Well, my last team tore itself apart because none of them have any respect for eachother at all. I'll bounce back. In the mean time, I can't refine my concept for the current game any further and I am sick to death of pouring over it. So while I'm taking a break from putting WAY too much detail into my design document I want to consider where I'm going with the series it's meant to be a part of and I hope to present a basic overview of each game. There's a running theme to this series, and each game has its own theme in addition to that. I want to make sure the themes are strong enough other people can recognize them without being told what they are.
Wounded Gaia: The first game of the series, the one my last team obliterated itself on and then told me I can't use any assets from (not even concept art) and is forcing me to restart from after six months of development.
The year is 2015. Europe is dying, caught in the crossfire of a deadly nuclear war between the USA and the USSR. (Alternate history, yes. Not going into it now.) 2,000 successful nuclear strikes and twenty-five years have left Europa collapsing under the weight of its own decaying carcass. Even after the USSR has collapsed, the US has ripped itself in two and Japan has forced the US and the newly formed SRR (Socialist Republic of Russia) to clean up the mess they made, the remnants of these powers are still squabbling over who gets to pick Europe's bones. The player is a small German child, alone in the Black Forest. Their only goal is to survive in the frigid, irradiated wasteland while war rages around them. This game is a wasteland survival roguelike with a strong horror element. It has no plot and no story, the war is largely a background event as you focus on day to day survival, with the war just coming along periodically to destroy everything you've worked for and send you running for your life, nursing your bleeding wounds.
Dying Gaia: The second game of the series, intended to be started within two years of the first game is completed, preferably within one.
The year is now 2025. Europe is dead, and the rest of the world is heading its way as its infection spreads. A disease named radpox has spread out from Europe into the rest of the world, killing a small percentage of the world's population but leaving the overwhelming majority infertile to varying degrees and frequently completely sterile. There's not many births happening, to say the least, and the human population that has been slowly declining for decades is now falling like a rock. Worse yet, a new strain that leaves *all* infected adults permanently sterile and turns them into carriers has begun to spread. Humanity doesn't like the idea of extinction, and has created "quarantine domes" to protect the uninfected from the outside world. These are all composed of children, as children cannot carry the disease so only they can be sure they aren't carrying the disease. The player is a child in a quarantine dome in Japan, as it fails due to the Russian navy attacking it. The player character is abducted by the Spetsnaz during the fight along with many other children, but the Japanese navy quickly finds the base, crippling it and allowing the player to escape into the Russian wasteland. This game is also a survival roguelike, but now your goal is to get yourself rescued by the JSDF instead of just living as long as possible, so you need to find a way to get to the waterfront and get the JSDF's attention without getting recaptured or killed. When you finally make it, you find out that the Russian spetsnaz kidnapped you and the other children to try and ransom you to Japan in exchange for information on the construction of the quarantine domes, which Japan would never give them because the RN (the alliance of Japan, the American Republic and Europa) would rather all their enemies be depopulated by their newfound sterility even if keeping the information secret hurt all of humanity, and that Russia was willing to compromise the domes and make the extinction of humanity more likely (including themselves, mind you) just for a chance to save itself.
Forgotten Gaia: The third game of the series, intended to be started within two years of the second game being completed, preferably within one.
The year is 2030. All the quarantine domes have failed, some to malice and others to incompetence. Humanity has only one hope left, and that's space. They intend to send people into space to colonize new worlds uninfected by the sterilizing plagues of Earth. Obviously, they can only send those uninfected, and that means children as only with children can they be 100% sure they aren't carriers of the disease. You are one such child, one from the American Republic, one of many sent into space on a ship to a nearby solar system. The ship fails its landing due to sabotage by opposing nations and sinks into the ocean upon arriving, and now you and yours have to make a foothold on this rock without the resources onboard. This game places you on a randomly generated island landscape, with the ability to travel between islands fairly early. By the end of the game, you'll definitely be at war with some of the locals, which will actively try to damage your foothold and kill the children, and will have to survive anyway. This game is different from the others in its goal, which is to get a solid enough foothold to make their deaths unlikely, likely involving retrieving equipment from your crashed spaceship. You also, of course, need to keep at least one little boy and one little girl alive and the more little survivors the better.
To summarize:
Human civilization dooms itself, then stomps all over its own attempts to fix it until the only solution is to let itself die and be reborn on another planet, and even then the nations sabotage their enemies' attempts to save the species, hurting the entire species' chances just to try and keep their enemies from surviving with them, and then goes to war on the new world. Humanity still doesn't go extinct, but not for a lack of trying.
Now, I want to know if the themes of each game and the overall themes of the series are evident at this point. If not, I need to work on that.