An Old Idea: Darrk and Recourse

Back when I was in high school, I had this idea for a game I called Darrk and Recouse. It was based on the games I was currently playing which were the Jak and Daxter series and Ratchet and Clank. Both featured a team up of protagonists with one doing more work than the other. Jak and Daxter was about a elf-like boy named Jak who went on adventures with Daxter, an "ottsel" which was a mix between a weasel and otter with red fur, who sat on Jak's shoulder. Ratchet and Clank was about a long-eared furry alien "lombax" named Ratchet who had Clank on his back and used him like a tool. Both games let you play each hero in different capacities. Daxter played like a mini version of Jak with the same moveset which made his short levels seem more like a gimmick than an actual stage. Clank sat on Ratchet's back and served as a hovering device after Ratchet jumped. Clank could also solve puzzles solo and could grow to a tremendous size eighteen times larger than his smaller self to fight giant monsters. Both games featured weapons and power ups that became the focus of my own game design. This design never left the confines of my notebooks but it served as early practice for story-telling and the career I had hoped would be my future. It wasimpossible back then for a nobody like myself to make a game as large as Jak or Ratchet but today the world has changed. It has "flattened" to the point that anyone can make a video game, even those that shouldn't make them. The indie market is full of half-finished projects that were abandoned and bad ideas that should have been killed in their infant stages. But there's also a wealth of promising starts and smaller games that blow the professionals out of the water. For my own contribution to the dynamic duo platformer, I combined aspects of my two loves in Jak and Ratchet. Darrk was a science experiment gone wrong and thrown out into a dystopian world. Recourse was a sassy robot who chided Darrk for his naivety. The pair would go into an open world and hunt down the generals of the badguy who created Darrk and absorb their enemies' powers. This was at the time I was into drawing more than writing. The monsters I drew served as bosses for the duo to fight. I often drew these during breaks at school or on the bus home. There was a little girl who was in grade school who loved to ask me about the "monsters" I was making. When I say that Jak and Ratchet inspired the game, I mean that to the fullest extent. In the Jak games the player had access to a variety of weapons and tools such as a hover board. I spent hours drawing dozens of different types of hoverboards that Darrk could ride. I remember one of them, my favorite, was a broken chair with three wheels. I remember imagining all the different ways these boards would work with the physics engine. One was a rocket with wings that served as the board. The player would have to guide the rocket to the target and jump off before detonating it. Another inspiration came from the mechs Ratceht and Jak used. Several blueprints were drawn up for mechs which had little to no symmetry. After Jak 3 came out, I added vehicles to the game which also lacked any semblance of a real car. I drew up maps for the player to explore and went on to design levels. I wanted an open world, racing, platforming, third person shooter game. Back then, it was common for designers to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what stuck. It was common for games to have designs that didn't fit with the original gameplay. After a time, I gave up on the pair that had held my imagination for over a year. When you get older you tend to laugh or cringe at your old ideas and I did both. Darrk and Recourse were just copies of games I loved, not original ideas. I looked back at the maps I had designed and realized there were many errors. I've played video games that have this approach of throwing all the spaghetti at the wall just to fill up the game. It's as if they don't have enough confidence in their own design and feel the need to add more to make up for the shallow gameplay. Take Mario for example, he's always jumped and run since the beginning. There's been little evolution on Nintendo's part but that's their own flaw. Looking back, Darrk and Recourse were a kid's fantasy of a game. Like a fanfiction. I never got far into the plot or their personalities so it's probably for the best that they remain dormant for now. At least until I'm bored again and need an old story to work on.