I think chris is convinced that his idea is the idea going into the game...
(dont worry, i cant suggest anything anymore either)
Subversion Development - Any Suggestions Etc...
Moderators: jelco, bert_the_turtle, DTNC Vicious
-
UnDeR_SEEG
- level0
- Posts: 9
- Joined: Thu Mar 04, 2004 1:34 pm
Subversion an Uplink Monopoly
HI there i want to share my ideas too.
I liked uplink alot it was the first hacker game that really let me dive deep into the games world !
So i would like to have a combination of World-domination-simulation and a hacking game.
It would be perfect to gain control over buildings and blocks by hacking them or manipulating them let's say via terroristic actions. (elevator manipulation, bombs ...)
there's one boss of a building / building complex. you can either catch him by monetary domination. (raising influence in the block) or by knocking him off. (terroristic action or hacking him down. e.g transfering all his money to your account) then it's yours !!
Starting interface can be similar to uplink. You've got your world map a small terminal and some cash for traveling.
You log into one shop and gain the ownership- or youre goin over to sell security systems to it. Of course other hackers try to crack that.
.
.
.
if you're owning a city it will protect you: means tracing will be a lot harder here (except there are some security wholes)
Another point is infrastructure:
So you can be a road/telekommunication/power -mogul and youse your influence for gaining world-domination.
i hope my idea is clear enough.
I liked uplink alot it was the first hacker game that really let me dive deep into the games world !
So i would like to have a combination of World-domination-simulation and a hacking game.
It would be perfect to gain control over buildings and blocks by hacking them or manipulating them let's say via terroristic actions. (elevator manipulation, bombs ...)
there's one boss of a building / building complex. you can either catch him by monetary domination. (raising influence in the block) or by knocking him off. (terroristic action or hacking him down. e.g transfering all his money to your account) then it's yours !!
Starting interface can be similar to uplink. You've got your world map a small terminal and some cash for traveling.
You log into one shop and gain the ownership- or youre goin over to sell security systems to it. Of course other hackers try to crack that.
.
.
.
if you're owning a city it will protect you: means tracing will be a lot harder here (except there are some security wholes)
Another point is infrastructure:
So you can be a road/telekommunication/power -mogul and youse your influence for gaining world-domination.
i hope my idea is clear enough.
-
GunbusterBuck
- level0
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Wed Jan 13, 2010 8:11 am
When I first saw the wireframe screenshots for Subversion, the visuals that sprang to mind were from the 80's Channel 4 one-off 'Max Headroom Twenty Minutes into the Future'. Oh, and Snake Plissken flying about in 'Escape From New York'.
I'd love to see that kind of infiltration/combat game, a bit 'SOCOM Tactical Strike' mixed with 'Syndicate Wars' with a dash of 'Uplink' and stewed in Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy. Maybe garnished with a sprig of ‘Spy Vs Spy’.
I'd love to see that kind of infiltration/combat game, a bit 'SOCOM Tactical Strike' mixed with 'Syndicate Wars' with a dash of 'Uplink' and stewed in Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy. Maybe garnished with a sprig of ‘Spy Vs Spy’.
-
DTNC Vicious
- Site Admin
- Posts: 1783
- Joined: Sat Mar 14, 2009 1:48 am
- Location: North of the Wall
- Contact:
-
SparroHawc
- level0
- Posts: 6
- Joined: Fri Jan 16, 2009 7:42 am
I think my biggest worry in this is that there will be insufficient reason to explore the procedurally generated buildings. The main flaw of procedural generation is that everything looks more-or-less the same, and the driving force behind exploration is to find new and interesting things. Of course, it's possible to get around this somewhat by having some form of prize that is accessible in the depths of the area, but Oblivion teaches us that dungeons quickly stop being worth exploring if they all look identical (even if there is something shiny at the bottom of it). It becomes a case of artificially extended gameplay.
Now, there are some ways to make exploring interesting even with bearing those limitations in mind. One method is to put a lot of variability in the generator. Since we're more or less looking at cubicle farms here, that's not very likely to happen unfortunately. Another method, though, is to let a few flaws make their way into the generator. Then instead of constantly tromping through mind-numbingly similar rows of offices, every once in a while you come across a building that has a single huge room with a bunch of chairs crammed in a corner. If this is actually being portrayed as a virtual world, and the visuals suggest this is the case, these odd buildings could be explained as glitches in the system. Heck, some of these glitched buildings could be related to objectives. And as long as your glitch-generating subroutine is interesting enough, you could have people saying 'Hey, generate a city with seed 44351 and take a look at the building at (44.35, 14.43). It's nuts!'
Of course, simply raiding nearby buildings for the resources needed to build what you want is rewarding in and of itself, but there's an added joy to the exploration when you have a chance of coming across something genuinely weird and interesting.
As for someone mentioning earlier being able to store and upload city layouts? With procedural generation, that's absurdly easy. All you need is a seed, which is fed to the random number generator to first plot the path of the river or the lay of the land, then the city is built on top of it with the rules defined for the city generator. As long as you give it the same seed number, the city will come out exactly the same. And depending on the srand() function, you could have over 65 thousand different possible city layouts, each readily accessible by feeding that five-digit seed to the generator.
Back in the day, this was the only way you could have large gaming environments since both storage space and memory were severely limited. Take a look at Elite; an entire universe, all procedurally generated and absolutely huge - and the reward for spending some time combing it is some ridiculously lucrative trading routes, as well as some amusingly silly world descriptions. Also, there is the game 'Sentinel', which had thousands of levels. The better you did, the more levels you skipped when you beat one - and the levels were all created randomly, using the level number as a seed. It even had a password system that was a hash of the level number. Procedural generation has been around for a LONG time.
EDIT: With the wire system that is in place, a very good prize for ransacking a building is a unique type of device. Each gadget depends on an actual person developing it though, so prior to the release of the game you may want to have a 'make a gadget' contest to bulk up the content. You could give some beta-testers a toolkit for device creation that works like an electrical engineering programmable circuit designer or the like (see: Logisim, an open-source logic circuit design app). For that matter, as long as it's a standalone app, release it to the world at large.
Now, there are some ways to make exploring interesting even with bearing those limitations in mind. One method is to put a lot of variability in the generator. Since we're more or less looking at cubicle farms here, that's not very likely to happen unfortunately. Another method, though, is to let a few flaws make their way into the generator. Then instead of constantly tromping through mind-numbingly similar rows of offices, every once in a while you come across a building that has a single huge room with a bunch of chairs crammed in a corner. If this is actually being portrayed as a virtual world, and the visuals suggest this is the case, these odd buildings could be explained as glitches in the system. Heck, some of these glitched buildings could be related to objectives. And as long as your glitch-generating subroutine is interesting enough, you could have people saying 'Hey, generate a city with seed 44351 and take a look at the building at (44.35, 14.43). It's nuts!'
Of course, simply raiding nearby buildings for the resources needed to build what you want is rewarding in and of itself, but there's an added joy to the exploration when you have a chance of coming across something genuinely weird and interesting.
As for someone mentioning earlier being able to store and upload city layouts? With procedural generation, that's absurdly easy. All you need is a seed, which is fed to the random number generator to first plot the path of the river or the lay of the land, then the city is built on top of it with the rules defined for the city generator. As long as you give it the same seed number, the city will come out exactly the same. And depending on the srand() function, you could have over 65 thousand different possible city layouts, each readily accessible by feeding that five-digit seed to the generator.
Back in the day, this was the only way you could have large gaming environments since both storage space and memory were severely limited. Take a look at Elite; an entire universe, all procedurally generated and absolutely huge - and the reward for spending some time combing it is some ridiculously lucrative trading routes, as well as some amusingly silly world descriptions. Also, there is the game 'Sentinel', which had thousands of levels. The better you did, the more levels you skipped when you beat one - and the levels were all created randomly, using the level number as a seed. It even had a password system that was a hash of the level number. Procedural generation has been around for a LONG time.
EDIT: With the wire system that is in place, a very good prize for ransacking a building is a unique type of device. Each gadget depends on an actual person developing it though, so prior to the release of the game you may want to have a 'make a gadget' contest to bulk up the content. You could give some beta-testers a toolkit for device creation that works like an electrical engineering programmable circuit designer or the like (see: Logisim, an open-source logic circuit design app). For that matter, as long as it's a standalone app, release it to the world at large.
-
Clive At Five
- level1
- Posts: 26
- Joined: Tue Sep 08, 2009 4:38 pm
For starters, it's difficult to contribute to a game we know so little about. That's not my way of prodding you for details, it's just a disclaimer for what I'm about to say.
Firstly, I think the previous poster (SparroHawc) makes a great point. What is the incentive to explore procedurally-generated buildings? In Uplink, the motivation to explore procedurally-generated LANs was initially "exploratorally" and probably a bit monetarily, but after conquering 20 or so "LAN dungeons," the algorithm was figured out and the only reason you'd ever hack another LAN was to make more money. No one likes a game where you have to replicate trivial tasks X times in order to access later parts of the game. That's the mark of lazy game design.
I think a page can be taken out of Darwinia's book: At first, the challenge was using squads to defeat the Viruses and save the Darwinians. Over time, we learned the ability to use those Darwinians to defeat the Viruses. We didn't need to necessarily tell every Darwinian which virus to destroy, or what tool to use. In fact, if we had enough of them, we could blindly charge a large group into an ants nest and predict a victory. Only the most difficult Viruses would still require squad assistance. This notion can be extrapolated to (what I am envisioning to be) the Subversion World. Once a few buildings are conquered, your team of agents will have the abilities to crack certain security systems without anything other than the instruction to do it. There will be certain systems, however, that will require the player to crack it. Once cracked, the agents would then be able to crack similarly-difficult security systems, and so on, leaving only the new scenarios for the player to decipher. An Uplink analogy would be like hiring lesser hackers to do the simple jobs like "Delete this file" missions, at, perhaps, a smaller reward, but at the benefit of increasing your own "company's" reputation or control in an accelerated way. Out-of-game, it has the negative side-effect, however, of increasing the requirements of the development team to include several levels of increasingly difficult missions/systems.
The other difference between this and Uplink, from what I gather, is that there will be a "live-action" element, i.e. security guards or bystanders, whose behavior won't be so easily predictable, and therefore, a heist not "replicateable" via your agents.
As per what I'd "like" to play, which I have no evidence to support Subversion's existence in these areas: I like domination objectives, sort of like GTA: Vice City's real-estate acquisition goals... Perhaps implemented like "Take over this Industry" or whatever until the entire economy of the city is run by you. I love city-building, so this could be combined with the previous idea a la spreading your "company's" influence via the strategic placement of XYZ service or agency, or perhaps by cutting off the water/power supply to a certain competitor's side of town.
These are just a few tidbits of input, which will probably be of little relevance to the actual development of this game, but DAMN, I love to hear myself speak... so voila!
-Clive
Firstly, I think the previous poster (SparroHawc) makes a great point. What is the incentive to explore procedurally-generated buildings? In Uplink, the motivation to explore procedurally-generated LANs was initially "exploratorally" and probably a bit monetarily, but after conquering 20 or so "LAN dungeons," the algorithm was figured out and the only reason you'd ever hack another LAN was to make more money. No one likes a game where you have to replicate trivial tasks X times in order to access later parts of the game. That's the mark of lazy game design.
I think a page can be taken out of Darwinia's book: At first, the challenge was using squads to defeat the Viruses and save the Darwinians. Over time, we learned the ability to use those Darwinians to defeat the Viruses. We didn't need to necessarily tell every Darwinian which virus to destroy, or what tool to use. In fact, if we had enough of them, we could blindly charge a large group into an ants nest and predict a victory. Only the most difficult Viruses would still require squad assistance. This notion can be extrapolated to (what I am envisioning to be) the Subversion World. Once a few buildings are conquered, your team of agents will have the abilities to crack certain security systems without anything other than the instruction to do it. There will be certain systems, however, that will require the player to crack it. Once cracked, the agents would then be able to crack similarly-difficult security systems, and so on, leaving only the new scenarios for the player to decipher. An Uplink analogy would be like hiring lesser hackers to do the simple jobs like "Delete this file" missions, at, perhaps, a smaller reward, but at the benefit of increasing your own "company's" reputation or control in an accelerated way. Out-of-game, it has the negative side-effect, however, of increasing the requirements of the development team to include several levels of increasingly difficult missions/systems.
The other difference between this and Uplink, from what I gather, is that there will be a "live-action" element, i.e. security guards or bystanders, whose behavior won't be so easily predictable, and therefore, a heist not "replicateable" via your agents.
As per what I'd "like" to play, which I have no evidence to support Subversion's existence in these areas: I like domination objectives, sort of like GTA: Vice City's real-estate acquisition goals... Perhaps implemented like "Take over this Industry" or whatever until the entire economy of the city is run by you. I love city-building, so this could be combined with the previous idea a la spreading your "company's" influence via the strategic placement of XYZ service or agency, or perhaps by cutting off the water/power supply to a certain competitor's side of town.
These are just a few tidbits of input, which will probably be of little relevance to the actual development of this game, but DAMN, I love to hear myself speak... so voila!
-Clive
One aspect that could be a lot of fun, given what direction the game seems to be headed in, is an ability to reprogram various things.
For example, say there is a troublesome guard patrol that needs to be delayed while you hack/slash/steal something: you could reprogram one of the keypads on a door along their patrol, effectively locking them out of an area and delaying them while they try to fix what's going on. Or, if there are physical alarms, the ability to hack the security system and isolate the opposition by sealing areas, triggering fire alarms, setting off false emergency exits, etc.
For example, say there is a troublesome guard patrol that needs to be delayed while you hack/slash/steal something: you could reprogram one of the keypads on a door along their patrol, effectively locking them out of an area and delaying them while they try to fix what's going on. Or, if there are physical alarms, the ability to hack the security system and isolate the opposition by sealing areas, triggering fire alarms, setting off false emergency exits, etc.
Feud wrote:One aspect that could be a lot of fun, given what direction the game seems to be headed in, is an ability to reprogram various things.
For example, say there is a troublesome guard patrol that needs to be delayed while you hack/slash/steal something: you could reprogram one of the keypads on a door along their patrol, effectively locking them out of an area and delaying them while they try to fix what's going on. Or, if there are physical alarms, the ability to hack the security system and isolate the opposition by sealing areas, triggering fire alarms, setting off false emergency exits, etc.
Or the ability to send them a memo saying their patrol route is to be changed
Feud wrote:Montyphy wrote:Feud wrote:One aspect that could be a lot of fun, given what direction the game seems to be headed in, is an ability to reprogram various things.
For example, say there is a troublesome guard patrol that needs to be delayed while you hack/slash/steal something: you could reprogram one of the keypads on a door along their patrol, effectively locking them out of an area and delaying them while they try to fix what's going on. Or, if there are physical alarms, the ability to hack the security system and isolate the opposition by sealing areas, triggering fire alarms, setting off false emergency exits, etc.
Or the ability to send them a memo saying their patrol route is to be changed
Or jam the printer just as they're trying to print thier TPS Reports...
Or kidnap the guards' families so as to blackmail the guards to get them to do the job for you.
Montyphy wrote:Feud wrote:Montyphy wrote:Feud wrote:One aspect that could be a lot of fun, given what direction the game seems to be headed in, is an ability to reprogram various things.
For example, say there is a troublesome guard patrol that needs to be delayed while you hack/slash/steal something: you could reprogram one of the keypads on a door along their patrol, effectively locking them out of an area and delaying them while they try to fix what's going on. Or, if there are physical alarms, the ability to hack the security system and isolate the opposition by sealing areas, triggering fire alarms, setting off false emergency exits, etc.
Or the ability to send them a memo saying their patrol route is to be changed
Or jam the printer just as they're trying to print thier TPS Reports...
Or kidnap the guards' families so as to blackmail the guards to get them to do the job for you.
Or turn up with your guys dressed as guards and get them to convince the real guards that they are guarding the wrong building due to a mix up at the office.
The above post is not intended as an attack on you. It's not about making you look stupid for not searching. It merely states the facts. Please don't be offended.
DinoSteve wrote:Montyphy wrote:Feud wrote:Montyphy wrote:Feud wrote:One aspect that could be a lot of fun, given what direction the game seems to be headed in, is an ability to reprogram various things.
For example, say there is a troublesome guard patrol that needs to be delayed while you hack/slash/steal something: you could reprogram one of the keypads on a door along their patrol, effectively locking them out of an area and delaying them while they try to fix what's going on. Or, if there are physical alarms, the ability to hack the security system and isolate the opposition by sealing areas, triggering fire alarms, setting off false emergency exits, etc.
Or the ability to send them a memo saying their patrol route is to be changed
Or jam the printer just as they're trying to print thier TPS Reports...
Or kidnap the guards' families so as to blackmail the guards to get them to do the job for you.
Or turn up with your guys dressed as guards and get them to convince the real guards that they are guarding the wrong building due to a mix up at the office.
Or just kill the guards.
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 11 guests