Topic: The story and gameplay of my own sequel to Lord of Shadows

[steve_j777]

Hello guys,

I'm new in this forum, this is my first post!
Sorry that its pretty long!

As a hobby of mine I like to create fantasy stories in my mind, I create characters and stories that I find intriguing and interesting. I have created many interesting stories through the years, and some years ago I had the idea of trying to make some of them into comic books. I feel comic books/graphic novels would be the perfect medium to bring my stories to life. Therefore I wanted to find an artist that would offer to illustrate one of my stories, but that proved to be very hard as most artists would want(and rightly deserve) good compensation and also would take a very long time to do a great illustration of even one page of a comic book. So at some point I gave up on the idea of finding an artist that could deliver this graphic quality to my stories.

I have also have been always fascinated by video games, and I'm a big fan of the Castlevania games! And of course I got right away Castlevania Lords of Shadows for the PS3, and played the game from beginning to end (in hard mode). My impressions about this game were the following:

I think Lords of Shadows has triple A production values, breathtaking visuals, great and fun combat system, great puzzles and a storyline that has awesome moments. So then what has prevented it from moving from a triple A game to a game of the year sort of game? In my opinion the answer is that it is predictable, gamers feel at any given moment that they are either fighting, doing platforming or solving puzzles. Even if the particular fighting or puzzle is awesome, part of the awesomeness is lost due to the predictability I talked about before. Also the story is awesome at certain moments but its not consistently awesome.I really believe that with a story that is constantly awesome and that incorporates puzzles seamlessly, platforming in the right moments and also fighting when appropriate, this game would have been groundbreaking. When the story mixes the elements seamlessly, the user is never aware he is solving a puzzle or doing platforming or fighting, he is just immersed in this very interesting storyline and is looking forward to what
is going to happen next, which ideally he should not be able to predict

So why am I talking about all this? And at this point I want to apologize again for the long post. One day I was thinking Wow! These guys at Mercury Steam can create this wonderful visuals and environments, if I only had all these resources to bring any of my stories to life that would be awesome! So I decided to make a little experiment, I tried to create a storyline for the next castlevania, and see what kind of thing I could come up with. So I spend two months working intensively on coming up with a storyline that would continue the game by explaining the things that happened before including why and how Gabriel became Dracula, and also a whole new storyline with its new twists and mysteries following the universe and events from the previous game, and trying to make it even more awesome than the first game. I eventually came up with what I consider a very cool storyline, but still quite a few missing pieces. If this was just a story I could complete it easily, but what makes it more challenging is that I'm writing a game instead of a story where the gamer is interacting and changing the story.

Then I started writing the ideas from my head into paper which proved to be a lot of work. It's a lot of fun to create ideas, stories and characters in my head, but writing them down sometimes feels like a lot of work. At some point when I had written a few pages for the introduction of the game, I tried to contact some of the people at Konami in charge of Lords of Shadows and offered to give them whatever I write freely for them to use in their game if they chose to. I sent them the introduction I had written as a sort of demo of   my writing style. They were extremely nice and cool people, but they were very clear in that they are not interested in receiving external ideas and they wouldn't read the introduction I wrote for legal and ethical reasons.

Because of this I have decided not to continue writing the ideas I had into paper. But since I already wrote the introduction and nobody has read it, instead of keeping this introduction to myself I thought I will share it freely with whoever would like to read it. I don't have much experience writing and I really didn't review or polish the document, but it still reflects the story I wanted to create and how I would have started the game. I also talk about an innovative gameplay idea I designed for one of the characters in the game.

So for whoever that wants to read it, you can download it from my mediafire site:
http://www.mediafire.com/?ob7mafyk89lsf66

Thank you for reading this post and for being Castlevania fans!

Steve

 

[JooohnShaft]

I could do some concept art for you free of any charge, I have a scaner to put my images on too, so I can post you images fast and easy

[steve_j777]

Hello Jooohnshaft,

That's a very generous offer from you. I truly appreciate that.

The way I planned this was more like a game rather than just a story, meaning I also had come up with precise gameplay ideas, many of them really innovative IMHO. So for this particular one just having an artist wouldn't be enough to make it real.

That said I have created other stories in the past, one of them has similar themes to Castlevania like vampires, heros, etc It would be cool to find an artist that could draw that story.

But if an artist would collaborate with me he would have to like my style and resonate with the kind of stories I write. Have you read the introduction for a Lord of Shadows sequel that I posted?