As of now the story is that a bunch of space explorers get shot down into Aeon because space junk destroyed their ship. They find a desolate, war-torn planet and their escape pods take them to different parts of the planet. The lands are covered with ruined, semi-functional war bases, that block their path. To beat each level they must find all of the power boxes to open the door.

The Crew:
-Captain:  Floyd the wolf
-Pilot: Felix the eagle (with a robotic arm)
-Navigator: Jean the cat
-Technician: Ivan the gerbil
-Medic: Rita the armadillo

And the bonus character:
Janitor: Hugsy the mentally disordered and mutant hamster who lands on the moon.

The levels will be broken up into "sets", where each character has a set of levels, on a different part of the planet.

However, I have to say that I don't feel very excited over this "story" mode. From what's been said and stuff, it sounds like we're making it pretty generic, but with some hopefully great levels. Because of this feeling of genericness, I propose some new ideas!


As you've hopefully seen with the Aeon demo by now, you can be very creative with Aeon. As yaya pointed out, you can make levels where Benjamin Franklin is constantly watching you in the background. I was really hoping, before, that we would make a ton of bonus levels that were crazy creative because those seemed more interesting to me than "a jungle level" or "a desert level".

I have a better idea than just the simple sets of levels. Instead, we should make a World Map, like in Super Mario World. That world map was awesome and it was so cool to explore different paths of levels and find secret ones. I'd love it if Aeon had something like that. That would be much more fun.

For those of you who haven't played Super Mario World, the levels are set up on an over-world map, with circles representing the levels and paths connecting each level. The paths were set up to draw a map, and every time you beat a level, you see a little animation of a trail opening up to the next level. Some levels were marked as red, meaning that they had secret exits. If you found the secret exits in their level, you'd open up a secret path, which would lead to a secret level or multiple secret levels. Going through levels and going through the secret ones was much more fun than looking at a list of levels and just clicking the one that you haven't beaten yet. I think it was suggested that we make a fancy menu or something with a world map, click on the spot on the planet and a list comes up. Well, that's boring compared to this.

And then we can do much more with that. Instead of having to force ourselves to make so many levels that are "jungle themed", we can do whatever we want. We can do something similar to the Star World in SMW where you have to beat a certain amount of bonus levels to unlock a path to a new world of even more bonus levels, which could be the Moon where Hugsy is at. We can make a ridiculous order of events, and have the world map change as you go along. And then maybe we can set it up so that it could work with multiple characters.

In this case, it wouldn't be a good idea to let you control each character from the start. Maybe we can make it so that if you beat a certain amount of levels, another character will "awaken" and you can go to his/her spot on the world, complete their levels and try to connect them with the other paths that you already unlocked.

I like the idea of a map, but it would probably be better to have themes. (jungle, et cetera) They don't have to be TOO themed (different style space station w/ different music, that's all) but everything should make SOME sense. Even Mario World did.

I like your map idea, the story does sound slight cliched, though.

Unlocking character should not be "beat x levels", but "beat level y". And it could still be divided into areas, as Mario World also is, with each a different theme. But I still say nothing too absurd. No terrain made out of doggy biscuits with a Sint Bernard looking in the background.

Amen, Jellsprout.

I suggest that there should be an Aeon I, which follows the ideas of Jell's post above. Then... after much learning and gathering of talent, we make an Aeon II. This game will be a cinematic masterpiece and will become one of the best 2D online adventure games of all time. The opening scene I have in mind is of the ship being hit by an asteroid and the crew have to get to the escape pods while the ship falls apart around them. In an ideal world.

If we will hold off all the costumisable stuff for user levels until Aeon II (which is similar to what I suggested earlier), I APPROVE that.

I think that Aeon I should be a fairly basic game with no amazing effects, customisation or scenery. Just a plain HATPC-esque game. Then, with any luck, Livio will be able to apply what he learnt in the first game to make a version that is more interesting for the player and, perhaps, the level-maker as well.

Remember, Livio, the game is not meant to be centered around the story, but the make your own levels part.

EDIT: 700th post!

bleh, that idea just makes working on "Aeon I" sound a lot less fun all of a sudden. I don't like the idea of planning a second version as an excuse for not putting stuff in the original.

yeah, we'll probably have a general theme, like a desert level leading to another desert level, and then that leading to a plateau or something, then a mountain. But the idea is that we're not forcing ourselves to stick to one theme for a certain amount of levels. And this will let us come up with better ideas too.

I think that we shouldn't be entirely closed off of making a couple absurd bonus levels. It would be really funny if I was playing a game, and I go through a ton of trouble to unlock this well-hidden bonus level and it turns out to be this totally crazy thing that makes no sense. lol But when I talk about such levels, I don't mean just making things look weird, I mean like taking advantage of some of the custom tiles maybe and making things like flying platforms and boulder-launchers and stuff. Maybe even some custom characters, like one idea for a level where you control a guy who is invincible to dynamite but can be killed by arrows, and you have to dodge the arrows from inside the smoke of a ton of explosions. I dunno, but only for a few random bonus levels, like with Hugsy on the Moon, maybe. Anything can happen up there....

yeah, but these levels are important too because these are the levels that newcomers will play first and if they aren't impressed with these levels, then they might not feel inclined to make their own levels or to play custom levels.

But if they are on different parts of the planet, how would it be one long path?

I'm not sure what you mean. There are multiple paths to levels and different hidden paths for bonus levels.

but yeah, the multiple characters thing makes it complicated. Maybe we make each level character specific, and then you unlock the character after you run into their location on the world map? and you can only play levels for characters that you've unlocked?

A peanutbutter-jelly world is absurd enough for my liking. As I said, no doggy biscuit levels with a Sint Bernard watching from the background.

As for multiple paths, either the levels will have multiple doors which you can use to finish, or beating a level doesn't unlock 1 level, but several levels. And each of those levels will take different paths through the world.

I like the idea of secret doors unlocking secret paths rather than secret mini-levels inside the actual level.

And maybe we could do something with the whole gem idea. Collect them all to unlock yet another collection of bonus levels?

And we should encourage going back to old levels by letting you use any character you want for levels that you've already beaten. That way we can do stuff like where you have to return to a level with a specific character in order to get the gem? Not sure if that's a good idea or not, but it definitely promotes exploration and replay, assuming that it's not overly obvious that you should go in with a different character, otherwise that's just annoying.

I was actually thinking of that Livio. In video games of mine, once you beat a level with the required character, you can go back and play the level with any character you wants to things previously impossible with a certain character. Completing the level fully unlocks other stuff.

I'd say that's a sort of good idea, but it has a problem with it. Wouldn't it be hard in levels to add an extra path for other characters? Wouldn't those other paths confuse new players? And wouldn't the path's for other characters take up the large but limited space availiable? I'd support this, but only on certain levels and if both the character you normally play it as and the character you are unnofically playing it as have met in the center.

No to all those questions. If you look at HatIC, it is actually pretty easy to make certain paths unaccesable to some of the characters. And most of the time, it isn't that difficult at all to what path to take. If you see a ledge of 5 tiles high, it is obvious only the eagle can reach it.