I defined with the creative team the themes and the controlling idea we wanted to develop in 50 AU, a space opera RPG. The goal was to identify a theme that would fit a gameplay focused on large space battles and an art style that mixed high-tech gear with the future of piracy.
The themes that emerged were around geopolitical conflict and the search of a new habitable planet. This goal was set by politicians years and years ago, before humanity developed its new space identity, and it was never updated. In the current day of our player, a single planet could never sustain the whole of humanity as it grew after generations of space exploration.
This provided us the setting for leading our players into massive space encounters and skirmishes alike.
2 quotes helped us build the themes for the game:
“Every organization rests upon a mountain of secrets” – Julian Assange
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” – F. Nietzsche
The controlling idea for our story was people federate in larger and larger group, power dynamics emerge and corrupts those systems, derailing them from their initial good intentions.
I used values from the table below to ensure consistency in our story.
| People can be trusted | Middle size organisations can sometimes be trusted but you’ll find out they had a personal interest in it that resembles one of the governments |
| Individuals who look like people but are part of governments look like they can be trusted but they cannot | Governments cannot be trusted |
The goal of this table was to help us ensure that no mission would contradict the controlling idea, while giving us a framework to develop a variety of characters and missions that would illustrate the concept in each cell.
Once this step was done, I went on to write the story arc with the main plot points, then I detailed each mission around its role in the main story arc.
Below is an example:
| Plot point | Location | Type | Mission steps | Key sentences |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting point | Deimos and the belt | Cinematic | PP1- Player works for Earth government. PP2- sent to a conflict PP3 – realizes his crew has been sacrificed and him betrayed PP4 – escapes with his crew to the belt PP5 – branded a traitor becomes a smuggler | Those ships… no those ships aren’t Martian… |
| Mission 1 | Belt | Exterminate | Because of resources issues some inner ships are mining the belt, The belt is a neutral area, nobody is supposed to exploit it. You are asked to find who is doing it Your main character recognizes inner markings and inner ships in an outer belt area. No pity, you have to burn them down, they just shouldn’t have come | Fucking inners! Like they haven’t screwed us enough, they think they can come and mine here, and nobody will fight them off. I say we teach them a lesson! |
| Mission 2 | Saturn | Delivery | A rumor from years ago says the rebellion on Deimos was staged, by a corp wanting to break free from the inner government. Player takes a contract for the corp after saving one of the scientists in the team. The ex-Martian corp is paying you to retrieve a package from the outer and deliver it to one of their new station in the belt. Player learn about Martian mentality Fight pirates to deliver package and head off to Saturn. | Martians! Land of queen bees, we could give them the best of the moons and it still wouldn’t be enough! |
| Mission 3 Inciting incident | Jupiter trojan | Boss | Delivery mission for Ceres. Taxi the scientist from one asteroid in the trojan back to Ceres. Meet Dust and learn about the fifth planet destruction and that Kuiper’s confederation tried to kill her. Pick her up, fight off Outer ships, intel about the Ancient civilization and the technology that destroyed the 5th planet. Kill the boss and go home. The boss here is a Kuiper sergeant that has managed to track her in the trojan which is Kuiper territory, he’s calling her a traitor and asking our player to deliver her to him. Because of your own history with the inner government you know what they mean by traitor, they threaten to attack your ship and won’t back down so you destroy them. | Long before us there was a fifth planet, a peaceful civilization, an ideal world, and someone came to blast it away leaving chaos behind them.I will find out why! |
Below is a sketch that summarizes the balance between missions where the player feels trusts or distrusts as this is the main sentiment we want to manipulate to build tension and emotion in the story.
Amélie Beaudroit 
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