Hi, I spent a little time today discussing with Aurélien on the current state of hackit gameplay/context. I put here the notes, it's not very organized (I'm not priorising long term/short term or filtering what is reasonable or not). I hope it can nurture the discussion, both for the short term missions brainstorm and also on the overall context/atmosphere of the game :
- if we assume that the organization that contacts the player is some sort of eco-warrior NGO, dedicated to many activities related to preserving the environment (with some official and some secret activity), we can imagine that there are different departments in this organization, each one representing one of the gauge we have in our gameplay. For instance, we could have propaganda&communication department, R&D and intelligence (gathering information), resources (hacking (or some other term) web site for the organization to increase its control over the web), etc. Then, after the first few minutes of gameplay, we could start being contacted by a member of each department that will help the player fill the respective gauje representing this department. This way, each gauje would generally correspond to a type of mission, but would leave the door open for surprises. For instance, the resources department could at some point need some information, therefore asking for an information gathering type mission. This looks better to me than having mechanical and artificial gauje that represent an abstract type of mission. We could incarnate it with the picture of each person that contacts us, associated to the gauge of his department. Also, for the storytelling, it opens the path for competency between the various departments, either because of power struggle or different ideological views. The way it can exist in the gameplay : Ex 1, missions that ask for contradictory actions. Ex 2, mission that asks the player to find an information that another department is also looking for => would be an easy win for the player (he already did the job of looking for the info), but I think can be fertile in terms of storytelling. - I like the idea of having, for each gauge (ie each department if we follow the idea above), a set of repeatable missions related to the activity of the department. And from time to time, we add a more elaborate mission that can be part of a campaign involving one or more departments. This way, we don't break the mission system, we just have a mix of automatic missions where we can insert something different when we want some more tailored ones. I see it like the TV show Alias, for those of you who know it. Nothing really happened in this show imho, each episode followed the same structure with a macguffin followed by some infiltration/fighting, with regular variations related to the kind of macguffin and the place where the fight took place, and from time to time, a specific mission that would slightly change the vision we have of the characters and reveal some secrets about their past or about the different organizations fighting for the power. But I don't see this storytelling as a straight line, but more as circles that create variations around a very simple and repetitive structure - and it worked well, according to me. - If we keep the mechanism of the 'scan' feature (do an action on a web page with a probability of success, but not own the page - this is the 'hack' action), we can rename it and use it for different purposes in missions : clean a page from a virus, retrieve an information hidden in a page, attack a web page and infect it (without gaining control over it). I've added the latter on the mission page. - question about the failure conditions. Can the player fail a mission, I'm not sure, what do you think ? - The external threat : not very original, but why not start with something like the trilateral commission (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateral_Commission) , which could be a quite natural opponent to the environmental NGO, and with enough power to create some interesting confrontations. The player might not have direct interactions with this opponent at the beginning of the game. - I like the idea of using card stories in our game, as part of missions. It would create a nice virtous circle ;) Main issue is how the storytelling can incorporate it without making it look artificial. Maybe related to the funding of the organization, which uses opaque circuits to fund itself, for instance by using web games where people pretend to pay to play but actually secretly fund the organization. I don't know. And there is no virtual money in our card game, so it's not a good idea maybe. But I still like the fact of thinking how the organization funds itself. And the fact of integrating Card Stories. But we don't have to link the two. Thoughts ? - To finish with, another idea of mission that can be user generated (adding it now to the missions page) : hiding information on behalf of the organization. The organization does not want its secret info to be centralized, so it's asking the player to hide it somewhere on the web, and to give in exchange a secret code that should make it possible to retrieve the information. Then, this can become a mission for other players, who must retrieve the information with the code. Then we could follow the card stories gameplay : if some players find the information but not all of them, it means that it was hidden with the adequate level of difficulty, and the player who hid the information wins. If no one or everyone finds it, then he loses. What do you think ? Sorry for the long mail :) D _______________________________________________ Hackit Bar mailing list - [email protected] Wiki: http://community.hackit.cx/ List: http://community.hackit.cx/ml/ Forum: http://community.hackit.cx/forum/ Ideas: http://community.hackit.cx/ideas/ IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/#politis
