Scots Taffer on 29/4/2009 at 23:08

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Nah, Hitman series just plonked you down at the scene or two seconds from it and told you to get back to an escape point (which isn't really a feasible escape point a lot of the time if an entire place was on high alert following an assassination) and the casing/planning etc was always inmission. I'd prefer it if you could actually get a feel for a victim's habits etc. Of course, we're talking zany and crazy here because in general, that game would be fucking boring.

doctorfrog on 30/4/2009 at 05:08

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Here's a rough, half-baked one.

After watching Dark City not too long ago, I had an idea that it might make a good SimCity type game with a bit of urgency thrown into it. You play the head of the aliens, in charge of a large coin floating in space. Your ultimate goal is to 'solve' the human equation and infuse the concept of the human soul into your race to reinvigorate your society. To do this, you maintain your laboratory, like SimCity in many ways, except time plays an important part. Every 12 hours, all the citizens go to sleep, and you have a limited time to re-generate personalities, personal artifacts, and reconfigure the city in an effort to isolate the essence of humanity.

The human species is an evolving one, however, and like the movie, some persons will begin to get hints that something is off, throwing off your equations. The more pressure you put on the humans, the more likely this is to happen, so you have to balance the rate at which your race is dying with the research rate. Ultimately, too much pressure on the fragile humans will result in the generation of a John Murdock-like rogue, a serious threat to the stability of your experiment. You have to spend time and resources hunting him down, perhaps in a Scotland Yard-esque public transit chase (based roughly on the board game). If you fail to do so, the rogue will begin 'tuning' like you do, messing with the purity of your research and eventually start re-forming the city to suit his own needs. He may even begin claiming some inhabitants of the city for his own and growing a rogue colony, or rotate the entire business toward the sun, which quickly begins to kill off your people. Each rogue will have a small chance of simply going insane and and becoming less of a threat, but also one less human to experiment on. Or, he may become a serial murderer or bomber. Or wall himself up in a quarter of the city and surround himself with a moat.

Either way, you deal with limited time, resources, and the occasional uprising to creatively achieve your ends. I'm supposing that an ingenious, not-yet-thought-of method for reshaping the landscape will both provide an unpredictable challenge that will require your attention and also be fun. Something like collapsing all the layers of the Startopia station, retaining the flexibility of the biodeck, and having buildings with specific uses that can be morphed into and out of each other, with the need to either restructure the road and transit system, or the need to remain with their confines.

Gameplay bits/stages:
- overall look will be similar to SimCity, aerial view, variable zoom, but mostly a bird's eye look on things. Resource management screens may be necessary, but would be ideal to indicate resources needs on the map itself.
- how exactly the city works is still a mystery to me. Yep, the biggest part of the whole entire game is being put off for better days.
- building the city: a combination of SimCity and Dungeon Keeper/Startopia. The initial layout will be fairly normal, but will grow more twisted as you warp the buildings and inhabitants. This should present its own challenges.
- planning the city (optional): assess how the city is doing and plan for the next night. Instruct your minions (a limited labor pool) on what
- reforming the city: assess the needs of the experiment as they rise, and re-form the city and its inhabitants to push the experiment toward its end. Buildings rise, fall and twist, people change dramatically, and their psyches experience stress.
- chasing down a rogue. Different rogue types and strengths will pop up, depending on circumstances, not just randomness. They will do different things based on their most recent personality mixes and/or who they actually were. Sometimes annoying, sometimes really threatening, they can't be left alone as they disrupt the carefully adjusted lives of your test subjects and don't go to sleep like everyone else. Gameplay will be similar to the Scotland Yard board game.

Resources:
- energy and matter (to construct and alter the city). May not be necessary to represent.
- humans - the raw stuff of your experiment, which you alter in terms of social roles and personality types. Similar perhaps to 'minerals' in RTS games.
- memories - a pool of memories drawn from the humans that can be mixed and matched and scattered throughout the minds of the city.
- alien minions, which determine how much power you have to tune your city and mix and match memories for your humans. In some ways, a combination life meter/magic meter.
- time: every twelve hours, the humans sleep and the city can be refigured, or a rogue can be chased down. For a considerable penalty, whole-city sleep can be imposed at any time, but this should be discouraged.

Rather than being a sprawling, Civilization-style affair, this might be best suited as a 30-60-minute long game where you either succeed in decoding the human soul, become overrun by a colony of rogue humans able to tune, or fail on time and watch the remains of your kind begin to die.

Tonamel on 30/4/2009 at 07:16

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Are you suggesting that 11 years isn't over the statute of limitations for movie spoilers?

june gloom on 30/4/2009 at 07:53

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Especially since a director's cut came out last year that has renewed some interest in the film.

gunsmoke on 30/4/2009 at 14:47

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Have you played Blood Money?