Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The FRED Workshop => Topic started by: supernova_989 on December 22, 2004, 07:14:38 pm
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I'm Making a new campiagn called Nemisis Of Space.
Features :
- over 20 missions
-3 new wepons
-see the whole GTVA fleet!
-A lot of action
-some old Nesmisis will arise
-great story
-meet a new Nemisis.....a virus that turns your own people into Phycos.
-go back to Capella
-a lot more to be mensioned( i can never spell that) soon!
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it's mentioned.
And that really doesn't mean jack squat, sorry. What the hell is the storyline? It sounds like your basic average newbie campaign, with Battle of Endor missions and basic storyline and grammar mispellings.
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Okay heres the storyline
Over 10 years have past sense you have destoyed Capella. You need to rebuild the GTVA incase of another mishap. You are now a miner, mining in the fields of Apollo. You find a divice that can screw with other ship's systems. You bring it back to the GTVA, which is installed on A collosus ship. For finding this one hell of a divice, you gaurd the Collosus, Capella, 24/7. But something is wrong. Capella's systems go haywire, making the ship rip to pieces. Trying to find what was the cause to this was, you go out without permission from command. You find that the only thing intact is the divice. All of the sudden it bursts into a yellow-blackish flame and sucks you into a kind of dimension. Your stuck there until you can find a way out..... if you can.
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Um, ok, first of all, get a grammar checker.
Second of all: Why be a miner if there's no point in the story? Not only is that pointless, but it doesn't make any sense: some down in the dirt miner suddenly becomes the top pilot of the GTVA cause he found some old device? Nuh uh, it doesn't work that way.
Also, if the GTVA was completley boned financially, it's possible that they would have built another collossus, but why? It took four years or something to build the first one...why spend their limited money on another juggernaut when the last one got pasted by the Sathanis?
And where exactly were you when you "go out"....are you saying you are stationed on the Capella, then, it disintegrates, but you're still inside of it...yet you then go out after it disintigrates, and then look at the wreckage? What?
And I'm not even gonna go into the last part.
Not to be cruel, but you really need to work on that storyline.
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The Colossus took 20 years to complete.
I believe with this whole miner thingy he wanted to diversify the boring scheme all campaigns follow. You always start as a new pilot at the beginning of every campaign, if it is explained who you are. The idea is original.
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I'm think i heard those histories elsewhere...
Another Collossus...yeah, that's a good idea...let's invest 20 years of work to make a big ship so a Sathanas can come and destroy it in a few seconds...
I think the GTVA Fleet will not evolve to bigger, but to more powerful and smaller, or more specialized ships...look at the Deimos, that's the future of the fleet...fast-moving powerful small ships...
and we need to be fast if we are going to use the 'evac system-collapse nodes' strategy in future Shivan Invasions...
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The New Collosus was a secret.
And dont go saying Why didnt they use it against the shevians?
Because they were building it then!
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Anyway it is going to get destroyed (Oops)
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(oops) omg oops you told us your story! Ahhhh! It's not like you didn't say that in your description.
And we weren't saying why didn't they use it against the shivans, but why were they building a second if the first took twenty years to complete? And how would (or why) would they keep something THAT big a secret?
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Actually it's quite possible that the GTVA would build a second colossus in secret in case something happened to the first one. :)
It's like that line from Contact. "Why build one when you can build two for twice the cost?" :D
My problem with the plotline for this campaign is not the appearance of a second colossus but that a lot of the plotline seems either very noobish or something we've seen before.
Supernova. I think it's time for my standard speech to new people who are thinking of doing a campaign. Take a look at the FRED Academy (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,28122.0.html). Don't just make one or two missions for us. Make 5 or 6. The FA will help you gain lots of skills in FREDding so that your missions are much more polished than they probably would be now. While training you'll be able to stick around in the community long enough to learn what sort of missions have been done before. Then if you decide to do your own campaign you'll find it much easier. Cause the worst thing you can do is plunge head first into a campaign and then realise six months down the line that you don't like your plot cause it's too noobish.
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Sound advice. :nod:
It's good that you want to make a campaign, but you have to be aware that 99% of them never get anywhere near complete. Everyone has their own project, but it's an awful lot of work, an most people don't get them finished (my own campaign has been in the works for 2 years now, and I'm only now making the first model for it, and only 2 missions have been roughly fredded - out of a total of 30 or so).
And the Collossus is horrible. Bad model, bad ship. Choose something else (you could use one of the dreadnoughts or superdestroyers that are floating about the place).
That said, good luck with it. :)
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I use the GTDn Archangel in The Truth Revealed (the one with the big Blue Über Beam on the front) to Blockade the Capella node, 10 years after Capella went nova. The Idea is a Sath comes out of the node in front of the ARchangel and the Archangel's gun starts firing and the Sath blows up, this continues until the Shivan Sath fleet is destroyed, or at least that's the plan...
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if 80 saty's jump out in the same moment the archie is toast
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yes, clean up the story a bit.
it soundsl ike it has promise, but clean it up.. it sounds a bit grainy right now.
since everything else has been say, i second it.
good luck.
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Originally posted by kietotheworld
I use the GTDn Archangel in The Truth Revealed (the one with the big Blue Über Beam on the front) to Blockade the Capella node, 10 years after Capella went nova. The Idea is a Sath comes out of the node in front of the ARchangel and the Archangel's gun starts firing and the Sath blows up, this continues until the Shivan Sath fleet is destroyed, or at least that's the plan...
Not wishing to derail the thread, but :wtf:? So what if the Shivans dump a load of bombers through the node and waste the Archangel (or just it's cannon)? And Capella got sealed off anyway....
supernova_989: Try and avoid having the story revolve around one big ship if you can. It tends to lead to rather generic missions, all involving the fate of that one capship. Focus it on an event, a location, or even a person and their ideas (some radical politician/religious nutter/whatever). That'll give you the chance to make some original and exciting missions around it. :)
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Originally posted by pyro-manic
Not wishing to derail the thread, but :wtf:? So what if the Shivans dump a load of bombers through the node and waste the Archangel (or just it's cannon)? And Capella got sealed off anyway....
supernova_989: Try and avoid having the story revolve around one big ship if you can. It tends to lead to rather generic missions, all involving the fate of that one capship. Focus it on an event, a location, or even a person and their ideas (some radical politician/religious nutter/whatever). That'll give you the chance to make some original and exciting missions around it. :)
Or base the whole storyline around all of them, confuse the player what is going on and let him only know this only at the very end.
Easy for me to say, I know. Do you think that is a good idea? :hopping:
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Originally posted by TopAce
The Colossus took 20 years to complete.
I believe with this whole miner thingy he wanted to diversify the boring scheme all campaigns follow. You always start as a new pilot at the beginning of every campaign, if it is explained who you are. The idea is original.
I belive it took 20 years to build becouse of the Great War reconstruction. Remeber that loses were terrible, and lot's f materials and time and skilled people went into the rebuilding. I really don't think Colossus was their top priority. Probably the construction has been halted and then resumed a few times.
If you take it that it takes 1-2 years to build an Orion/Hecate, then a Colossus really shouldn't take 20 years.
If you have 12 construction rings, you cna build 12 Hecates in 2 years. Likewise, if you put more resources, more people into construction a nother Colossus, I'm sure you culd do it in less than 10 years...
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Join to the FRED Academy!!!
i learned a lot there...
or join an already on-going project........also learned some...
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How about this :D
It has been over 200 years since the Shivans have been wiped out. The GTVA has been exploring differtent places of space. You must gaurd the Novastar and the Ra as you explore. You find new technology that could never be dreamed of....finding a way to minimize the size of a supernova into a gun, able to travel to other universes. But theres a problem. While finding a new part of another universe, you find that a horrifying creature has awoken. :yes: or :no:
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How can you possibly make a supernova into a gun?
And make sure how you state how the GTVA managed to whipe out the Shivans. Just wondering.
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Not really Freespace, is it? The GTVA could never wipe out the Shivans, and there's not really much of a story there. It's basically "OMG! Teh shivans are back! Alpha 1 saves the day!!11" but with a different enemy. Your basic "terrifying new species" plot. That isn't what Freespace is about, really, and it's been tried before anyway (aldo's campaign Reciprocity was about a horrible new species, as well as the Shivans coming back to rape the GTVA again. He couldn't finish it because it was too much work, too ambitious and he didn't have the time or staff to accomplish it. Shame, but not terribly surprising. I think there are others as well. The Tau (?? the blue blobby thing he made) from Nico's campaign Over The Top (also RIP) were another new species. OTT died last year, Reci this year.
Have you played Homesick yet? That's pretty much the kind of campaign you want to make - a challenging, exciting story, but nothing over the top, coupled with great missions.
You've got to think of a way to get the plot into the game in a way that the player feels immersed in it, that they're doing something important while staying true to the game universe.
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so.......whats a good storyline...
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dont ask us!!!! YOU gotta make it up!!
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supernova - my advice to you is this:
Join the Fred Academy. Do a stack of missions for them, to get your skills sharp. Then join a hosted project, like Scroll of Atankharzim or one of the others who need Fredders. That'll get you really sharp, and you'll be able to see the kind of plot structure and detail you need for a good campaign (I mentioned Scroll because I'm a staffer, and the storyline is fantastic ;)). That'll set you up to make a killer campaign of your own. :)
You need to start with a theme of some sort. You could have:
Pirates
Betrayal
Devious doings
Disaster - natural or otherwise
Shivans (try not to if you can help it - or don't base the story purely around Shivans - throw them into the mix once you're story's progressed a fair way. "Argh - the Shivans are back to kill us all!!" has been done so many times it's not even funny any more...)
Revenge
Any of those, or a combination of a few, will give you a good basic premise to construct a plot around. If you want, I can write you a little sample plot around one of these themes to get you started... :)
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ok time out guys....we are really hammering on the new guys lately. ok Cobras got annoying and pec...whatever his name is...well....anyway...at least supernova is trying to do something and actually ASKING.
Supernova i am going to give you a bit of advice that i learned a long time ago...write it. Once it is written put it away. Come back in a month....either you love it or you will hate it. If you love it, it's good stuff, if not...it sucks. The reason you put it away for a month is so that the newness wears off, and you aren't mistaking "fresh" for "good". It's a common problem. I do that. I think it and then i put it away. I read it in a month...and i gotta tell ya....i have thrown away more storylines than i have ever thought of showing, and am i ever glad that i do not suffer the embarassment of actually having shown that garbage to anyone. Try it, you'd be surprised.
Take that month that you are waiting and do the fred academy...it can't hurt, and more importantly, you'll be learning how things work here at HLP.
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Well said, ShadowWolf. :yes:
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let me sum up for what i have for my campaign ('The 900 Days'). oh, BTW, it has passed the 'fresh or good?' test :) (surprisingly well...)
it is based on disaster AND revenge AND shivans (in a fairly new way, too...) as the main points.
this is the type of campaign which chronicles an event or series of events, rather than play out a story.
it introduces a new 'race' (sort of), but its a very small one (lesse... maybe... 6-7 ships at most?)
a few new shivan ships (i already have the models, so thats no biggie)
so, relativly light MODding.
LOTS of new music. new music can really help immerse the player in the game. IMO theres nothing like jumping into an unknown (and new) mission to hear new, creepy music :) (i already have the music)
a new mainhall, which also helps get the story across.
this is quite an adventurous effort, and im letting it sit. it has passed the time test (ie, i still think its awesome) but i havnt started working on it yet.
and please, this is serving as an example. so dont start bashing my campaign. leave it be. please.
so, supernova, do sharpen your skills, even if its some standalone missions, then make sure your campaign is unique, fun, and/or just plain COOL.
THEN make it.,
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errrrrrr................what about me?
any way...
wanna make a storyline?
burrow ideas from other sci-fi games (Halo, StarLancer), and war-movies (Tears from Sun, Blade II <--not really a war-movie, but a good one[the first believeable scientific explanation of vampires])...just like me...............mix 'em up and you'll have something with a slight resemblence to original...