Yeah I'd like to hear how that was supposed to end, it seems making the game was harder than the art then, maybe if someone else did the game?
Well, to make a long backstory short, the Dreambattle Tower is a giant metal stake pinning the heart of an eldritch abomination to the bottom of the sea. Said eldritch abomination- the Eternal Pandora- was a portal-opening dimension-hopper that sucked entire planets dry of their life-force, and it gradually began to corrupt the tower imprisoning it over time. That’s what you yourself- and every Player- are; a creation of the Pandora, in imitation of a human form (so that the security droids patrolling the place would be tricked).
(There was a great war between the humans and the eldritch abomination, in the past, which ended with human extinction on the surface of the Earth. A team of lucky survivors in a space station orbiting the planet rebuilt their space station into a stake and literally dropped it from orbit in an attempt to kill the eldritch monster, but they only managed to deliver it a temporary incapacitating injury.)
You can probably guess what’s going on, now. Every unit of Energy is a fragment of the life-force of a planet, with each type of Energy corresponding to a different kind of planet. Eventually, you’d gather enough energy to break all the gates and then you’d set the eldritch abomination free. All the enemies opposing you were either natural wildlife (equivalent to magical creatures in their own setting) or native inhabitants defending their homeworlds from extraterresterial invasion.
Anyways, once you figured all this out and freed the Pandora, it would give you a choice. You could join it, and continue to go questing through portals and fighting exciting new enemies, getting cool loot, and gaining power. Or you could fight and kill it, and in doing so basically commit suicide (as you yourself are basically an extension of the Eternal Pandora’s form).
If you choose to fight the Pandora, the adventure ends with your death. Lynivera chronicles the story of the Dreambattle, and that’s the ending.
If you choose not to fight the Pandora, on the other hand, the adventure wouldn’t have ended. You kill Lynivera and conquer her home planet in the name of the Pandora, and then you basically get to keep playing… forever. Literally. I was planning to run the adventure indefinitely, if you chose not to give up the Dreambattle. (Obviously, that plan fell through in its entirety.)
That final choice was the entire moment I built the adventure for. Would you do the right thing if it meant I’d end the adventure? How far would you go to keep playing the most interesting game ever? At what point would your desire to continue playing the game override your desire to do right over wrong? Based on the responses my friends gave me, a significant amount of people would have gone with the ‘keep playing the game’ option, which pleases me. If I’d gotten that far, I think I would have quite enjoyed the reactions of my audience.
That’s the etymology of the adventure’s name. A dream-like battle, a dream that you don’t want to wake up from even if waking up would be the right thing to do. A dream of eternal battle, of fun without consequences.
(I was thinking about a few alternate endings too, where you realize the Pandora is just a massive cluster of Energy of all kinds, and once you’ve subdued it you decide to harness the Pandora for your own purposes. Perhaps you become a new Pandora in its place, securing near-divine power for yourself. Perhaps you create an artifact item out of the Pandora’s near-limitless energy, and lock it away somehow. Perhaps you even give the power of the Pandora to Lynivera. I didn’t really get that far, though; all of these ideas were additional ideas I had during the course of the adventure, not part of the original conceptual seed of Dreambattle.)
I don’t think I could have allowed myself to separate the art and gameplay portions of Dreambattle. Hell, I don’t think anybody would WANT to do the gameplay portions of Dreambattle for me. That part’s just objectively unfun, all number-crunching and little wordpad notes and reminders and lists of stats in excel documents. If I couldn’t get through it, I couldn’t possibly expect anybody else to do it for me, could I?
