“Tech Support” (tentative/working title)
The player must navigate the world of his computer in order to destroy the malware that has taken hold of his beloved gaming rig. The game world itself will be a caricatured vision of various computer hardware components. The narrative is as follows:
“Our hero downloads a game torrent, only to find out the file was a trojan horse! His roommate, who is the Will Hunting of Computer Science, rigs together a system that will allow our hero to upload his consciousness into the computer in order to do battle with the malware without having to reformat and lose all of his files for class or his precious dank memes.”
The player’s role will be to run the various gauntlets of the infected and caricatured computer hardware in a quest to rid the computer of malware. As for the nature of the gameplay, the primary challenge will be in the form of environmental puzzles/platforming elements, with enemy agents representing the malware as a boss battle at the end of each instanced level. What we’re aiming to accomplish is somewhat of a novel experience given the timeline of the project and everyone’s schedules. We would like to incorporate keys, possibly currency, and other dynamic elements that will add reusability/replayability to the environments/assets we create. Currently, our vision for the game structure is instanced levels with a main HUB (being the motherboard – in terms of the game world) that has gateways to each level. Our hope is, by using a system where beating a level grants you a key and will allow you to unlock a gate to proceed to the next level, that we will be able to foster a sense of progression and accomplishment in the player. We will build the game in the C++ language with the Unreal 4 engine, and thus far our team has learned the basics of unreal 4 and enough C++ to get started.
Many of our ideas are up in the air so to speak until we get a better sense of what we’ll be able to finish by the final date, but we hope to have these aspects figured out by the mid-project update.
I think the concept and story of the game are great. I missed the initial pitch, so I am unsure if this is to be a two-dimensional or three-dimensional platform. I think enhancing the typical platforming mechanics with other objectives (e.g. keys and currency) would be pretty interesting.