned by the colonists due to some existential threat, the audience sees how the colony has thrived, or not, in the intervening thousand years.
Another key concept is that The Far Future would have a heavy focus on playing with friends and strangers online. The audience would be able to visit other settlements, which are in fact colonies established by others.
Some of the luckier more stable settlements would have hung on to and maintained the technology their forefathers brought with them from the dimly remembered cradle world. Some settlements may still be able to manufacture modern technology. Other settlements may have deteriorated. In a reasonably stable colony, the pilot's aircraft and equipment, might be protected in a guarded tomb in the colony's central building, kept safe from the elements, perhaps maintained by a monastic order that has somehow retained the knowledge and expertise required to maintain the aircraft. In a less stable colony, the aircraft may be a little worse for wear.
There's a lot of potential with this timespace, but until the rest of the project exists it's tricky commiting to much of anything, and that's okay. In any case, for now The Far Future is a timespace where a whole variety of interesting concepts can secretly be filed away, separately from the initial release.
Deep Time & The Distant Past
Hidden, glimpses discoverable in The Future in dreams and campfire stories, various clues in the statues, buildings and culture of the cradle world seen in The Past.
Our explorers and their colony is an offshoot of a civilization and a culture that has existed for thousands of years on the cradle world. What kind of people are they? What do they believe? Why do they believe that? What was their schooling like? How does it make sense for them to develop this pilot program and launch the mothership?
To understand these things we'll need to look at the world of The Past and the thinkers, scientists and leaders who have shaped that culture, whose books, buildings, statues and beliefs are scattered everywhere.
Digging even deeper, underneath a modern technological society there is the pre-modern society, and the processes that lead to the transition from one to the other, and behind that there are texts, some of which are at the center of religions, where many laws and philosophies originate. These elements are rooted in The Distant Past, a murky time when mythology gave way to civilization.
Before The Distant Past, before civilization, a whole lot of time flowed, this is Deep Time.