Datascape

The Goal

To inspire various emotions through its programs while exciting the player with the main run and giving them deeper meaning when exploring.


The GRID is a massive two-dimensional array, you move unit by unit. I wanted the player controller in the Grid to feel awkward as you snap through your rotation but smooth as you fly through units. The precision mode was initially the only movement mode, D-Pad corresponding to movement direction, before re-reading Neuromancer and being inspired by its descriptions of moving through it's imagined lattice-like internet. From that reading the throttle mode was born, I lowered the speed of precision drastically and created the throttle system as a general mode as you move from one ICE to the next.


To activate throttle mode you hold a button, similar to running in most FPS games, which then locks you into forward/backward movement. Then you can throttle your desired speed, similar to a plane, and coast along the GRID.

    An exercise in
  • Level Scripting
  • Unique 3D player controllers
  • Emotional 3D environmental building
  • Unreal Engine
Video Analysis

Hacking

I needed some sort of hacking system in the game but wanted it to be quite simple. Something anyone could grasp quickly by looking at the screen and reading a bit of text. I took the cyberpunk terms of ICE, ICEbreaker, picks and ran with that. I decided to call the skills, functions and have the player overwhelm the ICE's defender with picks.

I didn't want it to be very difficult as the games primary time should be spent within various programs.

The colors picked were deliberately chosen to help the player identify what is going on. A pick in bright orange, means that pick is the defenders target. A taunt pick glows yellow when it captures the defenders attention. And the picks pulse cyan when haywire is currently active. The choice of using orange and yellow was because they are close to one another on the color wheel, indicating that color spectrum means the defenders is targetting those picks. And all the colors also contrast with the Grid's green color.

Balancing of the ICE's difficulty was important in progress and the structing a path for the player. I wished for the player to be able to quite easily tunnel into the weakest ICE, which is pink. But begin to get difficult one step high, requiring them to look for some other functions to help them or take a long time to tunnel.

I built out a spreadsheet that you can see here.

Hacking Balance Google Sheet

I had many different variables I could tweak to adjust the difficulty of overall / specific ICEs. I began hacking each ICE with a mix of the 3 base functions and the 3 functions you can find in the world and seeing how long it took and how precise it was. There's no doubt the hacking in this game is very brute force, but that's how I wanted it. There's a few techniques that you can pull by using combinations like KMGE->taunt->haywire->taunt and so on but that tech wasn't very necessary. More so the importance was how much time you were willing to invest in breaking one ICE and how many functions you have.