<another Glossary post draft>
The Toy Box Apprentice
In the story, the Toy Box Apprentice is the Player. This proposal for the Disney Infinity reboot is to focus on the combination of both playing & creating Toy Box games. It's to imagine the entire collection of community content as one big never-ending-story of Toy Box Tales. It's about tweaking the Toy Box engine to maximize its ability to support that variety of games & themes, and restructuring the database to better accommodate sharing them. Each Player is commissioned to this Toy Box Apprenticeship, with the options of joining one of many Guilds, participating in the open Forums, following the works of fellow artisans, competing in various Challenges on a local, regional, or global scale, with the overall goal of becoming a Toy Box Master Artist. In attaining such a goal, the player is awarded a great honor from the New Caretaker & The Architects - the creation of his/her own toy likeness as a Toy Box Townsperson, a Master Artist Avatar, that can be woven into any player's new Toy Box Tales. It's a game-within-a-game that encourages collaboration and the creation of high-quality games.
Improving Jiminy's Introduction
The earlier plans for Disney Infinity 4.0 to have Jiminy Cricket introduce a Toy Box Tale with an IN-logo'd book looked very interesting - the Disney Infinity Team continued to address fan feedback for the Play Sets to include as many characters as possible. Storytelling is a big differentiator for Infinity - not only for the iconic characters, but for the theming as well. However a part of this made no sense to me. It was like Infinity was re-inventing its own wheel. The Toy Box engine already provides the ability to do this. It's been an ongoing conflict between stand-alone Play Sets & the Toy Box - the Play Sets are completely implemented by professionals so there's an expectation that they'll be better - but that by definition makes the Toy Box lesser. Each stand-alone Expansion Game focuses on a single game genre, while the Toy Box covers them all - but not quite to the same extent. With this product focused on the spark of the imagination, it just makes more sense to use the Toy Box engine throughout. This focus on the single engine will reduce development investment and help drive increased function & quality into that engine, not only for the licensing developers, but all of the players. The players need to be able continue the story. It's a lot more fun that way.
This is a counter-proposal to improve upon Jiminy's introduction - use it to re-introduce the Toy Box in a way that's fitting for both old & new players. Have him begin this story of "Recapture the Spark" which happens to somewhat reflect the Toy Box reboot in the real world. Initially, have NO toys unlocked, and have but a single Toy Box available to play. Playing through this Toy Box tells a little more of the backstory, unlocks some subset of the toys & themes, and unlocks one or more Toy Boxes to continue the story. Sprinkled throughout these could be "Puzzle Boxes" from the Architects, that teach players in-game how to build specific game-types, & unlock the corresponding Templates (see associated post). The sequence of Toy Boxes become like Checkpoints, and unlocking multiple Toy Boxes at once provide forks in the storyline that allow the player open-play choices of which parts of the story to play through first. Unlocking the toys across a series of Toy Boxes provide inspirational examples, bring back fond memories to experienced players, & keep the new players from being overwhelmed. Some of these introductory Toy Boxes could be locked for a particular player ability, and once played through, could unlock all prior Toy Boxes featuring that ability. As each new figure is placed on the base, the set of Toy Boxes fitting that character are unlocked. As each major Template is unlocked, the set of Toy Boxes showcasing that game-type are unlocked. As the Toy Box Master Artist Townspeople are unlocked, the set of Toy Boxes submitted by that artist are unlocked. Playing through the Introduction of Toy Boxes provides the storyline & showcases both the Toy Box engine & the reorganization of shared content.
The imagery of Jiminy Cricket by that IN-logo'd book is great - would definitely be great to see that in the introduction. But it's not just one book - it's an entire Library. And the Toy Box Apprentices are invited to help tell the never-ending Toy Box Tale. 
Statistics: Posted by goofyspaceranger — Tue Aug 16, 2016 12:11 pm