Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Hackathon: Revisiting
While I haven't really had much of a chance to re-visit the results of my hackathon, I have been thinking about it a bit lately. So I figured it would be a good idea to make a list of the things I wanted to add in the near future.
- Get some semi-decent way of "controlling" an agent
- Add some simple AI to control agents and bad guys
- Have at least some form of simple interaction between agents and bad guys ("hey, what was that noise", "stop or we'll shoot", "you're under arrest" sort of stuff)
- Come up with a decent name for the thing!
- Get it to a point where people can actually "play", even if it's fairly suckful.
- Add more "tools"
- A way of cutting the power to a building (hacking into the powergrid maybe, or physically cutting the power or something)
- Hacking tools
- Password breakers
- Decrypting software
- Controlling lifts and doors
- Blocking and faking phone calls
- Grabbing email and other data traffic
- Having a mission over multiple maps - navigating through the sewers to get into the building
- The idea of a "mission" - you have a goal (say "steal the special jewel" or "destroy the data" or something), but to achieve it, it requires breaking into multiple buildings to get the information to do the main job. Several maps, several ways to approach each problem, etc
- More stuff with agents
- Add equipment they can use (which either belongs to them or you lend them)
- Weapons
- Stealth gear
- Hacking stuff (they link you into the computer network)
- Cyberware?
- You can hire agents on a per-job basis, or have a pool of agents in your employ you can use when you feel like
- Have "personalities" so each agent "feels" different
- implement a "relationship" mechanism - some agents work well with some people but dislike others. Individuals feelings may change over time. My vision is to have a situation where an agent will disobey you to go back and save his friend
- Have the possibility of "maps" being out of date - Anthony's idea of "there should be a door here!"
- On the topic of maps, my plan is for the player to have a big database of maps that they constantly add to, and so can pull up a different one when required - "hmmm, no, it looks too hard to break into the hall of records. I'll have to find another way to get the document".
- Have some way of getting "jobs". Maybe contacts or something. Having "commissions" and stuff you just randomly decide to do would be cool - you hear that there's a really expensive jewel on display at the museum, so you can grab that whenever you want, but you've been contracted to do some corporate espionage before the 31st
- Have a news system, like in Uplink, where events get reported. So if you do a cool job, you get to see an article about how "police are baffled by the theft" or something. It would be really cool is you took something in a very subtle way, so it isn't reported for ages.
- The ability to modularly add new "jobs" or "maps" to the game, so people could randomly get more content when it's available.