Proposal

I believe I’ve received enough feedback and interest to move forward to the next step where I start to codify what I will be laying down and start to solicit help for the project.

The game will follow the path of your character immediately after you sign on as an independent contractor. While not being officially part of the military, you will be paid by the sector’s defense department at a level equivalent to your abilities and experience (you will not be promoted, but you will receive pay raises). You will start the game off with one of three (any maybe more) backgrounds as either ex-military (where you will receive a bonus to your defensive capabilities), former bounty hunter (providing a bonus to your attack), or a medic (giving you bonuses to your healing and related abilities).

A skill tree will be accessible for you to place a rank in each time you are promoted, however the highest rank(s) of the tree are available onto if you possess the proper background (i.e. you could only perform emergency surgery if you were a medic). In addition, if you perform an extraordinary task or have saved up enough money, you will be able to access training to gain a rank on your skill tree, though these occurrences will be rare or prohibitively expensive.

You will be paid on a weekly basis by the government so long as you have performed either general or weekly tasks. In addition you will be able to turn in effects collected from slain aliens at a bounty office (poison glands, harvested carapace, etc…) for rewards. The more dangerous the enemy the more you’ll receive for returning with a trophy. Furthermore there will be periodic optional missions you’ll be able to sign on to (some repeatable, some not) where you’ll be put into a dangerous situation and rewarded accordingly (not always financially).

All publically available equipment will be attainable from the beginning of the game though the higher the quality the higher the price. Certain extraordinary equipment (experimental or top secret) will only be gained by completing special missions. In addition to traditional armor and weaponry, you’ll be able to purchase genetic modifications to make you a more effective fighter, resist poisons, regenerate parts of your body, etc…. Your body may also be augmented to change its outward appearance for aesthetic reasons (altering your hair/eye/skin color, giving you scales, fangs, et al).

Fighting will be conducted with a turn-based system and will rely on a combination of your skills, aptitude and equipment. Having the best equipment won’t mean as much if you aren’t properly skilled in how to use it, but inherent abilities you have may balance out other deficiencies while you become accustomed to new or strange materiel. You will be able to hire another to aide you from a selection of NPC’s, though you will need to pay them periodically to retain their services.

The aliens themselves, depending upon their type and your (equivalent) rank, will be seeking to kill, corrupt, or capture you. For example: at low levels you may only be worth killing by a minor peon, but a strong enemy may see a chance to capture you and take you back to the hive, whereas at higher levels the minor peon will recognize that it can’t kill you and try to corrupt you instead while the strong enemy won’t take a chance that you can injure it and try to kill you rather than risk capture.

Corruption will be a straightforward process of the aliens trying to convert you to their cause while you try to resist their efforts (or not). You will usually be aware of any influences on your mind and be able to remove them if you want, though at a certain point you may become too corrupted to undo or resist the effects.

Being captured will entail an entirely different set of circumstances. You may be able to attempt escape prior to or after being taken to the hive, you may be fed to juvenile aliens, you may be experimented on, the aliens may attempt to integrate you into their hive, you may receive the full Kerrigan treatment (Star Craft reference), or any number of other events that will have multiple paths for you to escape, be corrupted, or die.

Becoming a member of the alien hive will have a number of different outcomes. If you are not obviously altered you may be able to return to the human camp and act as a mole, providing information, sabotaging, or assassinating as needed. You could also remain in the hive to be changed further and become a humanoid hybrid. You could be converted into an alien commander, leading and coordinating the alien forces, or be made into a hive king/queen, breeding successive generations of hybrids. You may also simply be molded into a drone and become one of the innumerable swarm destined to die in the war at the behest of your controllers.

I would like to set up additional planets to travel to where you could perform other tasks such as specialized training, relaxation, fighting rebelling governments, pursuing romantic relationships, etc… but that will be achieved only if the support is commensurate with the difficulty in implementation.

Now we come to the biggest hurdle: I cannot do this by myself. More specifically I cannot program a game that would entail all of these elements. I can write any and everything that would come up but I would need someone else to provide the framework of the game. I do not believe that what I am asking for is easy and would probably require a great deal of time to accomplish. To that end I would need someone willing to devote a great deal of their time to this game and would be willing to compensate for services rendered. Because this project would (financially) rely entirely on donations I can’t even begin to estimate what I would be able to afford, but I’m sure I could work something out regardless of the outcome.

I would need to secure the services of a programmer before I begin to solicit donations as I could not live up to my end of the bargain without one. If anyone would like to sign onto this project for an indeterminate time and unknown pay please PM or email me at my blog. I would caution you not to apply if you do not have experience with programming or do not have a good deal of free time coming up soon (Spring semester is ending soon and I doubt I’d have anything needed much before then).

Any feedback is welcome.