ctfgame/ideas.md

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