make a new game?

[dvunkannon]

I'm not very good at the texturing side of things, so my natural preference is to work on a new storyline.

My first idea is a gremlins vs. droids story arc. I like the gremlins and the idea would be to turn them into units that can be added to your army. The game already has red and brown gremlins, so remapping the colors and cloning some files could give us other colored gremlins pretty quickly. I'm thinking at least three more types of gremlin to make gremlin units at different levels. For example, the brown (friendly) gremlin could be the level 1 unit, and the red (enemy) gremlin could be the level 5 unit.

How to get gremlin units? Perhaps you can buy them at a store, but how about a game mechanic where you get your gremlin units from the gremlins that you suppress inside items? As a matter of fact, you might be able to upgrade stacks by further suppression battles. Maybe having multiple gremlin castles in inventory lets you control multiple gremlin stacks of units, and level them up.

This idea would also need to expand the number of droid units, and specialize them as well. I think a unit with archer and flyer skills is very powerful, something the droids share with dragons.

The design team was watching too much Star Wars to even bring in droids, but now that they are here, some ways to make them fit the universe more...
1 - make their appearance more steampunk, like the dwarf train in KBtL.
2 - give the higher level units 6 legs instead of four.
3 - don't let them disappear when the stack of units is defeated, a defeated stack should leave a pile of debris on the battle field in the same way as other units leave bodies.
4 - Droids should be able to rebuild a droid stack of lower power from a pile of debris. This is similar to the thorn unit's ability.
5 - Debris piles can be mined for gremlins in addition to mana and runes! This connects the gremlins and droids together in a natural way, based on their natures in the game universe.

Now gremlins can have some cool attacks on droids, such as some kind of "Infest" attack that would give continuing damage, like a poison attack.

A scenario that used these gremlin and droid units would probably be mostly underground, like the dwarf areas of Kordar in KBtL. Our character would be free to choose which side she would help.

My second design idea also plays off of the suppression mechanic in the game. I'm calling it "Internal Armies" for now. The basic idea is to build a storyline around acquiring spell ingredients, and then using the inventory "use" and suppression to activate and combine the ingredients into potions or magical objects or spells.

As an example of collecting ingredients, it might be necesary to collect 5 bunches of nightshade at midnight for some spell or potion. This will force our hero to wait for the right time of day, and go into the swamp/cemetery/whatever when it is most dangerous. Of course, she will be attacked just before midnight! So she won't succeed with the collection unless she finishes the battle quickly.

The reaon to call it "Internal Armies" is that the suppression battles would use a different set of units than normal battles. This can be handled like a large reserve set of units that get swapped into the unit slots when doing these special suppression battles.

In these battles, your units represent your mental/emotional/magical abilities as personified units, and the enemy units are the problems/challenges those abilities face. For example, you might have a unit that represents your "Patience" ability, while one of the enemy units would represent a distraction should as "Hunger". The hero wins the battle when her forces of Patience, Concentration, Intellect, Memory (etc. have to invent lots of units of various levels) can defeat Hunger, Anger, Dark Desire, Revenge Fantasy, etc.

So the game mechanic of suppression battles taking place on this dreamlike canvas is used to represent a different level and kind of personal growth.

As described, this is mage/paladin centric design, but it can be adapted to warriors with a change of subject to forging weapons instead of spells and potions. Again the hero would have to go out and collect ingredients, and then bring them together using internal suppression battles.

My own vision for using these ideas in a storyline involves a younger Princess Amalie, in the time between KPtL and AP. The setting would be Darion, repopulated with appropriate quests and objects. I would also replace the main castle with a portal into a larger castle setting, such as the castle interiors and paved exteriors. This would allow a larger number of locations within the castle complex and allow Amalie to meet a large number of people, who can give her errands and quests, in and out of the castle.

A third design also involves the gremlin castles. The basic idea is similar to the exploration of the gremlin castle in KBtL, but expanded. Amalie enters the gremlin castle, which she was given as a keepsake. Explore it, go through one portal and she is "outside" in a new location. This could be a completely new landscape of the gremlin world, like Alice going down the rabbit hole, or Dorothy going to Oz. Maybe there are other gremlin castles through which she can connect with distant parts of her own world.

Or perhaps it is just Amelie has shrunk and she is outside in her own garden, but the size of an ant. Lots of opportunities for ant-sized adventures, as in TH White's "Once and Future King". The boss battle would pit Amalie's army of ants, dragonflies, sprites, etc against a normal spider, not a giant spider! But giant enough for them...

I think a gremlin world or ant-size world would involve creating a lot of new art and texture assets, but the stories would be similar to those we can write using the existing engine.

Anyway, I would appreciate your comments on the story content ideas, and the use of the game mechanics.