richmond2010 wrote:EDIT: Storyline... (cbloopy's idea)
One fine day, you came back from Magic School, but you lost your house key. You decided to go to Roar Bokysum Island with your brother, Wattaminute and Kaboo9 (bomb).
After reaching the island, you find a castle, that seems to be deserted and filled with ghost, hence the name Castle of Haunted Ghosts. After exploring the castle, you had to go through a volcano and a forest to get to Mun Town, the town of dark magic. [END OF DEMO 1.]
Not bad. Now let's see if we can flesh out certain parts of it:
1) There's no clear logic going from "lost your house key" to "go to Roar Bokysum Island". Seems like there should be some ministory/events/etc. that can lead from the first to the second. This would hopefully help with ideas for hub areas as well as adventures.
2) I can definitely see how you can incorporate adventure ideas by expanding on "You decided to go to Roar Bokysum Island with your brother, Wattaminute and Kaboo9". For example, there could be one adventure for each of the 3 characters (brother, Wattaminute, Kaboo9). For example, maybe Kaboo9 lost his backpack or something, and there's an adventure where you have to retrieve his backpack from his house or something before Kaboo9 joins you on your trip. Or your brother got lost in a cave or something and needs to be rescued.
3) I imagine you should be able to make at least 2-3 hub areas just for the stroll going from the Island's shore (where your ship presumably is at) to the Castle.
4) An obvious way to incorporate adventures into the "you find a castle" part would be to require winning a number of adventures to get enough keys to go into the castle. This would also work well with the hub areas created for #3.
5) The volcano and the forest sounds like excellent places to expand on for your storyline. Even if you decide to scope them out of demo 1, I definitely suggest putting in some interesting teasers for areas you might revisit further down the storyline. For example, there could be a gate to an entrance inside the volcano, or something similar for the forest, where you could visit during later events in the storyline. But for demo one ther'es no key for the gate so those areas can be left unfinished.
6) There should be at least one link between the Castle and Mun Town. For example, maybe you get a special item after completing a number of adventures in the Castle, and this special item is required to get into Mun Town or to visit someone in Mun Town.
On that note, it would probably be a good idea to have certain areas of the Castle off-limits until some further storyline events in Mun Town (for the next demo, not necessarily demo 1).
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Hope these ideas are helpful.
Another thing to consider is actually to not put too much thought into the adventures themselves. That sounds counterintuitive, but the fact is, the strong point of having a hub is for the storyline, and not so much for good puzzles. If I want good puzzles I could just as easily play them as standalone custom adventures w/o the hub. Even Midnight Synergy when they design their games, most of the adventures are generally not designed directly with the hub in mind; instead they just create adventures whenever they got an idea, and then figure out where in the hub to link the adventures to later.
So I think it's okay if you leave some of the adventures a little on the easy side, and worry about how to improve them later. In fact, having an easy version of an adventure can be very helpful in getting ideas for making them harder later.
