commit bd2e584fc8602753e6888cb88060b6bcb05a5592
Author: Michael Zhang <mail@mzhang.io>
Date:   Sun Aug 22 00:22:54 2021 -0500

    ideas

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+game is set in a near-future kinda society, with the primary difference being brain uploading technology is on the brink of being a reality
+
+## story outline
+
+game is mostly split up into:
+
+- prelude
+  
+  - this is basically the worldbuilding part, what does society look like in this reality?
+    - less digital freedom, more silos like facebook, google, apple, etc.
+    - are we a space civilization yet? that seems a bit _too_ out there...
+
+- start of brain uploading tech
+  
+  - tech is still in research phase, maybe some tech news and whatever twitter equivalent reports about it
+  - mc gets their hand on some of the tech early
+
+- brain uploading tech gets rolled out to consumers via startups
+  
+  - at this point, there are not yet able to scan the brain live, so the human has to die
+  - huge stakes since if the technology is unreliable that basically means ur dying instantly
+
+## questions / motifs
+
+- society perception on whether it's ok or not shifts as more people start doing it
+  
+  - initially people perceive it as very dangerous or unethical
+  - probably a lot of religious people against it
+  - when the payoffs start manifesting then much more people start doing it
+
+- also touch upon digital privacy
+  
+  - who runs the simulation and owns the brain banks?
+  - can they manipulate the brains on a higher
+
+## possible conflicts
+
+- corporate warfare?
+  - probably the easiest way to induce conflict, and also force the player to walk around and shit
+- foreign government with less human rights obtains / copies the technology, does evil shit
+- could brain uploading tech potentially give an upper hand in combat?
+
+## challenges ("the fun parts")
+
+- ctf problems
+  
+  - mc has a desktop at "home" and is able to connect to it remotely from laptop
+    - this virtual computer should be simulated by the game and players should be able to ssh into it and copy files out and shit. the near-future setting makes it easy to say "you can operate on these files with tools of today" since it's basically in a modern computer ecosystem
+  - hacking + forensics will be a large part of the game
+    - breaking weak crypto?
+    - bofs in firmware?
+      - are these things running linux? i sure as hell don't wanna roll a custom OS just for this shit but running an emulator also sounds ridiculously annoying
+
+- puzzles
+  
+  - the puzzles are kinda an afterthought, like substories in yakuza. i guess part of making people run around and stuff is for them to encounter these puzzles and idk if i wanna make this count towards any kind of real storyline ending
+  
+  - could just yoink puzzle formats from various puzzle games too 
+    
+    - minesweeper
+    - baba is you
+
+## renaming proper nouns?
+
+probably don't wanna get into some hot shit with real companies, etc, so ideally all these things should just be left as like `$country` or `$company` in the script so it's easy to change it later.
+
+also ideally collapse all the companies that are in the same market into a single company even tho it's less realistic cus fuck remembering like 50 new names
+
+- google-equivalent? some kind of mega tech corp that's basically like the go-to storage thing, thinking they offer services like drive, mail, vpn, and whatnot
+
+- 
+
+## other shit
+
+- romantic interest? i'm not the right person to write this kinda crap lol
+
+## references
+
+any links that i wanna keep