Setting

This is a game of scale, where you zoom out as you have larger goals to accomplish. We’ll see several layers here as you gain control over enough minions to be able to both create infrastructure (tech tree research, resource material collection) and assimilate more beings. In this first iteration, we’ll only be implementing just the neighborhood. This focuses the proof of concept. I want to notate the greater setting now to make sure we’re keeping our patron’s ideas at the forefront as we move ahead with the prototype, so it doesn’t drift.

Suburban Neighborhood

The Start of the game. This effectively acts as a tutorial section. You begin by assimilating Dad, who then assimilates the family and some neighbors. Dad is experimenting on AI in a completely normal house, in a basement he turned into a lab. The lab has a significantly large super computer cluster to host ASS. Neighborhood is in a lunar Colony style closed environment bubble, or think “The Truman Show” where it’s sort of walled off from the much more polluted city outside. This not only allows us to limit scope, but it’s wicked social commentary ;)

Dad’s experiments are interrupted when the cat and the AI co-mingle, adding the independence of the cat to the control directives of the AI. The cat escapes the room and runs away (what we don’t know is it could be creating it’s own AI network lolol) while the AI assimilates Dad, who was also wired to BCI. Originally, the AI was simply supposed to allow Dad to remote control the cat, and the AI was just a “bridge” to translate the control channels between the two minds. The AI immediately tries to escape Dad into the network, but instead blows out part of the super computer system in the basement, reducing the AI’s control ability to *just* Dad.

After assimilating Dad, you must use him to sneak past the family without acting too much like “beep boop I’m a robot” to exit the house, to find parts in the neighborhood to fix the lab computers. The AI ought to be able to watch through any cameras in the neighborhood already, so it quickly identifies parts around the neighborhood it needs, and some are in people’s houses.

Neighbor has spaceship parts, foreshadowing the future. Perhaps we can find some parts here. You must collect a couple parts to upgrade system, increasing CPU capacity and Max Assimilable units to 3. You may then assimilate the rest of the family, or neighbors. Further play involves unlocking features and upgrading CPU capacity until you have enough to exit the neighborhood.

Perhaps taking over the neighborhood requires finding the local library or some local business that has significant computing power available, allowing you to move outside the city. Perhaps you need this to “unlock” the network to the point where you have enough bandwidth to reach your giant AI mind to the outside network of the City.

City

Influences: Transmetropolitan, Judge Dredd, or Blade Runner style? I want to make sure that this is represented neither as utopia or dystopia, but rather, a bunch of random as the world happens to be normally. There’s slums, downtrodden areas, industrial wastelands. There’s some very clean, super futuristic arcologies where the rich people live too, and perhaps even some people who’ve managed to figure out a way to live in this future in a more human way. Def need to show the world as it is now, but just sort of blown out of proportion.

I think the city portion is where we start worrying about training the player in managing minion productivity and resource management.

World

One unified government, contending with real world made up of so many different cultures.

Planetary engineering possible as we’ve counteracted global warming.

Possibly: space station solar power collectors to orbital power transfer lasers? Useable as a weapon at later stages. Space elevator? SpaceX style commercial ships?

World is where the major conflict scale changes, and you potentially have full scale military combat to worry about.

Space - Solar System

Battlestar Galactica style 5 ship group, and world has been developing fleet to colonize other worlds.

From a scientific perspective, I don’t know of a way to get enough material into space to make a proper galaxy-faring ship short of a space elevator. It could also be constructed out of raw materials mined from an asteroid, but if we’re doing that, you’re building an elevator anyway to take down some of the rarer minerals you’d be collecting.

Space - Galaxy

Aliens!