“Jupiter Project”
Single Player Mod for Unreal Tournament 2004
Design Draft
I know it's long but just bear with me please, if you aren't interested I'm not forcing you to read it...
Prologue type thing (some from Prey by Michael Crichton)---
2006 - The coming of the new millennium promised great increases in technology with the development of the new and the improvement of the old. Nanotechnology was no different. Unfortunately, these promises were only promises. Nanotechnology promised radical new manufacturing and assembly techniques with the manipulation of individual molecules or even atoms. When IBM moved around a few atoms to form the letters 'I', 'B' and 'M', this was seen as a great accomplishment. There is no denying it is, however the actual magnitude of the accomplishment is not as great as many thought at the time. It took considerable time and energy to move just one atom. The engineers were not spending years pushing and were not straining a nuclear reactor but the effort for just a few atoms was not practical. Actual nanotech applications would require the moving of hundreds of atoms in a rather short time frame. To do this, super small machines that could manipulate the atoms quickly and cheaply would have to be developed. These "assemblers" would have to be of the nanotech nature themselves and exist in massive swarms that could bring all the molecules of a nanomachine together in a very short time. The real problem is how to make the assemblers. Until now no one has really determined exactly how to do it. The obvious solution is a type of assembly line. The drawback with that is that the build time is proportional to the number of parts. The build time for a car can be measured in hours as there are only a few thousand parts. The complex molecules of the assemblers and other nanomachines can have up to several million parts. This challenge has not yet been overcome...publicly. The Corporation is a large, private organization not known for many things but has seemingly unlimited resources. All that is really known about it is that many specialists in nanotechnology have been asked to work at unknown laboratories all around the globe. You, an expert in the assembly process, are asked to come to their remote laboratory/factory. They say they have near working assembly lines, which is a huge breakthrough. Naturally you are excited to go, the proposed paycheck no doubt a part of your decision. The fact that the site is in a desert is a little disheartening but you feel that you can handle the heat. Things start to go downhill as soon as you are told to pack cold weather gear. "Sh*t happens" is the most accurate description of your short-lived career at the Corporation.
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It sort of violates eastgate2’s first two dos and don’ts but the year was picked well after the rest was created and the accident is a simple pipe malfunction, not something the engineers could really have avoided no matter how smart they are. For those of you who have read Michael Crichton’s Prey or have seen the movie 28 Days Later this will seem somewhat familiar as it was inspired by both (I had just seen 28 Days Later when I read Prey and thought- hey, this could be a really cool story if they were combined).
The accident results in people becoming "infected" with assemblers that starts to destroy their nervous systems and make them insane, non-pain feeling cannibalistic pseudo zombies. Your goal is to survive and escape.
One of the big things behind the story is morality, which we are trying to play off of as much as possible. We can’t have a love relationship, that just wouldn’t make too much sense so instead we are relying on morality to make the story intriguing. The player ends up being given three choices: save the research and escape, destroy the research and save as many people as possible, screw the research and people and look out for yourself. The subsequent missions are actually somewhat similar (you still go to the same places in the facility) but in different orders and have different goals and outcomes. Everything revolves around “playing god” more or less. There is a religious radical there (not just randomly, he actually has a reason for being there) who claims the whole project is sacrilegious and should be destroyed since no one has the right to create life-like systems which is what the technology would lead to. The lead tech on the other hand wants to save the research at all costs. You have to side with one of them or none if you want to. The name actually has to do with this; the engineer who named the project felt like he was playing god in a way and named it after the Roman god Jupiter.
There will be one opening and two closing cinematics. The closing one you see depends on which side you choose. Short scripted sequences to push the story along without disrupting gameplay too much are also planned.
The setting is an industrial facility/lab with adjacent dock and helipad way up north in an artic desert that is miles away from anything, access by helicopter or if the weather is good a boat. As far as mapping goes it will all be just a few big maps, a few inside and one outside. Our goal is to have very detailed, highly interactive maps. There won’t be any huge pauses in the action like in Unreal 2 (i.e. - there is no ship to return to and take five). Melee combat is the focus since this is a research facility after all and not a fortress. Ranged weapons will be present but ammo is very limited.
The development process will be bottom-up. We will start really small, putting some weapons in game, replacing some character models, etc… and make a couple mutators to test stuff. Then make small pieces of the levels and refine those. Eventually we will hopefully get to a point where we can integrate the story and cinematics in but that will not happen right away. The story is the most important part but it comes last in terms of actual implementation.
There are many more features that will be listed on the website when that is finished (a friend is working on it now, just have to give the rest of the info to put on it). I could go much more in depth with the cinematics and all the twists I've thrown into the plot designed to influence your decision in different ways but I don’t want to spoil the story. If you really are interested in being spoiled contact me (vandor77@yahoo.com) and I’ll give you the full spiel. We are not actually looking for anyone as of now so I suppose this really doesn’t belong here. It's more of a heads up to future recruitment. We are just working on getting some prototype models into the game. We will mainly need skinners and possibly mappers or coders once we reach those stages, especially the integration of the story. I want to keep the team rather small so that everything is consistent and we don’t have styles clashing. Thanks for reading all this if you did. I’d like to know what people think and what we can do to improve the story. Any other ideas are welcome too.
Single Player Mod for Unreal Tournament 2004
Design Draft
I know it's long but just bear with me please, if you aren't interested I'm not forcing you to read it...
Prologue type thing (some from Prey by Michael Crichton)---
2006 - The coming of the new millennium promised great increases in technology with the development of the new and the improvement of the old. Nanotechnology was no different. Unfortunately, these promises were only promises. Nanotechnology promised radical new manufacturing and assembly techniques with the manipulation of individual molecules or even atoms. When IBM moved around a few atoms to form the letters 'I', 'B' and 'M', this was seen as a great accomplishment. There is no denying it is, however the actual magnitude of the accomplishment is not as great as many thought at the time. It took considerable time and energy to move just one atom. The engineers were not spending years pushing and were not straining a nuclear reactor but the effort for just a few atoms was not practical. Actual nanotech applications would require the moving of hundreds of atoms in a rather short time frame. To do this, super small machines that could manipulate the atoms quickly and cheaply would have to be developed. These "assemblers" would have to be of the nanotech nature themselves and exist in massive swarms that could bring all the molecules of a nanomachine together in a very short time. The real problem is how to make the assemblers. Until now no one has really determined exactly how to do it. The obvious solution is a type of assembly line. The drawback with that is that the build time is proportional to the number of parts. The build time for a car can be measured in hours as there are only a few thousand parts. The complex molecules of the assemblers and other nanomachines can have up to several million parts. This challenge has not yet been overcome...publicly. The Corporation is a large, private organization not known for many things but has seemingly unlimited resources. All that is really known about it is that many specialists in nanotechnology have been asked to work at unknown laboratories all around the globe. You, an expert in the assembly process, are asked to come to their remote laboratory/factory. They say they have near working assembly lines, which is a huge breakthrough. Naturally you are excited to go, the proposed paycheck no doubt a part of your decision. The fact that the site is in a desert is a little disheartening but you feel that you can handle the heat. Things start to go downhill as soon as you are told to pack cold weather gear. "Sh*t happens" is the most accurate description of your short-lived career at the Corporation.
--------
It sort of violates eastgate2’s first two dos and don’ts but the year was picked well after the rest was created and the accident is a simple pipe malfunction, not something the engineers could really have avoided no matter how smart they are. For those of you who have read Michael Crichton’s Prey or have seen the movie 28 Days Later this will seem somewhat familiar as it was inspired by both (I had just seen 28 Days Later when I read Prey and thought- hey, this could be a really cool story if they were combined).
The accident results in people becoming "infected" with assemblers that starts to destroy their nervous systems and make them insane, non-pain feeling cannibalistic pseudo zombies. Your goal is to survive and escape.
One of the big things behind the story is morality, which we are trying to play off of as much as possible. We can’t have a love relationship, that just wouldn’t make too much sense so instead we are relying on morality to make the story intriguing. The player ends up being given three choices: save the research and escape, destroy the research and save as many people as possible, screw the research and people and look out for yourself. The subsequent missions are actually somewhat similar (you still go to the same places in the facility) but in different orders and have different goals and outcomes. Everything revolves around “playing god” more or less. There is a religious radical there (not just randomly, he actually has a reason for being there) who claims the whole project is sacrilegious and should be destroyed since no one has the right to create life-like systems which is what the technology would lead to. The lead tech on the other hand wants to save the research at all costs. You have to side with one of them or none if you want to. The name actually has to do with this; the engineer who named the project felt like he was playing god in a way and named it after the Roman god Jupiter.
There will be one opening and two closing cinematics. The closing one you see depends on which side you choose. Short scripted sequences to push the story along without disrupting gameplay too much are also planned.
The setting is an industrial facility/lab with adjacent dock and helipad way up north in an artic desert that is miles away from anything, access by helicopter or if the weather is good a boat. As far as mapping goes it will all be just a few big maps, a few inside and one outside. Our goal is to have very detailed, highly interactive maps. There won’t be any huge pauses in the action like in Unreal 2 (i.e. - there is no ship to return to and take five). Melee combat is the focus since this is a research facility after all and not a fortress. Ranged weapons will be present but ammo is very limited.
The development process will be bottom-up. We will start really small, putting some weapons in game, replacing some character models, etc… and make a couple mutators to test stuff. Then make small pieces of the levels and refine those. Eventually we will hopefully get to a point where we can integrate the story and cinematics in but that will not happen right away. The story is the most important part but it comes last in terms of actual implementation.
There are many more features that will be listed on the website when that is finished (a friend is working on it now, just have to give the rest of the info to put on it). I could go much more in depth with the cinematics and all the twists I've thrown into the plot designed to influence your decision in different ways but I don’t want to spoil the story. If you really are interested in being spoiled contact me (vandor77@yahoo.com) and I’ll give you the full spiel. We are not actually looking for anyone as of now so I suppose this really doesn’t belong here. It's more of a heads up to future recruitment. We are just working on getting some prototype models into the game. We will mainly need skinners and possibly mappers or coders once we reach those stages, especially the integration of the story. I want to keep the team rather small so that everything is consistent and we don’t have styles clashing. Thanks for reading all this if you did. I’d like to know what people think and what we can do to improve the story. Any other ideas are welcome too.
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