Guys, I am at a loss on what to do.

I have reached a point in my planning of the ALWAYS HUNTING series where I have been faced with the hardest decision I have, and hopefully will, ever run into.

It all started about a month ago, when I had decided to set some of my major projects/series in the same universe, but on different parts of the timeline, which would allow me to really expand and elaborate on each, and the ALWAYS HUNTING series happened to be one of them.

At the moment, the enemy list of even the first game in the ALWAYS HUNTING series, Jacob’s Story, is lengthy at best. Given that it and my other projects/series will be set in the same universe, the enemy list is bumped up a lot more since enemies from the other projects/series are very likely to appear with major roles, which would mean one of two possibilities; first possibility would be that the enemies wouldn’t have as much depth to their characters as they could or, as for the second, each game would have to be much bigger to provide more space for character depth on each enemy. The problem is that I don’t want to create too much work for the team and I don’t want to keep everyone waiting too long, but I don’t want to have enemies that the player won’t be able to connect with due to lack of depth of character.

At the moment, I see one solution to the problem, and it is not to sever ALWAYS HUNTING’s connection to the other projects, rather it is to drop some enemies (namely Eyeless Jack, Laughing Jack, Jeff the Killer, BEN and The Rake).

I know some would be thinking, “Why not just drop them then?”, but that is the issue; I am conflicted.

On one hand, none of the characters in that list are characters that I could call my own (except for maybe Jeff, since his story and character is pretty much completely changed to suit the purposes of the ALWAYS HUNTING series), so if I dropped them it might avoid complications with some of the creators of those characters who might think “What the hell is this?” or “I think this is taking it a bit too far”. Also, there may be certain elements of my other projects (that I cannot reveal at this point) that the creators of those characters may not agree with, and may not want to be tied to their characters.

On the other hand, I have gotten permission from some of the creators to use some of the characters (the rest I was intending to go to at some point in the future), and a lot of time and effort has gone into building the characters into the story, trying to provide a fresh perspective on them while doing my best to avoid making them do something that would seem totally outside of what makes them who they are. So ripping them out may temporarily blow a hole in the project that may take some time to fix.

Either approach will take an unknown amount of time to implement, so I reach the point where I reach out to all of you; since this is a decision that I feel is too big to sit upon my shoulders alone, as any decision from me right now on this area may be rash and I may miss crucial context. What should happen with the characters I listed? Should I remove them, or keep them? Please give reasons why you would lean in one direction or the other, because it helps me a lot more to understand what you want and why than just what.

I know the final decision ultimately rests with Walshinator Productions, but I want to see your honest opinions on the matter before deciding (if there is another solution that you think could work, I would also like to hear it). I would also appreciate it if you would not waste my time with spam/troll comments.

Cheers,

Daniel “TheWalshinator” Walsh.