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