Unfortunately, adventure games can't. The past few months, I've been writing and re-writing the story for the events of this game... The formats have changed and even my original design document has been thrown out the window and burned.
Well, not literally.
Starting over from scratch on the story side of things is hard. Especially when all of the rooms have already been drawn. My graphics are still safe, though I may need to tweak them a little depending on how the story flows, a new exit here and more grime over there... but that's later.
So far, I've just started to write the game out as if it is a first person short story. An except is as follows:
"Callihan and Moxley are dead.
I've never understood why an astrophysicist and a psychiatrist would ever work together, but the two of them have been close since before I joined up with the Technical Division. Sam Callihan is built like a box, all right angles and hunched over his desk most of the time. He's the kind of shrink that makes you feel exposed under his beady-eyed stare. John Moxley is quiet. He hardly talks to anyone other than Callihan. He has the build of an awkward high-school wrestler; all limbs stuffed into the standard white lab coat.
The two of them have been out in Sector 35 studying the psychological effects of spatial anomalies on humans out in deep space. Seems like a waste of funding to me, but the big wigs like to act like they are concerned with the welfare of the space workers. All I know is that I have a flat line from the AI of their research craft. Flat line on occupants automatically triggers the recall protocol to fetch the bodies of our fallen comrades. So here I am, in a slow spiraling search pattern to find the Switchblade-class ship, aptly dubbed "Conspiracy".
I can't help but wonder if this is just a malfunction. It has been known to report perfectly healthy people as among the dead due to interference or a software glitch. They could also be using the monitoring equipment as another of their creepy experiments.
The scanners on Norm's computer beep, so I pull up the data from the sensor sweep. The old Switchblade is visible on the scan. The ID query returns back the Conspiracy's ident string.
Callihan and Moxley are dead.
Another beep from the computer means that Protocol 001 is initialized."
