Cyber/GDD.md

The "GDD"

This is an organized collection of the brainstorms this game's design is based on.

Interface

• HUD
  • All HUD elements are represented in the 3D world
  • All players have helmets that have an inner and outer HUD
    • Inner HUD: what the player sees on their screen, like vitals, "tooltips" and subtitles, etc.
    • Outer HUD: what the player's visor looks like to the outside world
      • Smileys?
      • Customizable faces?

Game Mechanics

• First person, possibly shooter
• WASD+Space movement
• In-game world interactions
  • Opening doors, pressing buttons, etc.
• Inventory
  • A hologram in-game, player looks where the cursor points
• Minigames
  • Cooking, bartending, programming/hacking, driving

Assets

• Art style: low poly, bright, contrast, neon
• Procedural generation
  • World map consists of tiles.
  • Cities are the main points of interest
    • Cities are manually built with tools that use procedural generation to create structures.
      • Procedural generation should probably be based on human readable words, see the nice list of words by EFF.
    • NPCs are procedurally placed depending on the environment.

Lore

• Technology
  • Steam power wasn't a very big thing.
  • Electricity was discovered a lot earlier (as were transistors)
    • Common inputs and outputs: tactile buttons, beeps, synth voices, holograms
  • Matter can be transformed into energy and back, essentially real-world item hard drives.
    • Players can pay to have their stuff stored in the cloud, and this will happen when they die so they don't lose their stuff (but will still have to pay for the temporary storage).
  • The world consists mostly of androids (players are androids too)
    • When players die, they can pay to get a new shiny body or be revived in a broken junkyard body, and may later upgrade.
    • When players log out, they can leave their in-game bodies to do some NPC things (or just go to sleep).
    • Voice synth?
    • The androids' faces are displays (see Daft Punk) which can show emotions as smileys or maybe text?
    • Androids have their conciousnesses running in the cloud, but they are not controlled by external forces, because even though brains are emulated, they are not understood well enough to be controlled subtly.
• Political climate
  • Nation states have been deprecated.
  • One megacorp owns practically everything
    • Monitors everyone through connected tech.
    • Rebel groups try to make people aware and end the oppressive capitalist regime. Free chips vs legit chips? Some connection to FOSS?