So to start...What will my game look like?

A quick search on “game engine for isometric rpg’s”  lead me to an site called “Retro Style Games,” seen here https://retrostylegames.com/blog/best-engine-for-isometric-games/. Apparently the classic Fallout style must’ve been accomplished via “vector drawing” (at an 30  degree angle), breaking up buildings and the landscape into tiles. Fallout 2 (and 1), have these tiles where just like in GB Studio, the assets’ size are limited to their tiles’ size. Working in GB, I simply called it perspective. A browser based engine called Cocos2d-x could be worth exploring further. But the retrostyle’s an outsourcing company however; not strictly useful. Cocos ostensibly might work, I do know the basic of JavaScript, and it supports that, along with HTML and like a dozen more platforms. Site’s here: https://www.cocos.com/en/cocos2d-x.

I also like Decker Professor. It seems to be able to illustrate those detailed portraits especially. Its scripting language, called “Lil,” is probably inspired from Python, and can create limited vector graphics as well. It is to a degree interactive storytelling but not so limited as twine or betsy was. I’m weary of the iPhone app however. True to life images as graphics always made me uncomfortable. Part of me needs to know this is a game, and not something else. I probably stereotype games as “just silicon,” whereas true-to-life images are more akin to flesh and blood. 

I also needed to iron out the plot and setting. In an effort to be concise, the old plot felt like I was retreading all ground. I wanted a plot that had something to say. I mean that this new plot speaks to me, and I feel like it is interesting enough to feel new. So without further adeu, if you have three minutes, please listen to "At Last" by Etta James, while you read this cutscene, found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qJU8G7gR_g.

Imagine this like reading the first draft of a movie script: We see a man watching an TV screen in’a little house in the middle of nowhere. His face almost totally obscured by the evening light. There’s a lot of gear crowding the room, suggesting he’s been off the grid. He’s watching  frantic news reports coming in talking about New York, and then DC…he sits back, stunned at first….but smiling. 
A cold numerical counter shows the rising death toll now in the hundreds of millions. He gets up and begins to dance. The camera rises out from the house, higher and higher into the clouds. We see a glimpse of Congress in a shouting match, stylized graphics of our population and GDP outpacing the rest of the world’s. People are being strong-armed, they sign deals they know aren’t fair. Then sulk all the way back home, spirits broken. 
For a moment he looks through a window. A quick pang of anger flashes across his face, but he will’s it away and it subsides. As the song begins to come to a close, he hold still for a moment and we see the side of his face, still partially obscured by the setting sun. He’s very handsome—blue eyes/red lips, shiny brown hair in a tasteful style, and the American flag emblazoned on his shoulder. The camera faces him clearly now, in an POV of his equipment. We watch him pick up his keys and leave, letting the door loudly slam itself shut. The camera cuts to outside, behind him. He turns around and opens the door again, and gently closes it. Now the camera faces him. He takes one last look at the house, he seems like he’s known it for some time. The weather vane’s spinning very fast as the winds really start to pick up, and he frowns. Aside form that, all’s quiet.
We see the tail end of his car as he drives off, probly for the last time. The camera moves through the door and back into the house, where the TV screen still blares the reporters desperate pleas for it to stop. But there’s no answer. 

This is optional world building that’s included because it’s all new and I worked on it last week at the time of writing this.

Imagine, if you will, a dark America. One a little less benevolent than we know. She’s a nation untainted, her dreams without an end. In this America, our way of life was made to continue, just as it was. They built a secluded kingdom with invisible walls. They became like an island of peace and prosperity…And I kinda trail off there. Suffice to say what was meant to be, meant very little. It didn’t last.

So finally here’s my unadulterated view on the United States, and my reasoning as to why I would write this.

I’ve come to the realization that I like America, but I don’t like the American. This is a country consumed, and increasingly, defined by its past. It’s became ugly, despicable, and mean. Not to mention deeply uneducated. And for an “young” country, it feels positively ancient. And so do I. I just feel very old and tired even just thinking about it. People are starting to have too much to say. And they’re changing too many things about themselves and too quickly. They align and realign; they go to a fro, back and forth, over, and over, and over again. Friends become enemies, become friends again. 

Some spoilers.

As for the intro, (so spoilers), the man is an Agent of a group called the “Wyrd,” literally pronounced as “weird,” though I’ve seen some rather forcefully anglicize it to “Why-Red.” This is an agent religion dating back to pre-pagan Ireland. A time so long ago that even an organized pagan religion did not exist. Wyrd means fate in Gaelic, it refers to the depressing inevitability of death. Back then, they were fishermen but did not know how to build boats. Rather, they subsisted on rafts made from driftwood and tree bark. The Atlantic Ocean is an often dangerous place, especially under their lens, as an ancient but beleaguered and freighted people. They would go out to sea and simply never come back. It was all too common. And so it was that fate first became cruel. Whereas Christians might seek to uplift or to soothe, some, like the ancient Gaels reveled in the inexplicable chaos and embraced hardship.

This group loves America just as I do. But detest its people for all the reasons you’re probably thinking of. Perhaps if you were to listen to people, and I mean really listen. You may find that most of them don’t seem to know (or care), about the world until it directly affects them. Yet they’ve still plenty to say on just about everything. They’ll march around for causes they barely understand, or latch onto whatever belief system that amounts to a cover to for their insecurities. Supposedly, it was the founding fathers that believed most men weren’t intelligent and so they advocated for a number of systems to keep them out of the voting pool. This group believes that life is supposed to be hard and if it isn’t, bad people take will advantage. They believe that suffering is intrinsic to ‘living in fulfillment.’ They believe that America was a great country for the ideals it once held, but has since become an laughing stock. What system was in place before the bombs fell wasn’t important because the people it had produced were “bad,” not unlike the flood and Noah.

This Wyrd is in effect a cult-like Illuminati who single-handedly carried out the nuclear annihilation of the the United States and the World. This was done to reset humanity, to humble them, or at the very least to shut them up.