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Re-Boot Revealed

2014.02.24 10:28:25
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image Some time ago I was working on an MSPA-like webcomic called Re-Boot. You can go read it here if you feel like going through hundreds of posts of not much really happening. I am great at advertising my things. Anyway, this blog post is about explaining the background behind everything and revealing the thoughts that went into it.

I'm doing this primarily because I was asked to, but I feel it's also good to offer some closure to the people who did bother to read through it all, as I don't think I will ever continue, let alone finish it. I think I'll start explaining with the initial inspirations that started everything.

The first thing I thought out was that there would be some kind of science facility deep underground in a city with an artificial sky. The inhabitants were technologically advanced and had developed techniques to bridge over between virtual worlds and the “real” world. This was partially inspired by the Myst books (which you should read), particularly Atrus' dilemma of what actually happens when a new age is written: Does it create a new world entirely or does it merely establish a link to an already existing reality? And what about the world we live in? Is this made up or linked to as well? Those are some very interesting concepts and ideas to ponder around with.

I decided to couple it more with a virtual reality approach. There would be a huge computer that was in charge of managing these virtual spaces. In order to avoid having to come up with billions of characters and a thriving society, I opted for a disaster scenario: Something went horribly wrong and everyone was put into stasis, living in virtual worlds. You start out as an individual whose virtual world was broken and didn't work properly. From there you'd somehow escape into reality and try to escape the facility. That's about the extent I thought out when I started the comic, although everything was much less definite than that still. I also had an entire mechanic planned out for when the player dies (the state is loaded from a previous save, but the world would change in some ways), but that never really came to use.

Later on I decided it would be much more interesting if the computer that manages the virtual space and thus has complete power over it would be an active antagonist, although not strictly malevolent as that would be way too overpowered. Instead I went with a malfunctioning, crazy personality that would leave a lot of space open for mistakes. I planned out a huge backstory as to how the malfunction came to be, but never really explored that either. I can't quite remember what it was all about, but I think it involved unexpected earthquakes creating a corruption in the highly volatile computer database, which then coupled with a huge power surge led to a disturbance in the personality of the AI. The complete evacuation then followed due to the computer's misprojections of the seismic activity.

Anyway, the biggest problem throughout the work is that there was never a good or clear goal as to what to do. The characters just stumbled from room to room, investigating things and sometimes “solving” things that can only be described as puzzles with a sack of salt added. I could never quite figure out on how to put enough pressure on advancing either. I guess this is mostly due to me actually wanting to do something else, rather than driving a story along. As is often the case, I simply love immersing myself in an environment and simply exploring it. This sort of instinct of peaceful exploration heavily clashed with the desire of having an intriguing and exciting story to play or read.

After some time I worked on expanding the background of the civilization they belong to. There was a bit of history planned out about wars between different intelligent species in the past and a scientific collaboration in this lab that led to some variety in the species being present. One individual of the other species..es was also briefly introduced in a flashback. The reason for this particular civilization burying itself underground was that the earth above was drying up and quickly turning into a huge desert due to heat storms. They discovered a huge cavern that provided good living standards (clear water lake, access to energy through thermal heat, food through large fungi and underground animals, etc) and built a new city within it. It was subsequently almost completely shut off from the rest of the surface world and as such their complete evacuation and basically death went by unnoticed by the rest.

The main research that was performed in the labs was genetics and virtual space related. Particularly trying to fuse different organisms and incorporating different traits. I thought about adding in an entire sub-section about a puzzle that involved generating the proper genetic sequence to advance and so on. The reason behind our initial character ending up in a failed virtual world was that he was actually a creature built buy the scientists there and was only hastily put into a broken cryo storage chamber.

Generally though a lot of parts of the world were left heavily underdeveloped and I could never figure out how to build it to create a plot that would result in interesting scenarios. I was always hoping that the random and wild nature of an MSPA would provide enough craziness to inspire interesting things, but I think the rather serious tone I laid out for the plot pretty much ruined that. I was hoping to catch this craziness again with the shift sometime near the end. Introducing completely new and different characters and using a more silly form of images was supposed to shift it all into both a more workable format for me and a more interesting plot for the readers.

Sadly this all didn't really work out either as I was just out of steam. I got tired of the story and all the corners I had written myself into and there was no fix anywhere near in sight. As other projects grabbed my interest I decided to leave it at that to clear my mind of it.

I still don't regret putting this down as it's just so flawed in way too many ways. There's a lot of intriguing ideas in the world, I'm sure, but it just didn't work with the comic. However the case may be, I hope this at least gave some insight into my reasonings. I'm certain I could do this all a lot more in-depth, maybe even panel-by-panel, but I'm sorry to say that I really don't want to put that much effort into reliving my mistakes.

If you do have more questions, you can write a comment or ask me personally and I'll see if I can remember. image

Written by shinmera