THIS IS IN IDEAS AND SUGGESTIONS AS AT THE MOMENT THERE IS NO CURRENT PLAN TO GO THROUGH WITH MAKING THIS MOD This is generally the basic outline of an idea I had for a BeamNG map/campaign combination in which the map would change based on the 'chapter', or era which you are playing, allowing the actions of the player to influence the overall map in future 'chapters'. This may sound confusing but allow me to explain some of the terms I will be using and show you a basic outline of the three projected stages, which should clear up the basic premise of what this is hoping to attain. Terminology Used: Chapter: will refer to the time each map is in, basically imagine an interactive screenshot of what the map would have looked like within that era, or chapter. Chapters also reference the dedicated campaign modes assigned to each era of the map. Outline: will refer to the basic progression of the main storyline, as it holds a roadmap of the general evolution of the map itself. This can also be referred to as the Story Outline or Evolution Outline further down in the concept. The outline itself will be pre determined before work on the map begins to ensure for a smooth continuity of the decided script, with minor changes being made to previous map versions only when needed. STAGE 1: The basic outline is formed, which will include the storyline and evolution of the map. This outline is the roadmap for the entire project and arguably the most important part in forming a cohesive and immersive player experience. The outline will also determine the window of time between all chapters, which also decides by how much each map will evolve between iterations, currently in this concept the window is roughly 10 years between chapters, spanning from 1960 till 2010, giving 6 unique campaigns, one for each era which, while all are separate from a player perspective, are all intertwined through plot narrative. Create the base map, which would be representative of the earliest 'chapter', this map is released through early access and while released it is brought into the next 'chapter' through gradual modernization in accordance with the pre planned outline. Once the modernization is completed, this new map is also released and the next modernization occurs, Each of these maps will be released independently from one another as to not make one large file needed, and allowing players to pick and choose which maps they want initially, although eventually all will be needed for later stage content to work correctly. This stage primarily focuses on the maps themselves, which will be a large part of story telling narrative needed within the individual campaigns. This focuses attention on creating maps which make the player truly feel like they are in a certain era, through design elements and assets which represent the era they are from. Certain assets will carry on from one era to the next, while others could quickly be replaced, which give the player a proper sense of evolution, as old buildings get torn down and replaced by newer ones The map itself would not be overly large, relying on detail and immersion to drive player interest, it would likely be around the same size as WCUSA, maybe a little bit larger. It would feature a similar city style atmosphere, with the rural areas becoming progressively more urban and the urban areas becoming denser and more compact as the map evolves. This would also help make more realistic roadway networks, which would change based on the evolution of the city and lead to the typical poorly-planned city center that breeds immense traffic, while leaving the natural randomness of some city aspects which came about due to prior developments, further immersing the player by allowing them to not only see the evolution of the city, but be able to go through newer iterations and remember what that same part of the city looked like last chapter, or the chapter before that, allowing the player to have memories evolve in the map. STAGE 2: With all eras of the map released, the next stage would be to begin developing and installing the dedicated campaigns of each chapter into the game, these will have already been planned by the outline and work for most if not all of these can begin in tandem with their respective maps. Each campaign chapter will be fundamentally different from the others, with different stories, mechanics, and features. Each campaign chapter will be designed to take around 2 hours with time factored in for character development and various storytelling cutscenes. The stories will be set up to reflect pop culture influence of those eras, without spoiling any main plotlines, I will list a brief summary of the general outline for these storylines, with attached mechanics as well (NOTE: These are my own personal ideas for outlines, they are subject to change and open to all suggestions/ideas). -1960: LA Noire meets James Bond in an action style police drama, playing as a new cop in town, your investigation of a simple hit and run slowly transforms into a Cold War era coverup, pitting you against government secrecy and forcing the player to choose between national security and morality in a fast paced drama. This features the basic campaign setup, as well as tiny amounts of side content, such as police missions, delivery missions, and street race missions. This is more or less a proof of concept designed to be driven not by features but the story itself. -1970: A reimagined Mafia style game taking place over the 70s, featuring a mob centered storyline designed to encompass the ideology of 'the road to hell being paved with good intentions'. Its storyline would focus on the rise and fall of a mafia member whos rise and fall from grace would be reflected through the storylines increasingly erratic and hopeless missions, making it seem as though simply staying alive another day is the hardest thing to do in the city. This would feature much of the features of the 1960s chapter, but also include other features, such as a basic cash system, in which money is earned through completing missions and side missions, this money would be used to do things such as pay rent, fix your car, bribe cops, and more. -1980: None other than a Scarface/Miami Vice storyline, featuring a storyline following a DEA agent betrayed by her former partner and left for dead, you track them across the city as they fight to get to the top of the criminal enterprise ladder, forcing the player to attempt to stop them before they can take control of the city. This would play off of the 1970s chapter, with old allies now becoming enemies in an interesting turn of perspective. This campaign would also have unique features, such as more in depth police missions and investigation methods, undercover missions with added criminal missions, expanded street racing, drug busts, and more. -1990: A sort of play on GTA4 where you play a (slightly) more competent Roman Bellic, where you are the first to arrive in America, with you main goal being to make money to send back to your family in order to allow more of your family to come to the new land and help your business grow. This would feature a storyline basically playing off of the American Dream fantasy of an immigrant making it big in a new land, using sometimes less than legal/ethical means. This would feature a city takeover style addition, in which you can go around to purchase businesses around town, and assign family members to run them in order to make extra cash on the side. -2000: Need for Speed style drama story, featuring an in depth vehicle buying and tuning campaign, where the main focus is on creating the ultimate street weapon to tear up the track. Playing as a college drop out destined to make a living without having to settle for the boring day-to-day of an office job, you turn to underground street racing in hopes of making big bucks, but instead make a big mess which forces you to try and clean up your mistakes and reconcile with your choices. This would also feature a 'buy and sell' vehicle feature, where you could turn a profit by buying, tuning, and selling cars out of your garage. -2010: As a final installment to the series, you play as a teenager destined to find the man who killed your father, going off of only a loose description from a brief glance you got as a kid. Elaborate police chases and mafia attacks are not fully out of the picture, becoming more late-game enemy stages as you fight to uncover the truth, while simultaneously appeasing your uncle through helping him with his moving company. It is designed to, like the original chapter, focus heavily on a deep and meaningful story, and once again leave the player with a difficult decision to make in the end. These would be released, once again, separately from one another, due to the sheer size that each of these could take up, and once again for the ability for players to pick and choose which ones they would want to try out. Each chapter would feature elements such as stylized UI elements created to reflect the era and add uniqueness to each experience, opting to create what feel like 6 different yet connected games instead of a 6 part series of the same game. Naturally, this would open the game to more players, since instead of it being one continual game idea catering to one genre of games, it instead offers a wider variety of game designs. This would likely be one of the hardest parts to implement, due to the amount of coding knowledge needed to even begin to plan how to set this up, none of that being knowledge I have, which is part of the reason why this is in Ideas and Suggestions. STAGE 3: This would be the basic optimization and bundling of all of the content, which would include maps and campaigns, into one cohesive mod, this will be one of the smoother stages, as all of the pre decided content will have already been added, it simply needs to be polished heavily and then finally released as one part. From here, it would be released and all that would be need to get done would be bug fixes and further optimizations. As well, various spinoff campaigns, such as movie based campaigns playing off of movies such as Mad Max, Fast and Furious, Bullitt, and others could be created using their respective era of map in order to create future content as well. Summary In conclusion, this idea outlines the concept of a map in which players would impact the design and layout of the map through their actions via an integrated campaign, which allows players to explore countless different eras of the same map. It was originally conceptualized as a way to create a more realistic city layout, which would come about through natural map evolution, but has evolved into a campaign across 50 years which allows players controlling several different characters to become immersed in each era and play through missions which actually have an impact in the next chapter. What You Can Do As mentioned within, I myself do not intend to create this, I wish I could, but I lack the knowledge and the technology to do so, my computer at the moment can run BeamNG only on low settings, meaning it is virtually impossible for me to make a immersive and detailed map. If you would like to actually get involved with this project, feel free to message me about it, I can send you basically every single thing I have planned for this, and am more than willing to share anything that you feel would help in creating some of your own additional content too. If enough people do end up messaging me saying they: -Have Experience -Are Interested -Can Do MORE Than Just Beta Testing Then I will post an update here, and will create a group message with all of the volunteers, and hopefully (once again, no promises) break ground on the project. With that being said, do not get your hopes up that this can or will happen, it is in Ideas and Suggestions for a reason, that reason being that as of now, it is an Idea and Suggestion, and not planned.
I have gotten precisely 0 interest into this project in the past 2 weeks so I likely won't be going any further into it
That was almost sort of the concept, in theory at least. It really was just a concept of making BeamNG into something vaguely resembling BeamNG in game engine and vehicles alone, with all other elements being virtually unrecognizable, to make it seem as if it was its own game entirely.
Not really, seems like a normal need for speed/f&f esque story. Nothing bad at all, what gave you that idea? Seems like it would be fun escaping the mafia and finding the guys who killed my father. Not everything is sunshine and rainbows, a bit of spice and violence every now and again is fun in videogames/movies
Thanks, thats actually mostly why I picked it. I always enjoyed the endings of games like Mafia where there is no happy ending, and as someone who writes short stories as a pastime those sorts of endings where always fun to throw in, especially if you want to get across a moral or lesson with a more lasting impact. Each story outline was more or less designed to be incredibly different from one another, and yet still be intertwined. For example, the 1990s storyline would have focused heavily on the difficulty immigrants face when first arriving, and various struggles of missing home. The 2010s finale, which would have been one of the sadder ones, is actually one of the ones I planned the most for, funny enough, it being sort of a spinoff of something I had began writing as a passion project and then got too busy with school to finish. Since I doubt I am ever going to make this I will just spill the whole planned story here for your reading pleasure. It would have opened with a basic cutscene, showing the car wreck that killed your father, featuring a head on impact by a heavily modified sports car, and thrown you into a *ten years later* type cutscene. You finally get your license and drive yourself home to your uncles house, where you live, as a tutorial mission (As an easter egg, your uncle is the main character from the 2000s storyline). The next 2 or 3 missions would be very basic, drive to the high school, drive a moving truck once or twice for your uncles business, until the first 'investigative' mission. In this one, you sneak off in your car to a local street take-over to see what you can find out about the man who killed your father in the wreck, going off of only a tattoo on his ankle from when he stepped out of his car. (I debated how i would want to do this, with either just saying that you had seen the tattoo, or instead having the cutscenes actually be animated in a sort of Initial-D style, in order to give more character to the characters, story, etc.). Here you meet your generic love interest, no I never got far enough to figure out a name. From here I never truly ended up filling the middle of the story and whatnot, it would be mainly just low level street races and eventually a mob involvement once you start mentioning the tattoo too loud. As the final mission, you and generic love interest would be once again met by generic mobsters who just want to bug you while out going for lunch or something. From there you get escorted from the diner or whatever to the main mobster heads house (Easter egg, its none other than the dude from our 1990s storyline, natural progression after buying out the whole town) and must explain why you want to be digging around about this tattoo. He informs you that this tattoo belongs to one of his previous henchmen, who was very good at their job, and went silent 10 years ago, around the time of your fathers death. Since he either doesnt see value in guarding their identity, or just does not care enough to keep it a secret, he hands you a photo of the man with the tattoo. The photo shows your uncle (your uncle will wear socks with sandals alot, and this will make it incredibly clear why he does this damning sin). Horrified, you race back to your home, generic love interest in tow, and find your uncle in the garage beside a car covered by a sheet. He tells you he knew one day you would find out, and had tried to make it up to you ever since then. He explains vaguely that 10 years ago, he had run into some big trouble with the mob while working with them, and ran to a rest stop to call your father to come help him, which is why in the flashback your father answers his phone, turns around and rapidly drives in the other direction. Continuing your uncles story, he says the mob found him at the rest stop, so he got back in his car and frantically drove back into town, where he struck your fathers vehicle, killing him. He goes on to explain that he felt incredibly sorry and adopted you to try and make up for it. He then pulls the tarp off of the car sitting in the old garage in your backyard, revealing the same car that had struck your fathers (with the moderate damage still present). He then explains he has packed his bags and is driving away to the airport to leave town, since your interest in the tattoo has stirred the mob into trying to hunt him down once more. You, being understandably angry, yell and begin to fight but he shoves you away and drives off. You attempt to get in your car but it wont turn over (you drive a shitbox, so you always fit in with car enthusiasts). Leaving you to chase him down in the car that killed your father (that somehow still runs after sitting for 10 years, idk dont ask me how it was designed to be dramatic) all while generic love interests pleads for you to reconsider. Using multi checkpoint style missions, you have 3 choices: 1. Kill your uncle, which, as the name implies, has a car chase where you catch up to, crash, and finally kill your uncle. Generic love interests realizes your a psycho and leaves you, you spend the rest of your life behind bars. 2. Flee the city, in this option, you and generic love interest just.. leave. You dont do any elaborate car chase, just one long, silent, and somber drive to the highway leaving town, where the story ends with no info on what happens next (ooooh maybe a sequel). and finally, 3. Kill the Mob, this one is a little more complicated, you would trigger this checkpoint and immediately call your uncle to tell him not to worry about leaving town, you will get the mob off of his tail and that you forgive him. You then arrive at the mob leaders house, and through a cutscene attempt to kill him with a gun (you went to a street take over, of course you left with a gun). This fails, and a chase ensures between you and the mob leader. You eventually cause him to wreck, while being chased by other mob cars trying to protect him, and as you go to kill him you are shot from behind and fall down. The screen fades to black, and all good intentions you had are meaningless in the end. While dark, it was more or less designed to have the moral of 'holding a grudge will kill you if you obsess over it too much'. Hope you enjoyed!
When I got to the "chase him in the car that killed your father" part, that hit me quite hard for some reason (not because my father is dead, he's still alive). Just being in the car that killed your dad makes it feel like the story's come full circle, and maybe instead of spending your life behind bars, you could also die in the crash that kills your uncle. Just a cool suggestion I thought of! --- Post updated --- Nice story BTW
Its a great idea but way too involved and difficult to do, especially for a small developer, mainly because of the huge variety of visual assets and gameplay set pieces needed.
