Project: Revolve

More Merilyn McDowell. Trying out some poses and perspective and kinda failing at it. Along with some minor dress alterations and back.

Idea

So I was kinda all, what if Merilyn’s story was in the form of a Japanese styled Tactical RPG on a smartphone? So I decided to randomly dub this Project Revolve. Though this may have nothing to do with revolving. But revolvers might get involved.

Gameplay

So I sorta crunched out a turn based tactics gameplay in my head, after thinking about one of my more favourite attempts at it and one of the more recent ones I played. That being Wild Arms 4/5 and X-Com Enemy Unknown.

Essentially its a Hex-based game where you control a small squad of unique characters with heavy emphasis on cover, which lies between the hexes. Fan out, take cover, shoot each other. Characters automatically take cover when present. Characters have movement points which they use to move and use movement related skills. Then they have action points, which they use to attack/reload and use movement unrelated skills.

Cover is completely protective, so characters can’t be hit when behind cover unless you hit them from behind. Cover however has two values to it, suppression and health. Cover when shot will build up ‘suppression’ based on the number of shots hitting it. It loses durability based on the power of shots hitting it. Though certain forms of cover will be immune to certain attacks, it’ll still build up suppression. Suppression is lost over time.

A suppressed piece of cover has a negative impact on characters behind it. Their actions take additional movement/action points to perform and their accuracy suffers. Suppress a target enough and they won’t be able to move at all, and they will have major trouble trying to fight back.

And that’s the general gist of it. There will be probably fairly typical stuff pertaining to stats, level progression and maybe some kinda Overdrive/Limit Break.

Setting

I’ll come up with the long names and extraneous flavour material that 13 year olds only care about later.

It’s the year sometime far in the future. For some reason or another, humanity has kinda screwed the Earth over and haven’t quite progressed beyond the solar system. But now they kinda have to, for survival’s sake.

Using the last resources they have at their disposal, they build giant colony ships designed to be somewhat self sustaining and set off on a very long voyage towards the stars, in hope of reaching somewhere habitable.

And after many generations and years, they do arrive on a habitable, but less than ideal planet. It was home to a primitive alien race that have wiped themselves out and left the place a bit of a shithole. But the people had enough, and a post apocalyptic wasteland will have to do. There’s some alien infrastructure they can salvage, atmosphere’s still breathable and the Gs aren’t too off.

In preparation for settling on worlds unknown, the people on this particular ship had resorted to genetically engineering a superhuman race to help them. Stronger, better, more resistant to radiation, yadda yadda bla. The idea was to send them in first and get them to figure out the early dangerous parts of colonizing an unknown world.

Only there was a lot of different intentions behind their creation. Some just wanted to stick to the plan and then dispose of them. Some people wanted to use them as some crack team of super soldiers to rule post colonial civilization. The guys involved in their development wanted them to replace the human race, hence engineering them to possess a form of ‘genetic domination’. Where crossbreeding these superhumans with regular humans would just result in a superhuman rather than some diluted crossbreed.

So along with the chaos of who gets to decide what when it comes to the new world, all sorts of shit hits the fan and the colony ship spectacularly crash lands on the planet. Tripping humanity over quite a bit. A lot of technology is lost and its time to start all over. Civilization gets based around the crashed colony ship and the salvaging of technology, with many frontier civilizations being formed around gathering resources, studying the extinct aliens and all that jazz. And thus we’re left with some kinda semi-techy Wild West world. The central city based around the crashed ship has a monopoly on most technology and is mostly dominated by the guys who seek to utilize the superhumans as a means to enforce their rule. People they don’t like are mostly exiled to more frontier areas and given more primitive means to survive. Those areas end up being quite lawless as a result.

The superhumans themselves were split. Some were seized by the guys wanting to use them to establish a new world order with them at the head. The guys who wanted them to supplant the human race had some of them ejected from the ship prior to the crash and scattered all over the world to prevent them from falling into wrong hands.

Story

And Merilyn was one of those that got scattered all over the world. After laying sealed in the middle of nowhere, she gets found by an old couple. Who end up awakening her. Only the cyrogenics got all screwed up in the crash, so the awakening process goes all wrong, But she’s superhuman! So it’s cool. She recovers from all the organ failure that would have happened to normal people, along with all that brain damage. But her memories end up being pretty screwed up.

All confused and shit, she gets adopted by the old couple who have lost a daughter prior to all this and treat her like the second coming of their dead daughter. And normally, by the laws of typical RPG development, they will get attacked, the old couple will die and it leads her on an adventure regarding her origins and the fate of the world!

Only that doesn’t happen. The old couple kinda just die of old age and Merilyn decides to figure out what to do from there on. She searches her cyro pod for clues, finds a banged up computer meant to fill her in on everything. Only it kinda got too banged up so it only fills her in on part of the big picture, being that of her origins and that there were more of her kind.

So she embarks on a journey to find the rest of her kin, which…. leads her on an adventure regarding her origins, fragmented memories and the fate of the world.

Merilyn & Friends

So Meryilyn is part of a superhuman/posthuman/whatever project with multiple intentions behind it. But in a nutshell, they are stronger and tougher than regular humans. They have pale skin, but not because of a lack of pigment or bizarre albino effect – its the presence of a semi-reflective pigment in their skin, which gives them far greater radiation resistance than regular people. No they do not sparkle. Get out.

These superhumans were created in pairs and had their eyes dyed certain colours to differentiate the various pairs. Each pair were made with differing characteristics and were given code names [Precious Gem]-#. Merilyn is Ruby-2.

Merilyn picked up the use of lever-action weaponry from her foster father, who had colourful bloodstained history I can’t quite be arsed to come up with just yet. She works as a sort of traveling bounty hunter/gun for hire as she searches for others of her kind.

She eventually meets Amber-1, and they end up fighting over a bounty before realizing who they are and eventually they team up to round up the rest of their kind. Too lazy to design Amber-1, I’ll do that later. Amber-1 doesn’t suffer form memory loss like Merilyn does and seems to be hiding things from her. Eventually news of them starts to bring unwanted attention!

Merilyn and Gameplay

Merilyn will be an offensive forward sort of character. She specializes cowboy weapons, that being revolvers and lever action rifles. Normally these take a lot of action points to reload, but she has the ability to load rounds into them automatically as she moves. Also capable of dual wielding.

She’s bad at suppressing enemies, though capable of it at some level by heavily expending ammunition.

She’s geared towards constantly moving and flanking her opponents. Her movement isn’t as affected by suppression and she has the ability to leap between pieces of cover in close proximity.

~ by depleted on March 16, 2013.