Bad Weather

Alright, so fun idea here. During the early Triassic period two things were happening.

One, Pangea was still in one piece, it didn't start to fully break up for another 50 million years or so.

Two, at around 249 million years ago the temperature spiked with average ocean surface temperatures at the tropics at 40°C (104°F) and average land temperatures at the tropics at 60°C (140°C).

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22395-roasting-triassic-heat-exterminated...

This is significant because you had an unbroken global ocean named Panthalassa (the Greek roots literally mean "All Sea") paired with enormously hot ocean surface temperatures.

Ostensibly, that means the trade winds of the time (unbroken by mountain ranges for most of the planet's circumference) could begin forming a tropical storm off the West coast of Pangea and blow it West all the way around the world, building up energy the whole way, before slamming into the East coast of Pangea.

Here's an academic paper on "Hypercanes." 

https://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/hypercane95.pdf

Basically researchers figured bolide impacts (think asteroids, comets, etc.)  or submarine flood basalts (reaaaaallllyyy big underwater volcanic eruptions) could superheat the ocean and produce surface temperatures able to feed these hypercanes.  A hypercane is modeled to have sustained windspeeds around 220 m/s. That's 792 kilometers per hour or 492.1 miles per hour. These hypercanes are a suggested additional mechanism for mass-extinctions.

To put this into perspective, the fastest speed ever verifiably recorded for a tornado is 486 kilometers per hour or 302 miles per hour. 

This means a hypercane could have wind speeds almost twice as fast as the fastest momentary speed of the fastest tornado. 

Sustained.

So, an additional point I'd like to make is that currently our average ocean surface temperature at the tropics is about 30°C (86°F), but that can vary 5°C+ (9°F+) either way. For example, just last month, the surface ocean temperature off the coast of Florida hit 38.4°C (101.1°F).

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-ocean-temperature-world-record-heat-100-deg...

This is important, because of the 40°C (104°F) average ocean surface temperature at the tropics 249 million years ago. If you map the same sort of temperature swings onto that, that's a seasonal maximum of 48.4°C (119.1°F) or more.

If you go back to that paper, which was considering the surface temperatures needed to form these hypercanes, they were mapping this onto an Earth that was often much colder, thus the bolide impact or the submarine basalt floods needed to add energy.

Interestingly, the surface ocean temperatures they modeled necessary to form hypercanes were 45°C (113°F).

Yeah.

45°C (113°F) < 48.4°C (119.1°F)

So, hypothetically, there was a brief period (geologically speaking, many many many human civilization-spanning lengths of time as far as we're concerned) when hypercanes formed spontaneously and seasonally, had most of the surface of the planet to form and build strength, and regularly slammed into the East coast of Pangea, or modern day Europe. 

These hypercanes would have been much bigger too (4000+km or 2500+mi across, or 2.5x bigger than the biggest hurricanes today), so any given storm event could have lasted many weeks not the 3-5 days we're use to.

Everything else would be bigger too. 

Storm surge? Supercharged, and super long-lasting. Also, remember negative storm surge, which would suck large amounts of water away from the beach, exposing vast amounts of the seabed to the air for weeks at a time.

Hail? The tallest hurricanes reach 15km (9.3mi) tall. A hypercane could reach 45km (27mi). That's almost halfway to the Karman line, or what is commonly accepted as the boundary of space. Imagine the enormous updrafts on this thing keeping hail in the air. Most hail stays suspended 5-10 minutes, an hour tops. The longer it is suspended, the larger each piece of ice grows. How big does each piece of hail get in a hypercane?

In fact, after the End-Permian extinctions (also known as The Great Dying), life took an unusually long time to rebound (~5 million years). Perhaps regular hypercanes could have attributed to conditions not amenable to life?

Regardless, it's these conditions that I thought might be fun to capture in a more visual Twine or VN. The earliest dinosaurs evolved around 245 million years ago, after global temperatures dropped significantly, meaning whatever creatures would experience this hypercane would be a few million years prior to the dinosaurs.

In the coastal and internal waterways, temnospondyls were more common (think sorta like proto-crocodile) while early ichthyosaurs began to rule the oceans themselves.

On land, sphenodonts could be found. While they look like lizards, they are actually just a sister group to lizards and snakes. The only surviving species of this group is the Tuatara of New Zealand.

I would probably choose the viewpoint of an ancient sphenodont for the game. I'd love for the player to live in this radically different world for a bit before the storm approached.

The challenge of this game would be getting the scale of this event across without retreating into numbers and figures, which is why I want to do it from a sphenodont's POV. Keep the words simple and minimal.

Basically forcing myself not to nerd out and keep things relatable while striving to express the scale of this thing visually.

I suspect to do this thing justice, I would have to team up with an artist (AI art is not an appropriate option for me, so please don't suggest it). Perhaps a sound engineer would be a wise addition as well.

I just want to write a game about a rainy day.