TREE AND STAR, by Paul Lee (aka Bainespal)
There is something about Competitions I really can’t cope with. The real annoyance of our time, the ultimate depressing machinarium. It is the time limit.
You know, you have to submit games in time and this deadline can spoil good games and ruin a player’s experience.
So, you may ask: why start a Comp if that is what you think of it?
The answer lies in the results.
This mini-comp had one main object, when it started blossoming in my mind: having people use part of my setting to create games and to see how those games would be in terms of quality, yes, but most of all in terms of story.
'Cause you know, linear or interactive, puzzleless or puzzlefest, it is all about the Story.
The first game I received was Tree & Star by Paul Lee. Or, as the game banners itself (!), Sea and Star. (The author can decide whenever he wants.)
This is an impressive game, in terms of storytelling. Paul has asked me a lot of questions, during the Comp’s time, to check if what he had in mind was right for what I sketched out first. I kept answering that I didn’t care, that I didn’t need his story to be that much in synch with mine. But that was not entirely true, to be honest. I really wanted my background to grow. I really wanted to see what the Andromeda’s Universe is like.
Fortunately enough, Paul took a small, dry seed and turned it into a full blown forest.
Let’s see how this forest grew.
The Setting. (With a capital S, due to ego-enlarging purpose).
Tree and Star takes place in a giant ship, somewhere in time. The sky is dark, the Universe is out of sight and there is nothing to do but Duty and Duty is the New Way of the New Heavens.
The sordid truth is that the starship Godspeed, in which the PC has lived all his life, is stranded in space and all its gazillion inhabitants are dumb soldiers and civilians who live a life pointless, no hopes of redemption, nowhere to go. Which is, essentially, a parody of our own time, where people have to write complicated games in complicated environments to find a medium to happiness.
There’s this prologue, then the prologue ends and it’s a misty years later and Our Hero turns out to be a programmer in a silly cubicle living the silly life of the Duty.
Then, something happens.
Talking about “canonicity”, this is nothing short of what Andromeda Awakening was built around: an unforeseen (?) event which starts Spreading The News and which the PC must survive in order to reveal it. The main difference is that, while in AA What Is Going On wasn’t (I hope) too much foreseeable, in Tree and Star it is all been said before the game begins and you have to have a lot of nice aces up your sleeves to render it in HD.
Paul rendered it in HD and 3D, in my opinion.
More on the subject: The PC himself is a sort of “scientist” finding a “superior truth” no one is willing to consider. He tries his best to let people know but, eventually, they won’t know as happens. There is a Council, there is the Military. There is a limited environment to explore and a place to run from.
Basically, it is the same plot of the original game with a different story. Like Die Hard 2 was to Die Hard or any other episode of Knight Rider (are you old enough to remember?) or The Hulk.
If this is not “canonical” to a shared world I don’t know what is.
Fortunately, being the story “almost all told”, Paul did a great job in delivering a fast paced-action thriller as opposed to the slow, painful voyage that Awakening is. What I must pinpoint is the very linear way he decided to use to tell his story, which many won’t like very much. It is flattering to understand how much Paul was fascinated by my background: it is obvious that the story itself was the most important thing to him as he decided to level all of the gameplay to honor us with a good screenplay. Also, I understand how the aforementioned time limit was a hindrance to him rather than a push forward.
The overall atmosphere is not much different from the one I experienced in the movie Equilibrium with Christian Bale. Equilibrium’s world is one in which emotions are banned and made against the law; the people are forced to use a drug that suppresses them and everybody should “live in peace” due to that trick. The civilians and their everyday duties, the Militia: they all conveyed a sense of oppression quite disturbing.
Part of the setting is, in this very case, the story. I’m not going to spoil the game by exposing it. Let’s just say the Myth of the Voyage which surface was barely scratched in Andromeda Awakening is here told, explained and… lived. Although we may know who the travelers are, we don’t know what their trip was like until we play this game, and I loved what Paul came up with.
The Characters. (With a capital C, due to the awesomeness of this Legacy. We will discuss this later).
Rood and Veritas are not the only people on board. There is this old man called Chronos Han which is the real storyteller and the One-who-knows-it-all. The kind of character a story like this can’t miss and that is central to it. Its delivering is quite awkward, as he is too much a carbon copy of Gandalf and this role is underscored by events and actions one can’t quite miss. (during a scene, Chronos-The-Grey stops a fiery Balrog—namely, Militia guards—from reaching the Fellowship. “You. Cannot. Pass!”) That said, he seems to be a member of “the Council” (whatever that means in Andromeda’s past) and a riotous one, too. He usually acts as the deus-ex machina but in a way that I seem to like. He appears from nowhere when needed but, instead of making one perceive this as a puerile gimmick, it conveys that sense of action movie that is much welcome.
Talking about the rest of the crew, all of the names are simple awesomeness. Veritas Tora, Chronos Han, Euros Markon, Rinaldi “Rin” Fletcher. Wow. I love them and I love how they mix well with my own (poor) christenings in the original game. I don’t know if they sound too much from Star Trek, I’m no expert, but they really got me. This is an impressive trend in this Competition (Joey Jones, in Andromeda Dreaming, did some of the same, also) and I love it.
[rant]Wade pointed out to me that the main char’s name Rood may be from a real person, Sir Jonathan Blask aka Roody Yogurt, a mate of Paul in the Hugo scene. Not knowing this detail helped me in staying focused during play, I suppose.[/rant]
One last note about the setting. It is fair to consider this game 99 to 100% faithful to the original timeline I drew back in the last months. Although not many may know about the travels of the humans, there is a piece of paper in the second or third-to-last room of Awakening, hidden among war machinery, that can explain a lot about how Tree and Star mix with it.
The Implementation. (With a capital I because coding is hard and you must not joke about it).
As I said in the forewords, a Competitor worst enemy is the deadline. To people like me it is the only thing that keeps the ball rolling, but to dedicated authors it can be hindering.
I know Paul didn’t have time to have his game betatested of proofread. This is no big deal, as he will have time to have the game’s small problems corrected (don’t know about the large ones, see below) but, although this didn’t ruin my experience, one more month (or a couple of) would surely have helped.
I can’t feel guilty for it because it’s Paul’s “fault” to have chosen such a vast game to code, not my order. But, given as the story turned out to be funny and thought-provoking, a bad experience with it would suck. I know that many people disliked my game especially for the bad prose and the bad implementation (in its original form: I’m quite sure it is well playable at the moment), and I know those players will never give me a second chance. The same will apply to Tree and Star and this makes me sad.
Of course, Paul has now a lot of time to rethink some of the mechanics and to smooth the player’s experience. If you are of the kind that can’t wait for a good story, play it now and be sympathetic. If you can wait, well: wait.
The main problem with Tree and Star is the lack of interactivity. You can actually win the (long) game by TALKING TO anybody and HACKING things. And this is too much like a CYOA with no CYO, if you get what I mean.
It is obvious that the first half of the game was well thought and executed (although not tested), while the second half has been made in a hurry. You can see it in the writing and in how the actions are triggered. Much of the tension between the characters should have been depicted more strongly, while at the present state not much is shown about how they relate to each other.
My best advice to Paul is to take time and 1) correct the misspelling and the small problems and, then, 2) reconsider the game mechanics towards the end. Insert more branchings, more interaction, less streamlined sequences.
Conclusion.
I received this game one minute before the deadline, which was at midnight. I opened the archive and just had a “check on it before going to bed”.
Well, I went to bed at 4AM, 'cause the game damn got me. I went to bed and continued it in the morning to see how it ended. I had a lot of fun, it was a real experience and I think Paul did an awesome job in telling an untold tale.
So: bravo, Paul. At the present, this is an Orange Glowing game, but it can reach for Small White in no time with just a little tweaking. Change how the game runs from midgame on and it will surely deserve a Giant Red.