Long ago, I came up with a story that involved a futuristic video game where people entered a virtual world.  There were teams who would compete in the tournaments with the players have a different avatar for each area.  The heroes were a new team made of misfits, including a homeless teenager who was living in an abandoned arcade.  They would go on various adventures as they compete until . . . I didn’t really come up with an endgame since I never outlined it.  That’s because various problems appeared:

1. I merged everything into Windemere where video games didn’t exist.  Hard enough to get him alien bounty hunter into this world.  No way to pull off video games.
2. Many of the stories would appear in other stories like ‘Ready Player One’ and ‘Sword Art Online’.
3. I’m still not sure if the word ‘Hyperscape’ would appear in Windemere, especially if I have to change the sport.

That’s where I’m stuck with ‘Lords of Hyperscape’.  The characters were fun and I like all of their arcs.  Yet, I don’t have a story that would work for them anymore.  Not if I kept things the way they were.  Even dropping this to a collection of short stories focusing solely on the tournaments didn’t help.   That worked for ‘Phi Beta Files’, but the general concept of a college story can be transferred regardless of tech level.  If I’m working with virtual reality and video games then I’m having trouble.

One of the ideas I considered was having the characters compete in illusionary worlds.  It could be a manhunt, find an object, or various other games, but that could get old really fast.  For a while, I thought about making it a caster sport where each ‘world’ would revolve around a different school of magic.  This gets tricky because I never made the various schools and I don’t want to copy DnD.  I also do a lot with casters in general, so I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that again.

The key point was coming up with some kind of sport for Windemere.  I created on before, which involved teams flying on various beasts to protect a nest of eggs and gather more from the playing field.  It was called ‘Clutch Ball’, which is still viable.  The homeless arcade dweller could be switched to someone living in the wilderness with a flying beast.  The team could be a collection of different mounts instead of everyone being on the same one like their opponents.  This doesn’t have the magic factor, but it definitely stands out a bit more.  Just can’t call it ‘Lords of Hyperscape’ unless the eccentric team owner goes with the name with no explanation.  They’re still going to be a gnome, so maybe ‘Hyperscape’ is their business?

‘Clutch Ball’ being the front runner brings up the other headache.  I have to design a sport with rules, scoring, and different types of mounts. It sounds like a fun challenge.  Would be similar to ‘Phi Beta Files’ where I have to design the mercenary team roles and create a bunch of teams.  Hope the two series having that in common doesn’t cause any problems, which is another stressor.  Not sure how to make ‘Lords of Hyperscape’ differ unless I don’t make any other rival teams.  None with details beyond the mounts they use.  Would that even work since it means no solid enemies?

As you can tell, this post is mostly just venting and seeing what comes out to fix this idea. I don’t want it to go the way of so many others.  It’s part of a group that’s having a lot of trouble adapting.  Alien bounty hunter is too, but that might be a post in the near future once I get my mind wrapped around things here.