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June 23rd 2014, 05:17 AM
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CocoMonkey
Bard He/Him United States
Please Cindy, say the whole name each time. 
"...you could make an Epic with four screens and no storyline. Just have one screen where NPCs have three hours worth of dialogue, a screen filled with another two hours worth of fighting monsters, then a screen with lots of hidden goodies for an explorable area, and then a final screen with ending credits." - Skull*

Could I? Let's see.

*Four screens
*Many Levels
*Many ABAB Quatrains of amateurish metaphor-based poetry

example:
The Forest is a box.
"A hundred paper crowns,
with whiskey on the rocks
in a barroom built from nouns."

example 2:
The Dragon is a man.
With clockwork in his jaws,
He lights the frying pan,
Subsuming all that was.

I promise they don't all start with "the X is a Y."

*One Conversation per level
*One Battle per level (refightable for the most part)
*No Hidden Goodies or Explorable Areas, there isn't enough room
*Definitely not an Epic

In "Reductio ad Absurdum," we find Dink Smallwood confronting the big end boss of a huge epic DMOD that we'll have to assume just happened. Dink fights; Dink loses. The bad guy's plan comes to fruition: the world we know is replaced with a world at once tiny and infinite. Only a couple of screens' worth of space exist, but although a great many people now inhabit this world, it's rare for more than two or three to meet as they phase through different instances of the same space.

Repeatedly, Dink will find himself in such an instance. There will be someone to talk to, and there will be a battle. He'll find out more about the bad guy and his motivations as he goes. You'll find out details of the epic quest that ended in failure. Dink won't know if he's accomplishing anything at all, but you will, because there are NUMBERS. Getting to the top one has got to be good.

--

This DMOD is so early in development that nothing really exists apart from a few text files and a bunch of ideas in my head. I've been told that this is a pretty bad idea, and it may be. Maybe there will be no interest in this, and I'll abandon it. Maybe I'll end up abandoning it at any rate. But I've been taking this idea quite seriously and spending a lot of my time on it lately.

The reason I'm bringing it up so prematurely is to solicit some ideas. A hundred conversations is a lot. I've already got solid ideas for twenty or so, but I've still got a lot of slots to fill. If anybody has an idea as to what kind of characters Dink might meet while phasing through this crazy little world, let me know. It's also pretty hard to balance a hundred battles with generally increasing difficulty, so if anybody has thoughts on that, that would also be groovy.

*Note: Skull was arguing that such a DMOD should not be considered an epic, to be clear.

UPDATE 6/29: Edited to reflect the abandonment of 100 levels, which was too much to ask of both my ability and the player's patience.