Cyberpunk Browser Game

[B4UTRUST]

Post the updates, changes, idea, info for the cyberpunk web game here.

[B4UTRUST]

As it stands...

Adam and I are on hold for coding till the storyline is hammered out and done properly. To aid in this I've pulled in Cynical Cat to assist with the story implimentation and design.

So, welcome aboard Cynical.

Once Cynical and I confer and get this hammered out well enough we'll pass along the information to Adam and from there we can finish coding this game. By Adam's estimates we're what? A few hours from code finish? Aside from minor changes and such that happens during betas of course.

So hopefully within the next week or two we can get this together in time for Allen to finish his design of the site overlay and graphics so we can launch with the rest of the site.

Cynical, since you don't have the site yet, join up on the game site and please by all means give some suggestions and comments.
Here's the site

[Destructionator XV]

Aye, I think within a few dedicated hours we will be done. Mind you a few dedicated hours in reality is more like a few days because of stuff that comes up and IRL garbage. But it won't be long after we get back to the coding that it will be playable.

[Cynical Cat]

Okay, feeble first impressions.

It seems interesting but the names of the bad guys got to go. They sound like the leaders of a third rate Shadowrun sprawl gang, not scary evil overlords.

Is there good reason why turns in the grid weren't measured in single digit integers?

It does seem like it has potential

[Destructionator XV]

So yeah. Any ideas at all?

Trust me: you do not want to see my creative talents become the final product. Give us somethig to work with!

[B4UTRUST]

I think we're still waiting for cynical to post up his premise. He talked to me about it on AIM and it sounds rather good actually. So I await his post.

[Cynical Cat]

Okay, ideas, ideas, ideas.

Setting it on another planet: We need development time. Say the second generation after a failed utopia. Gradual corruption and centralization of power is met with the beginnings of resistance. Also allows for the development of industries, cities, and all that cyberpunk jazz.

It seams that the idea is to have evil overlords and wide open playing field. So are evil lords have to be wanna-be evil overlords with a weak grasp on things for various reasons i.e.-the leaders of the strongest faction, not the bosses.

The design seems to indicat both commodity based wealth and a currency, which are exchangable at a varying rate. Needs to be clarified. I'm partial to an official currency of nudollars (or whatever we call them) and unofficial currency based on gold (thanks S. Andrew Swann)

Obviously we need some NPC big combines with their own interests to produce goods, consume resources, and hire shadowrunners. My understanding is that we want to allow for single play, teams, and forming your evil corporation of choice. Sliding power scale means that beginning players might take beat up thug missions from shop owner x, to gang territory fights, to corporate war and espionage.

We want players able to gather resources, make stuff, and create missions for mercs and somehow derive a profit ffrom all of these.

Corrections, critiques, and clarifications please.

[B4UTRUST]

pretty much on the mark on most of it from what I can tell.

Players can do multiple things, be it play the johnson type role, corporate wage-slave, corp security, corp runner/manager, shadowrunner, etc.

Players can create corps, run them, research and develop products and then sell them on the open market. They can form teams to raid corps, steal data, take research, sell it back to other corps for profit or complete missions based on it.

As for currency, I'm open to suggestions on a name for the currency other then credits. And we can change platnium to gold relatively easily. Just change names on a few files.

[Cynical Cat]

Whether its gold or platinum isn't really important. I definitely want to call the currency anything other than credits.

How high were we thinking for tech level?

[Cynical Cat]

Okay, screw up is my bad. I accidently edited instead of quoted/responded. The question is how advanced. There is a world of difference between Hyperion and Firefly.

[Destructionator XV]

OK, time to bring this back to life and get it running.

I am thinking rewriting the entire codebase might be a good idea. that will let us to everything we want and nothing we don't. My knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, and most recently Javascript has advanced greatly since I last looked at this game. I can certainly do much more now, so lets get the ideas started.

We want to design the game first, then write the code afterward. Last time, we took an existing codebase and slowly edited it to make what we wanted, and we were left with an incomplete, and messy program. I don't think even I know the database well enough to recreate it, and that is pathetic.

So: think what would be fun. We take it from there - with no limits (except of course for the technical limitations of it being browser based).

[Destructionator XV]

Here is what I have in mind for the game:

I want most of it to be based on player interaction. This leads to a more open ended game, and less work for us programmers.

This means only a few NPCs, who are doing the boring, monotonus infrastructure jobs.

Players get to do what they want. I would prefer player skill to be the factor of success, not mindless stat garnering, however some numeric stats will be needed.

For planning, I want to create units of time and everything must take place in whole positive multiles of this unit (the game will only updated once per unit). The unit will then be converted into RL time; something like 1 unit per 6 hours or whatever works best. I will refer as these time units as TUs from now on.

Some kind of location control is needed. That means someone far away from a real store can mark up his prices to make a profit, and real estate actually becomes valuable.

My plan for locations is as follows:

There are cities, connected by roads. Tolls will proably be needed to travel between cities. Travel will take 4 TUs per city or so.

Inside cities, you can move to different buildings. Travel time is dependent on where you are and where your location is on the city grid, but it will not exceed 4 TUs across the city.

A player may decide to camp on a road and rob you as you pass, but other than that, nothing happens during travel.

Once you are inside a building, you can move anywhere, one room at a time. The movement itself takes no time, but breaking locks or cracking computers or something like that might. Combat with guards or autoguns may happen in buildings.

Speaking of combat: the only combat would be PvP or maybe Pv random redshirt computer cop.

Preferably, it would be real time so you can enter commands, but I don't think that is feasable in this type of game. It will probably have to be automatic batch combat, where you would have your player preset to do things and it would all happen at once.

Example of preset options:

default: attack nearest foe
life drops below 25%: use medpak
life drops below 10%: run away

With those simple preset options set up, you can have some control over battle, but it would still be automated enough so you can fight a player even when he is AFK (which would happen more often then when he is online in a game like this).

Damage would be based on numeric stats. Here are the ones I figure they would have:

Life
To hit
Damage
Damage reduce

I am leaving out a evade stat because dodging bullets is absurd.

This would be done basically D&D style:

if (To hit + random between 1 and 20) - (random between 1 and 20) > 0
then
damage = (damage - damage reduce) and this of course cant be less than 0.

Then life = life - damage.

Rince, lather, repeat.


If a player dies, he may be robbed by his killer, then he will lose some cash to the computer and respawn at a random point, or his home of he has one (like his parent corporation's HQ).

Player activities:

When players meet, they can do various activites:

Buying and selling at will. Set items in the inventory for sale and set a max and min price. If the player AFK has nothing for sale, this does nothing.

Combat. If the AFK player has himself to run away automatically, he will try to flee. If he doesnt flee, they fight.

Dialog. This would happen in a message board so the players can actually talk. Of course, this means nothing happens except making posts while a player is AFK.

Here are other player activities:

Doing some lame repetative job to get money from the computer.

Mining raw materials and refining them to resell them.

Designing security for corps (floor plans, gun layouts, computer systems)

Building stuff.

Exploring empty land.

On the move Medics

Hired guns

Guards

Thieves

Forging documents

Hiring other players.




As you can see, I am being heavily influenced by Shadowrun here, however I don't want to take the Matrix to the levels they did. Some computer cracking is needed, but not to the extent of jacking in and all.

Tech level will be pretty well modern. Magnetic locks controlled by computers, padlocks, guns (pistols, shotguns, assualt rifles), the Internet, cars, etc.

In this world, there would be little or no government. Those people with the guns are the only de facto law. People are driven by greed and lust for power.

Any more thoughts?

[Ace Pace]

Sounds okey, but combat in any online game is very difficult to handle. If you want real combat, they must both be aware and be synced so that the screen refreshs.

Obviously thats a problem so most web based games sidestep with one sided action.

[Destructionator XV]

Yeah, that is why I am thinking about making players be able to put in some custom automation. Have a number of triggers and let the player preset some actions. He won't actually have to be there, but his character will still have some intellegence.

[Ace Pace]

Ah, yes, that works, to a point, lets take the Robbing scenario, if the player presets responses to everything, it can work, but some stuff obviously dosn't.

I'm of the opinion that webbased games cannot be real time or require simulatnious input. It just dosn't work unless you have people at the same timeframe online and visable only.