Mercwars

I told you to expect a post on the game I'm "conceptualising". That was Monday. I've been a little busy since then but I have time to give you the low down on the concept behind it. Throwing out concepts in front of the general public is like asking to have your ideas borrowed, plagiarised, appropriated and generally stolen. But if someone makes this game first, that just means I don't have to. So like I don't care that much. Besides it's not like it's fucking innovative. Not that I'm saying my intellectual property is fair game, just that I don't care enough about the risk of someone stealing the concept to not post it on my blog. Plus I have like, five readers or something. (According to my tracker I have none?! Which I'm pretty sure can't be true since Vess and Et both read the blog)

The idea is based on the simple premise of making a cyberpunk game in the style of magewars or utopia. I'm sure there are other similar online games but those are the two I know. (I'd give you a link for magewars only I hadn't checked it for a long time and it appears to be defunked now). These games are text based games, where you buy troops and build bases and then attack the bases of other people. You get a certain number of turns or money (depending on the system) over time, and while quite simple the game can be very addictive. Not to mention the nature of the game is such that it can be played by thousands of people all over the world. It can be accessed during your lunch break at school, or work or any time you have a spare few minutes. If you don't get a chance to play for a few days, then it's usually ok because your money or turns just rack up while you're away. You just better hope you haven't been attacked.

Basically the game is set in your standard cyberpunk world, corporations are the big boys now and the government doesn't feature much. There aren't really laws as we know them so the corporations can steal, sabotage, espionage, assassinate, pretty much whoever they want as long as they have the power to get away with it. And the way corporations generally do this is by outsourcing tasks to mercenary organisations, which is where you (the player) come in. You start the game as the leader of a small mercenary group having just secured your first corporate contract.

Being on the corporate payroll means earning money to defend a corporate location of strategic importance. Your pay is docked if you fail to defend your location but you also gain substantial bonuses for successful defence of your contract. In addition to defending your contract, you also recieve funds for successful attacks on enemy contracts. As you gain money and power you are entrusted with greater responsibility which also means more money. The aim of the game is to become the number one mercenary organisation in the city/world and stay top dog for as long as possible.

So that's the bare bones of the concept right there. There's lots of little details to fiddle with but I can't be arsed to go into them right now. Me and Ed are gonna use our holidays to work out the mechanics of the game and also to learn some programming so we can actually make it. If you know anything about programming feel free to chuck us a line we'd love some help. We'd love it all night long.