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[matrix54]

"In a state of crisis, who is most important?"

It's late in the holiday season, and the President is scheduled to give a special year-end broadcast for the masses in the garden terrace of one of the city's many high rises. Citizens from all walks of life gather to listen to the President give his final year-end speech, relishing in the cheer of holidays and the upcoming new year. Amidst the excitement of event, a group of unknown terrorists managed to plant bombs in the tower, sending the civilians, and the higher ups, into a panic and injuring many. With the stairs having collapsed from the bombs, the only means of immediate rescue from the top floor, F40, is the elevator.

It's a balancing act between weight, capacity, biography, and prejudice as the player determines who deserves to make it to safety, and who has to meet their untimely end - all to answer one simple question: who's more important?

-~-

• Choose Between 5 weight levels, each of which requires you to prioritize different resources.
  
  
• Deal with a struggle of ethics-vs-mechanics, as you struggle to determine if you have enough resources to save as many as possible, or prioritize a select few of the game's 101 titles.
  
  
• Sort through randomly generated characters and make each decision count, or avoid the hassle and just save yourself. Or, sacrifice yourself for the greater good.

-~-

Tell me what you think and leave comments and questions below.




Here's a WIP shot of the game, in all its "glory."

[matrix54]

So, this is totally a concept of a thing. It even rotates all fancy like.

And updates:
Game:
-Base scoring has been added to the game, however, no grading has been implemented as of yet. While VERY easy to add in, that requires extensive testing before I start throwing letters around.

User Interface
-The "timer" now, visually, indicates weight via the use of color.
-Floor and overall weight now appear on screen.

-The UI scales dynamically.
-UI transparency can be scaled, where appropriate.

[matrix54]

I don't think anyone remembers this, but yeah, I'm still slugging away. Little by little.

I've reworked the who interface. I'm having some difficulty with conveying a lot of information at one time, as well as having it remain pleasing to the eye. It's mostly bland shades of grey with a touch of color used so it's not so boring. Having a lot of stuff to convey is a limited windows is proving to be quite the challenge.

[matrix54]

I had my friend test the game and she said it lacked challenge. So... time for another update:

Game:
-Looting, Inventory has been added to the game. Upon arriving at a floor, you'll be giving the option to search the floor for medicine, loot and spare parts.

The collection of money, I'm currently toying with having it effect score or using it to pawn off to terrorists (Yes, those exist) but it exists in both high and low values: cash and assets.

Spare parts are used to upgrade the elevator: It's speed will greatly increase, the option to skip a few floors at a time is available, an emergency drop (go to floor one) option is available (not yet implemented) and it's weight capacity is slightly increased, which is helpful on harder difficulties.

Some incoming riding will board with a variety of ailments and will require aid or care. Some riders are a little bruised, some are bleeding. Some of the women will be pregnant. Medicine is required to heal hurt patients, or they'll die. Dead bodies occupying the car must be removed (not yet implemented).

-Speaking of women... gender has been added to the game, to further push player bias. As in reality, most will be cis-gendered, while others are multi-gender, transgender or agender. There are rare, however.

User Interface
-The timer only has three colors now: Normal (Gray), Warning(Red) and Danger(Black).

[whtrbt]

So the aim is to reach the 40th floor, but you need to decide which people to take with you. Presumably some of these people can help you overcome difficulties you encounter on the way?

Have you considered psychological effects - people get pretty stressed out in elevators, even in non-emergency situations.

Can you explain a bit more about the gameplay loop - I'm guessing each floor plays out like a turn?

[matrix54]

You are correct - each floors essentially a turn. However, player can heal and check up on riders in between floors. Although, the goal is to gown down, not up.

When you arrive at a floor, you're "greeted" by a survivor. This person is randomly generated (with a few controls thrown in to clean up the generator). The player compares the incoming riders stats to that of others to see who's more valuable. The player is also able to throw off riders, if they wish.

Riders can be thrown off for a variety of reasons: Weight, health, occupation, age, gender or even a lack of space.

Players can also search the floor they're on for different kinds of equipment.

This goes on until the player reaches the ground floor. I'm still deciding on an appropriate ending.

Additionally, I've considered adding chance cards, when a special event is triggered while riding. I gave yet to start on that, however.

---

At the moment, no one helps anyway, but everyone is a potential liability - some more than others. I'm still working on who should do what and when, etc.

For mental/emotional ailments, I've considered hysteria as well as nausea and vertigo. Hysterical riders would be able to harm other riders.

Nausea and Vertigo would be mostly aesthetic and would have no effects that affect the game long term.

[matrix54]

I added more inventory mechanics:



Health:
There's a health bar above the career/gender/ailment icons. Simple: if someone hits 0, they die. They also occupy space I the elevator. All points are immediately taken away when a rider has died, so get rid of them.

Meds are a cure all. They immediately remove any ailment that the rider is suffering from (except pregnancy). The amount of health restored is tired directly to the difficulty level.

-To be added is loss of health from Ailments.

Flashlights:
I think this is fun: initially, you search through floors blind. You can't pick up much, but you bring things back. If you find a flashlight, you can see things in the dark. Not only is searching faster, it's more efficient and you can bring more stuff back (unless you play on very easy). The harder the game, the less you can search for initially. A flashlight increased this one tab.

Bombs:
You do NOT want to pick up bombs. :|
Bombs occupy an inventory space and it sits there. Forever. You're given a warning before hand, but if you're nuts, you take it. If you throw off a terrorist, they leave a bomb in the elevator.

-To be added: a way of removing terrorists without the inventory being plagued by bombs.

[matrix54]

So... updates.
Again.

And a demo!

Survivors:
-Text is clearer about how you're handing riders. instead of just Remove, you have Ask to leave[/B] for outgoing riders, Remove for dead bodies and Sacrifice to let yourself go.

-Bio's can now be seen for incoming survivors. It's a toggle on the side of the info bar for incoming survivors. Due keep in mind that bios haven't be finished, but have been started.

-Survivors now carry a "purse." Survivors of different career types have special inventory items that they bring forth with them. You're not forced to add these to the inventory, so you can ignore them if you wish.

-A recently incoming survivor who has been thrown off on the floor they came in from now has the option to be added again.

*a bug occurs where you're still allowed to heal the rider even though they've been thrown off.

-Difficulty changes the occurrence of which victims of ailments spawn. Very hard causes most everyone to have something wrong with them, so choose, and heal, accordingly!

Health:
-Survivors now take a health hit for each floor traveled when suffering from an ailment. Currently, all damage in the game, but I haven't added all of the ailments in, so a little here and there is fine for now. This can be cured with meds.

Remember: Meds heal in larger amount the higher your difficulty level, so change how you play accordingly!

Terrorism:
-Terrorists now forcibly allow themselves onto an elevator at any given time. Asking them to leave will either flood the inventory with bombs or they'll simply add one to the inventory. They must be killed or bribed (6 diamonds) in order to prevent this from happening.

*a bug occurs where asking them to leave wont make them leave on the floor they've come in from, but they leave bombs in the inventory each time you ask. This is due to recently added code...

-There's now a proper ending for dying from an explosion.




And here's something to do: Have fun.  

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12892601/F40_WebPlayer/F40_WebPlayer.html

It's not completely bug free, but if something's wrong, tell me.

[matrix54]

Another update (but not to them demo yet - I'll update that later).

Bugs:
-You can no longer heal thin air, or remove it from the elevator.
-Terrorists now leave when promoted without forcing themselves back in.

Pregnancy:
-A wrote some code wrong (a single number...) and that prevented pregnant women from spawning. Well... they do now! It's quite rare, but the odds inflate on harder difficulties.

-All women, regardless of their preferred gender(s), have the potential to be pregnant.

-Pregnant women now give birth.

Since the actual length of time you're in the building is unspecified, but I figured it'd be possible for some pregnant women to actually give birth. While quite doable, I AM NOT going to add pregnancy complications, like bleeding or death. That's a bit much for something so rare.

What you will get, however, is a cute little baby icon.

[Zenvalley]

Pretty neat concept. One question though, are you going to have tooltips for any of the items? or is the player supposed to discover what they are through using them. I played the demo briefly and had trouble understanding the items. Either way i cant wait to see more!

[matrix54]

Yep. All information about the various portions of the game will come with little blurbs of text about what they do. Since I'm still working on it, everything is being done piece by piece.