User blog:C3PO the Dragon Slayer/Avian Hunt: August 23, 2008

August 23, 2008
I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about the story of Avian Hunt, which has to go through a minor revision because of what I just saw today.

I'm talking about Star Wars: The Clone Wars, of course. I knew I'd have to change Avian Hunt the moment I heard the phrase "kidnapped, Jabba the Hutt's son has been" in the trailer. My reaction was a mix of hardcore amusement, shock, and pride. Who would be so ambitious as to make the next Star Wars movie about the offspring of Jabba the Hutt during the Clone Wars? I wondered. Well, I felt a little guilty at this. My namesake fanfiction, C-3PO the Dragon Slayer, stars "Jabba Junior" as its penultimate villain, who makes his entry via the Princess Bride-inspired line: "My name is Jabba Junior. You killed my father. Prepare to die!" How am I supposed to feel that the joke villain I created for a fanfiction, solely for the purpose of making a silly twist to the story, is now a baby Huttlet in the new Star Wars movie? Then, in Avian Hunt, I had Jabba the Hutt star as a villain right around 20 BBY, the exact time the Clone Wars movie takes place! The original plotline has the 1337 N00B5 (the protagonist faction of the game) setting up ambush on Tatooine for General Grievous, but now it seems like I'm going to have to make it a trap for Dooku. I'm working out the kinks of how they discover his stupid plan.

Now, I don't hate The Clone Wars, but it was not great as a movie. As a TV show, it's entertaining and worth watching. The battle droids are just as stupid as they were in Revenge of the Sith, but much more comical, and I got over their idiocy a couple years ago, so I enjoyed the battle droid humor. One of the funniest parts in the movie is when when an overwhelmed clone trooper accuses the army of battle droids of being outnumbered, upon the battle droids acting confused and counting their own numbers on their two-fingered hands, and then being blown up by arriving Republic reinforcements. Anakin was better in this movie than in Star Wars Episodes II and III, simply because the story doesn't emphasize how he's becoming dark. I'm not talking about acting, I'm talking about character. Anakin was more than a Saturday-morning cartoon hero in The Clone Wars, something I didn't expect, because this is the next Star Wars Saturday-morning cartoon all about how "Skywalker is the Republic's only hope".

Gosh, the decision to make the first three episodes into a movie was not the best in the history of Star Wars. Of course they save the better story ideas for later episodes, using the pilots as teasers, but taking those and making a movie about them is like making a movie out of Darksaber. And I just realized how awesome that analogy is. Wow.

But what I had to focus on, for Avian Hunt's sake, was the Hutts. I was very disappointed by the depiction of Jabba, who was a strong-minded personality who was all about slime, power, and "Wo ho ho!" in Return of the Jedi. He had a personality everyone loved to hate. In The Clone Wars, he is portrayed very flatly. We don't even get to see subtitles, so his motives are diminished to that of "desperate parent who's willing to believe whoever last mentioned his 'punkymuffin' in a sentence," which might work for a different Hutt, but not Jabba. Rotta brought back reminisces of Ice Age, where fish-out-of-water heroes take care of a lost baby of another species. Not to mention an excessive amount of crying and little emphasis on feeding the poor thing. Animators don't seem to understand how much babies eat. Ziro the Hutt was the most unexpected character, tatooed and vain, whom George Lucas whimsically declared should speak just like a certain deceased gay author who was made more famous by his cameo in To Kill A Mockingbird than his literary works. Unlike some critics, I think that idea added character to an otherwise paper-thin and utterly pointless plotline. The movie would have been better with more from Captain Rex and less from Padmé (as would two out of three of the installments in the Prequel Trilogy), but as a TV show, it fills the 22-minute timespace to delay the resolution.

The Clone Wars is better than Clone Wars, the micro-series animated in 2D. The animations were styled uniquely, and the detail far exceeded what might be seen on animated shows like Jimmy Neutron. The story was just as insignificant and unimpressive as a typical Expanded Universe product; a subject which many movie critics obviously have relative inexperience with. The old characters were recognizable (except Jabba), the new characters were mostly original (except Ahsoka), and if you treat the experience as watching a TV show, rather than seeing the newest installment in the legendary Original Trilogy (a fault that killed The Phantom Menace, despite it being a good movie). It was littered with inside jokes and subtle references. If there were enough floor in the movie theater, I would have been rolling on it laughing when Ahsoka said "You're right, there are so many other things to talk about [on Tatooine]. How about the sand?" She has no idea...

So Grievous is most likely out of Avian Hunt, save for an appearance during the space battle over Coruscant. Making amendment to the storyline of my game... wait a second!

For my birthday, I got Empire at War: Gold Pack, which includes Forces of Corruption. And it turns out Jabba during the Clone Wars and a loving son of a Hutt aren't the only ideas that only I came up with. I never thought a story like that of the 1337 N00B5, where a rouge pirate gang forms almost from scratch, fighting evil wherever they go, operating in a strategy game, etc. could be a canon product. It turns out Tyber Zahn is like Kaffman, only more narcissistic, colder-hearted, and less idealistic. It turns out that it is okay for something as outrageous, perhaps even moreso, than the 1337 N00B5 (come on, the word noob appears in the EU, and it's just as unbelievable to name a whole Consortium after it's leader and to have all sorts of special abilities as seen in Empire at War) as a canon product. Which means I might have to replace the ridiculous out-of-place humor with something more believable, "who's scruffy-looking?" stuff. If gamers can take the Zann Consortium seriously, they'll be distraught to see my game put so much into the story, but interrupt with random humor now and then.

And playing a ways through the campaign, I learn that they have.... dun dun dun! A Sith Holocron! Just like the 1337 N00B5! And you'll never guess where it came from...

Jabba the Hutt.

My whole world is falling apart. It's uplifting to see all my ideas turn out to have similar counterparts in canon, shocking since most of them are jokes, exhilarating to learn how easy it will be to connect to familiar parts of the canon Expanded Universe, disappointing since my plot points don't turn out to be very original, and embarrassing to see the critical reception of the canon products that have these things that are so easy to connect to my ideas.

I swear, I knew nothing about the Zann Consortium when I made the 1337 N00B5. I wanted to make an original faction with room for me to create a unique cast, create my own rules, and let the player see something new. I worked to make original characters that stray from the typical archetypes, the only character who is remotely familiar in the context of Star Wars is Jett Worrap, who plays a hotshot cocky pilot with a that some idiot in charge of the EU decided should characterize every single Corellian male. I'm now working to distinguish the 1337 N00B5 from the Zann Consortium now. Here's a brief summary of the main cast for the video game:

I like the character of Kaffman, the de facto leader, who is intelligent and pragmatic, but comes up with atypical solutions to problems that still turn out to work. One of my favorite facets of his personality is his tendency to misinterpret the motives of typical Star Wars good guys: he thinks Mace Windu is plotting to overthrow the Senate and have the Jedi take charge (just watch the events of Revenge of the Sith pretending you're listening to the news reporting what the Council is doing... it almost makes Palpatine's story believable), and he declines to join the Rebel Alliance because he sees Bail Organa's intentions to be political jealously, campaigning militarily under empty promises. However, Kaffman's intentions are selfish only when protecting the lives of himself and his friends.

Radar is just as fun to work with; he's every ounce as intelligent as his friend Kaffman, though he's more realistic and more reluctant to break laws. Radar is a better pilot than Kaffman, having trained in Eta-2 prototype simulators since he was a child, and he still feels overshadowed by Kaffman, who always ends up making the big decisions.

Then there's Ilmar Grmek, whose name I made to sound okay even when a Mon Calamari says it, who is a brilliant tactician who functions, in gameplay terms, as one who hints at what a player should do. She hates losing units, mourning every life that is taken, and even shows restraint when attacking enemies, knowing that there are real people in those fighters (even though from a player's perspective, they're just computer-generated polygons). It's amazing what kind of opportunities for dialogue and gameplay it creates to have a battle-hardened admiral who cares deeply for her troops and finds exhilaration at being able to take command over a fleet. It creates an internal struggle, where one side of her loves the heat of battle and is eager to outwit an enemy, but she still must face the loss of life whenever she does so. She is nevertheless rational and composed, and her abilities are not hindered by the unexpected loss of a friend or comrade.

Another character prominent in the 1337 N00B5 is Jett Worrap, who was the former leader of a renegade smuggler band that betrayed Jabba the Hutt (hence my wish to have a level where they must face Jabba's forces), who is strong-willed and ambitious, almost bloodthirsty, but can understand the motives of the 1337 N00B5 and their goal to destroy the Sith and weaken corrupt governments (Republic, CIS and Empire alike).

The last member of the Big Five (yeah, vain) is the Holocron of Vergere, a secret Sith-wannabe that gradually reveals secrets of the Sith. The Holocron was built in a hurry, so it is full of glitches and malfunctions, and lets things slip even though it often remembers that its consultant is not a Force-sensitive and is therefore unworthy to learn Sith secrets. The other members of the Big Five struggle with Vergere's secrets and face moral dilemmas regarding their responses to Vergere's mysterious "wisdom." Vergere is the only major character I have not personally created, so I did a lot of reading into the New Jedi Order books to get the feel of who she is meant to be.

Back to technical news: I am converting everything I have to be compatible with the Ultimate 3D Game Maker extension, for speed reasons, and because it's easy to make efficient vector calculations using the DLL. I'm having a little trouble with the models; but I'm confident that I'll find a solution soon. In the meantime, I'm developing a program (using Game Maker) called ButtonBuilder and a Game Maker extension that will let a user create mouse-controlled menus out of images for buttons, captions, and effects of buttons. It's going pretty well so far, but it's still in early stages. The tool will be essential for creating the strategy engine and the many menus that must be navigated in Avian Hunt.