EDIT (May 25, 2016):
Years went by, and I finally decided to make a game to finish the story.
Everything below this point is now just here for posterity!
Link to the original cancellation announcement:
http://jonbro.newgrounds.com/news/post/732398
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I've chosen to discontinue the Riddle Transfer series. This post explains what would have been in the games had I decided to finish.
RT2 was first planned to be a game where Phil, Smiley, Phred, and Zack attempted to escape through a sewage system, which did not get further than one room drawn, and there would have been a few water level-changing puzzles that would be better suited for a Zelda game than for something like this. The end of the game would have involved an alligator or some mutated creature being electricuted by a toaster. Most of the game was not planned out.
I scrapped this idea after many months and played around with a different idea derived from something my friend Mr-Shark said. Diz would have been recaptured by Zone 5.1 (which is actually an independent organization not related to the government at all, and that was a common misconception fans had about it because I never made it clear). The new game was going to involve playing as Diz, which started by getting out of a prison cell much like in RT1, but no blueprints were put on paper beyond that. Once again, one room was drawn and production slowed to a halt. At the end, Diz was going to be captured a third time, this time by the leader of the facility, presumably but not certainly to be killed by agents. The best part about the game would have been a puzzle involving the word "woof," which was inspired by a suggestion from AbbyDrew.
** A couple of people wanted to see pictures of what the first room in Riddle Transfer 2 looked like.
There are two versions of the first room since I started the game over at one point.
Version 1 of the first room in Riddle Transfer 2
Version 2 of the first room in Riddle Transfer 2
RT3 would have involved the four young central characters just getting out of the sewers and finding themselves in a simulation room, in which Phil would have entered six virtual chambers into the six unutilized rejected games Riddle Company, Riddle School 4+1, Riddle Manor, Riddle Mansion, Riddle Eye, and Riddle Attorney, only these games would have been made from scratch and altered in such a way that would keep consistent with the series' gameplay scheme. As I mentioned in Riddle School 5's special features, all of these games were rejected for a number of different reasons, and it is clear that they, like the rest of the RT series, would not be worth the time and effort they would have taken to create. This game would have mostly been a cheap ploy to satisfy fans that served no relevance to the story, which is a really sad basis for motivation.
At the end of the game, Phil and his friends were planned to have come face to face with the leader of Zone 5.1, whose name was Shaw deLot and behaved like a stereotypical shady villain, and next to him would be Viz, alive and well with two of his four arms missing. DeLot pulls a lever, and all the characters fall into separate classrooms in a personalized prison called Prison School, where the fourth game was going to take place. Zack is not sent down with them because deLot and Viz have other plans for him.
RT4 would have played just like RT1, rescuing your friends and then attempting to escape, in a somewhat school-like setting with a color scheme mostly comprised of dark shades of gray. The concept of the Riddle School and Riddle Transfer games have always been fairly repetitive, and this game certainly wasn't going to help that. Upon reaching the top of this fake school deep within the caverns below Zone 5.1, Shaw deLot was going to be playing the role of the principal and attempting to interrogate Phil and his friends. Phil was going to ring the enormous school bell aboe the room and cause it to fall onto deLot, trapping him inside of the bell, then take his key and make the escape into the final game's setting, essentially the last stretch before hopefully saving Zack and ensuring their freedom.
RT5 would have taken place in a big indoor test area with many unpursued science experiments, and it would have been reminescent of a school playground on a larger scale. None of the puzzles in any of these games were planned, so I literally know nothing else about what the main core of the game would have consisted of. The last door would have been opened by rearranging the letters in Shaw deLot's name to spell "Slow Death." And through the last door is a room with similarities to the final room in the Riddle School series, with machinery at all sides, a large doomsday weapon powered by Zack's heat, and a large, suspicious round hole in the floor blocked by heavy doors. The weapon begins to charge, and you confront Viz, who is using his brain waves to assist the weapons' charging progress. Somehow, you were going to knock him off his post, and you realize Viz was, in fact, your alien friend Diz. He was brainwashed by Zone 5.1 after RT2 and was made to believe he was Viz in order to burn the world with the original plans of Vizion. (The real Viz died at the end of the RS series just before RT1.)
DeLot, who is irate, picks up Phil with a giant mechanical claw from the ceiling and opens the heavy doors in the floor, revealing a lava pit like the one Phil falls into in Riddle School 4, only this wasn't going to be a dream. The claw loosens its grip, and Phil's friends watch in shock and fear as he falls down into the fiery chasm, his life flashing before his eyes. At that point, Phil would have stopped his fall by barely hanging onto a small outcropping in the pit, and you'd take control of Phil, trying everything in your power to make it back out of the pit, realizing there is nothing you could do. Then you would have taken control of Smiley, Phred, and Diz somehow to rescue Phil before his grip loosened. Like all the other Riddle games, there would not have been a way to fail this final test, but the idea was to make it a very tense moment for those who had grown attached to the characters. In the end, Phil is pulled out of the pit by the same claw that Shaw deLot used to drop him in, and deLot accidentally fall into the pit himself in an attempt to jump and grab Phil to kill him with his own two hands.
The agents were going to admit they were glad to be free of deLot's rule, which is the same way the aliens following orders under the Vizion project felt after Viz was frozen to death. Zack is now neither hot nor cold, but a perfectly comfortable temperature, and he is slightly saddened but mostly relieved by this fact. Phil is shaken up but greatly thankful to his friends. Diz feels morally conflicted about having left the others behind in RT1 and wonders if it would have been best to stay with them rather than only save himself, because there wasn't time enough to save everyone. But he apologizes sincerely to them and they're all just glad that Diz was there in the end to help save Phil's life. Just outside of the Zone 5.1 building, the agents prepare Phil, Phred, Smiley, and Zack to fly in a jet to their home town at long last, and Diz is with them, only they have to split ways because Diz still has a life to live with his friends in the far reaches of the galaxy. They say their farewells, with Phil and his friends flying in the jet into the distant skies, and Diz going the opposite taking the old Vizion ship back into the cosmos. Before he takes off, it is clear by his expression that he will miss them, but it's for the best that he leaves them behind and goes on his own way.
As his ship disappears into the stars above, the credits roll. And after them, I was thinking of having some quick cutscene where Diz and Quiz are playfully laughing and having a friendly, casual discussion with one another as they talk about the silliness of Earth's Internet. This cutscene was going to be my way of laying to rest any assumptions that Quiz was significant to the story. He's just some blue alien who was forced to follow Vizion just like all the other aliens. Nobody liked Viz, and it seemed like the perfect way to say Quiz was a totally innocent and unimportant character was to have him and Diz get in a nonthreatening and funny conversation.
I also had the idea that Riddle Transfer 5's credits sequence would have involved clips of Phil's life with his friends, going through the years of school all over again, living his life and growing older, being in the same high school graduation ceremony as Phred, Zack, and Smiley as they got their college diplomas, and the last shot was going to be Phil, walking into his empty university dorm room as clouds dimmed the light coming from a window in the back, and his fully grown, fully matured character was going to set down his bags and take in the silence and the significance of this milestone, because at any given point in his journey, if something had gone wrong, he might not have done, or would not have been able to do, any of this. And even as a world hero, he is still just a human being like everyone else. All of Phil's development as a character would have happened following his near death experience at Zone 5.1 and reliving his life in school with a different point of view. It would have been a very emotional series of scenes, especially for such simple characters that were only a means of comedic effect in RS1-3.
* One thing I forgot to mention when I first posted this, is that I had also planned to gradually give Zack more and more hair throughout the series in order to distinguish his appearance from Phil or Phred. It didn't seem like an illogical plan since he had hair in RS4. This is hardly a significant detail, but it is one that people have asked about and it seemed like it was worth adding to these discarded notes.
That's that. All of my abandoned development plans are out and exposed to the world now.
I hope this conceptual road map was an interesting read for those of you who enjoyed the series, even though it never saw the light of day in the way I had originally intended.
But as for what was released, it wouldn't be hard to just say that Phil, Diz, and the others successfully escaped at the end of RT1 and that's the end of the story. That works just as well.
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NOTE: Remember that I'm still the same person that I was when I made Riddle School in the first place. Even though I've left the Riddle universe behind, it's always possible I'll make another game with humor and puzzle-solving like Riddle School's always had, because I love those kinds of things.
ALSO NOTE (Updated Jan. 21, 2015) I used to say no one had permission to continue this series, but my thoughts on that have changed and can be found here.
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