Satellite Reign Dev Chat #2 Transcript

Transcript:

Chat starts at 00:34

Chris:	Um, so yeah, death.. character death.

Mitch: 	Yeah because people, people were very keen on the expendable nature of the agents.

Chris:	I don't want my agent to live forever, I want him to die. [laughter]

Mike:	Well this is because we've kind of said, you've got these.. we're kind of almost portraying it as a story line, carrying on of these characters throughout the game.

Mitch: Mm, yes.

Mike : And so that kind of gave the impression, if a character died you just... they're dead for the 	rest of the game or whatever, or they can't die

Dean: 	Or you would have to reload and go back and do everything you wanted.

Mitch:	Mission Failed, and a restart screen.

Mike: 	Yeah, well we're setting this in a world where you can... there is the technology there to 	implant brains from one person into another

Mitch: 	Well their consciousness, you wouldn't physically move their brain

Dean: 	DNA and their traits

Mitch: Battlestar Galactica is a good analogy. Where the Cylons upon death instantly just [wha] 	wake up in a vat of goo

Chris: 	They don't make that noise when they do it. [laughter]

Mitch:	 Some of them do!

Chris:	 Um, yeah, so we've, we're kinda weaving that into the story too. That the, the big CEO, he's made up this technology. Um, so that's why he's risen to power and his corporation is running everything. And all the people who are living on the top …

Mitch: 	upper tiers

Chris:	parts of society, they've all, they're all effectively kind of immortal. Because every time their body dies they can, um, you know, clone... clone that body or get a new body or whatever. 	But they can take their consciousness out and shove it into a new body

Mitch:	 And that's what the satellite network is kinda there for. That's how it happens instantaneously. I guess everyone sort of, might be …

Chris: 	hooked into the network

Mitch: 	Always connected to it. Always on connection.

Chris: 	So the organisation your agents are working for, the mysterious organisation. Have somehow gained control of this, and they've got, your four agents now have the ability to … When the body that dies out in the field, they can tap into it and the consciousness of that agent gets pulled out and shoved into a new body.

Dean:	 Yep

Chris: 	So you've got um..

Mitch: Sort of what makes your little start up organisation formidable, in that..

Chris: Everybody else is sending out soldiers and they're dying and they can't do anything. But your guys are able to go back and keep fighting them. And get better and better as they go along.

Dean:	The difference between obviously the corporation, they have all these resources and funds to do this and you're much more limited in that. So, like you'll actually be able to go into the populous, the general populous and harvest from them to do this stuff as well. And then, so instead of just vats of, you know, made up genetic...

Chris: Super soldiers.

Dean:	Super soldiers, that they just go through and go, oh, B-nine-seventeen now gets fed into this thing. You'll actually be going, oh there's ah, there's ah Mike over there [shink] I'm gonna take you and ah..

Chris:	Take his body.. and stick him in a vat.

Mitch: He has plus twelve to baldness. [laughter]

Mike: That’s always a useful stat.

Dean: That grew over time..

Chris: Yeah so, you’ll be able to capture people and civilians and as you play through, the uh, corporate soldiers or scientists or whoever you wanted to capture and take them back and you set them up in your, in your base, I guess. And each of those characters will have slightly varying stats. So the normal civilians will have, you know, maybe a bit of a boost to you know, their stamina or their firing ability or their damage or something like that, but it will only be a little bit. Um and your scientists, if you take them back, you can either use them as scientists to help research stuff or maybe you just want to shove them into a vat, and clone them and use them as your soldiers. And they’ll have, maybe a bigger boost for your tech skills or something like that.

Dean: Effectively traits that everyone can sort of balance against the classes we have, and you can go, oh this one’s actually got a really cool trait for this guy that i’ve got over here, and I’m going to put it on him.

Chris: So maybe, for example, the scientist. You take him and he’s got an extra 10% boost on all your technical skills. And you’re customising your hacker  to be really going down the hacking path, so you’ve upgraded those skills all the way. You make him the guy that you’re cloning for your hacker agent so you’re getting an extra boost on top of that.

Mike: I love the idea of you, you can actually just spend time just with your hacker out on the street. Just searching for people who are... Here’s a really exceptional..

Chris: Specimen..

Mike: Yeah, this ties into the whole RESISTOR level where you can put your own NPC into the game.

Mitch: Yeah, with your name.

Mike: So you can go out into the city. Find your self. Take yourself back to the cloning machine and then you’re one of the agents in the game. The only downside is if your stats are just horrendous. [laughter]

Brent: But on the other hand, you could find your friend in the world and just have them die grizzly deaths over and over again. [laughter]

Mike: So lets recap the death of an agent then. So you die on the field . All your memories, your consciousness has been uploaded so that can go back into a new clone.

Mitch: Which could be anyone. It could be a male or a female, it could be anything.

Mike: So you’ve got, we have this concept of there’s a deterioration of the stats with each re-cloning so that there is a slight penalty there.

Mitch : Because you’re making a copy of a copy of a copy.

Dean: Genetic degradation.

Chris: So effectively when you’re cloning, each time you clone one of the civilians or agents or soldier or whoever you are using to clone for your agents

Mitch: Each time you die you mean, and create a new clone.

Chris: Yeah, each time your agent dies out in the field and you need to clone a new body. It degradates the stats that you’ve got on it, back down to.. eventually it will level out to zero, so effectively you just get no bonus and then you might want to … if you’re getting civilians, you might only have 2 or 3 percent, and each time you clone it you’ll lose, maybe 1% bonus. And once you get down to zero, then obviously that becomes a stock standard meat sack. You can keep using it and stay at zero bonus but you can go out and find another

Mitch: Yeah it’s not that you get punished so much for dying over and over. It’s just that you, you don’t get the bonuses you would get otherwise

Dean: You’ll need to go out and harvest more

Chris:  Yeah, you’ll need to go out and find more bodies.

Dean: Not that we’re gonna have to stop people from doing that

Chris: Yeah I think people are going to capture as many bodies as they can.

Mike: I assume your stats are going up throughout the game anyway.

Mitch: Yeah

Chris: So there’s the two things. Ones the bonus thing you get from whatever meat, whatever meat you’ve taken off the streets. Whether it be a civilian or a corporation guy or whatever..

Mike: So thats the innate genetic skills and intelligence

Chris: So their genetic traits will give you some sort of little bonus, and then you’ve got your character traits that you’ve built up throughout the game. So that stuff doesn’t degrade, it’s just the civilians or soldiers or whatever. It’s just that stuff that will slightly degrade until it gets back to zero. And then you’ll find that meat bonus, that meat guy that you’ve got, he becomes useless and you’ve got to throw him away and you go out and get another guy to replace him.

Dean: And you might find someone of equal or better stats.

Chris: So yeah, if you go out and you find someone who has a much better base level stats for creating clones. You take him and go, well screw that other guy, he’s useless, we’ll throw him out and we’ve got this guy, and he’s awesome, and now... Well we do that, you might as well send your guy out and go, Alright I want to use this clone now. So I’m just gonna send my guy out and get him killed...

Mitch: Go out in a blaze of glory [laughter]

Chris: going ‘AHHH’.... just run into the middle of … run in front of a mech, punch it. [laughter]

Dean: There is nothing from stopping us from going out and going on a harvest run and going, hmm, I want to find some of you guys. You know going I’m going to get all those guys and just physically going back to your HQ, jacking in and getting it all like, effectively turn this one off, turn that one on, and now I’m upgraded

Chris: Well you can do that, but that’s a little bit boring. I prefer to go and punch a mech. [laughter]

Dean: Well we can have them scream in the chair like ‘Arrrgh!’..

Chris: Well I suppose you would lose all your weapons and stuff if you did that so maybe it would be better to just go back and save all that money. But punching a mech thats kinda what I want to do.

Mitch:  And the thing also is that when we say your clones degrading each time, it’s not going to get to the point where that clone actually just, your characters are no longer any good. It’s just those bonuses that degrade

Chris: So you’ll get a little bonus out of whatever person you’ve hijacked and that little buffer will drop back down.

Mitch: At worse case, you’ll just be back to your base stats

Chris: Or you could do what I plan on doing and just not die.

Mitch: Yeah, yeah you could do that.

Mike: Good luck with that

Dean: How’d you go with X-COM by the way?

Chris: [Indecisive sounds] I may have lost one or two people... or a few more … or everybody.

Mike: You’ve also got the other side, which is all the augmentations.They’re kind of left in the body so you’re able to go and pick up whatever remains that have survived whatever epic battle just happened. And, uh, you may be able to reuse some percentage of that to re-augment this new clone.

Mitch: Or to salvage it to get some cash back or something like that.

Chris: Well, we have the other idea too, about having insurance... insurance thing set up for your agents. So that you fill them up with all these augmentations and gear and stuff and rather than having to repay for all that stuff every time, you lose and agent on the field., you can pay a small amount for insurance. So that when your guy does die, your insurance company will pay for all that stuff for you. So you get 90% off the re-equipping your guy with everything he had previously. Um, and then the cool thing about that would be that... every time your character dies, your premium may go up and up and up and then you might need to get to... You’ll get to a point where its just ridiculously expensive, so you’ll need to go off and maybe find the insurance company somewhere in the world.. and hack into their system and wipe your slate clean so that you’ve got a … you know, zero rating on the insurance company...

Mike: I want to see that insurance claim form [laughter]

Dean: You’ll have to fill out a claim form in game..

Mitch: This is an accurate city simulation...

Dean: In triplicate..

Mike: Complete simulation

Chris: there is going to be a 45 minute, you know.. mini game to fill it out

Mitch: You’ll have to wait in line as well and hand it in.

Mike:  Its more like the fact that you’ve been killed in some epic gun battle for the seventh time

Chris: Really, again?

Dean: Do you smoke? [laughter]

11:08 - Class system

Mike: Okay, so we’ve got... we need to sort out this issue with the class system.

Dean: Clarify, because we haven’t really, really made a good job of explaining. So I think the term ‘Class’ in itself is probably a little bit misleading as well. Because that, that sounds quite rigid. It sounds like I can only be a fighter, sort of thing, and that’s it... All they can do is combat. Whereas, the way we were sort of talking about it before is that its more of a specialty of that class. I lean towards a certain aspect of gameplay, but I’m not confined to that aspect of game play. So, you know, the hacker obviously, the hacker... they’ve got the ability, they’ve got traits that will sort of push them towards being specialised in technical, manipulation and controlling the environment via hacking into systems and stuff like that. But that doesn’t limit them to a non combat oriented ...

Chris: It’s just the base starting, kinda level. So that you start off and you’ve got your soldier and he’s already heading towards the combat side of things, and the support guy is slightly down from that. The hacker and assassin are, you know it’s just the base of where they’re all starting from.

Mitch: They’re on different parts of the scale.

Chris: But it’s not, you’re an assassin so you can only go off and do it this way, and you’re a soldier so you can only go off and do it this way. They start at that and you customise them and gear up your guys to be, you know.. whichever way you want them to go.

Dean: Through skills, thorough augmentations, through weapons, through what traits that you grab from the populous that you go back and put into your clone when you’re putting them together. I mean, it’s actually going to be quite varied. I think the whole thing we want is just having this really open ended system where, okay this guy is geared towards this at a base, but we’re going to allow you to play with it. So what happens when you make a soldier guy actually way more defensive... you know what sort of systems will we come up for that. Or what happens when we make a hacker really aggressive, combat driven hacker. You know he’s just surrounded by drones with mini guns attached to them. Thats cool.

Chris: So instead of four mini guns you’ve got six or seven... There’s three drones hanging around behind this guy with mini guns and he’s got a mini gun as well.

Mitch: We don’t want people to get hung up on the fact that they’ve got different names. The agents have different names and they look different. That doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have four people who can hack the shit out of any system in the game and get into any facility... or could just blow the doors off any facility... or anything in between.

Brent: It’s like the A-Team you know. If you want a heavy hitter you put B. A. Baracus up the front. If you need something flown or fixed, you get Murdock in there to do it. But they can all stand on  their own when shit hits the fan and they turn a forklift into a helicopter.. they can all band together and get it done. [laughter]

Dean: Helicopter forklifts, make that happen.

Chris: Alright, that’s drone number two.

Mike: That sounds like drone number two and drone number three combined together.. [laughter]

Chris: Yeah, so start off with each of your guys will have their, the class system or specialties as we should probably start calling it instead of classes...

Mitch: Well it’s not that classes is wrong, I guess it’s just people have a preconceived idea of what a class means.

Dean: It implies, like I am only this sort of structure of like... if we say the class is a soldier, then I must be this really aggressive combat only guy. Well no, the soldier has a varied sort of amount of things he can do

Mitch: All of them do.

Dean: Yeah, all of them do, but its just for him specifically. It’s just based slightly more towards combat.

Brent: He has a natural proficiency in a certain field. And also there are unique abilities amongst them that only certain ones can do . But you get  a crossover with a lot of those things as well.

Chris: Yeah, so it’s not just you know, you’ve got a class and then you can kind of customise it slightly differently. It’s like you start with this specialisation and we have a few skills that we know that the player is going to have, so we can tailor the world to incorporate some of those things. And then from that, you go off in either direction so that the hacker has his hacking abilities and the same thing with the soldier... will straight away be able to handle big weapons and stuff like that. But if you wanted as you upgraded and customize your guys, you could take the, the um, hacker or assassin and move them over towards the combat side of things. So you can end up with all four guys running around with massive mini guns and stuff.

Mitch: And you’re going to be able to do that... There is all sorts of variety of ways you will be able to do that as well. Like it’s, it’ll be thought customising skills to give the hacker more drones or whatever that have mini guns on them. Or it could be through augmentations that would allow them to move faster or carry bigger weapons... that sort of thing.

Dean: Shielding systems, so that the hacker whose maybe a bit more squishy, can be heavily shielded...

Mitch: So he can still be able to take on people by himself or grouped with everyone else.

Brent: It’s probably a good example, the augmentations, because a mini gun for example, the soldier will be able to pick one up straight away and use it, but if you try and give it to a sniper he’ll need to be augmented up to the ability to move around as fast as the soldier would be. But he can still carry around, be a bit slower and less accurate.

Mike: I imagine at the start he’s going to be trailing, trailing along behind …

Chris: Dragging this massive gun

Mike: Wait for me … then he shoots and its just all over the place

Mitch: It’ll be like TF2 (Team Fortress 2) where the medic has to keep stopping and waiting for the heavy to catch up  [laughter]

Mike: and he’s shooting and the recoil is actually caving in his chest

Dean: Maybe one of the hackers ability is to get a gun and hack the gun and they can make that gun more powerful.

Chris: I really like the idea of him having, you know, the plasma or some sort of laser cannon-y type gun. Where if you give him some sort of upgrade where he can charge, supercharge... you know overclock his gun. So he can fire it at twice the power than the other guys can.

Dean: It gives us a lot more options than just a blank slate, you’re all just soldiers or one type of class. It’s just we get this real colourful , um sort of switch between classes that will allow us to play up different things in the game. And another thing to take, uh sort of point out as well is that, you know a game like Syndicate, it actually... it had quite a, how do I say it. It’s not as complex as the systems that we’re implying. So to put a simplistic system like you’re just four guys who are tanks in our game, probably wouldn’t necessarily work as well as the way we’re trying to do it. Where we have this layered, more complex system. It will have all of the same benefits I think that people got from that. I think,... to backtrack a bit, one of the things that people, and I know I liked about playing games like Syndicate is not so much that I had four agents, It’s that I had the feeling that I could take this, upgrade this powerful entity and get the feeling of being this almighty destructible force. We will still have that feeling. You will still be able to get that buzz of going  around and having carnage. Its just its not going to be handled necessarily in exactly the same way, but the end result will be...

Mitch: You’ll still get the same feeling from it.

Dean: Yeah, exactly.

Mitch:You’ll still get the same experience.

Chris: You’re still going to get that rush from annoying the crap out of people.

Dean: And that’s really what the gameplay is, but it’s not the specifics.  The gameplay, when you play games is like how did I feel, what do I remember about that, what was the buzz that I got and as long as we can capture that feeling and we don’t limit... Oh I feel weaker or I don’t really  feel like I can take on the man as well.. like I think, I think we’ll be able to do that.

Mitch: Yep.