"Survive the Horror of the World of Tomorrow"
This page is a pitch document and contains major story spoilers.
 
What is this project?

This project is, to the best of my abilities, a love letter to the narrative genres which have captivated me ever since I became aware of their existence: Mystery, Horror and Science Fiction as well as the fascinations with the visual aesthetic of Retro-Futurism and captivating interactive genre of Open World Role-Playing games.

This is my personal interpretation of how I perceive these genres interacting with one another. Now the mere idea of me, a solo (as of this writing) indie developer, producing an open world role playing science fiction horror game, that is this heavily stylized, is a ludicrous and overambitious proposition which sets the bar out of reach for the limited resources I have to work with, both in terms of finances and lifespan. Thus I aim to create a game which feels like an open world title, rich in lore, yet is focuses solely on a single "Side Quest" which that player had supposedly taken on, and a single location of an abandoned mega-mart in the hypothetically larger open world within which it is but one of many.

Now even though it is only making the appearance or an open world game and only concentrates on a single side quest, I nevertheless aim to create the game's systems as if it were indeed an large open world game. This means a Real modular inventory system; Real Quest and Dialogue systems with functionality to assign, check and mark quests and tasks, grant items check for flags. Why? Well because you never know. In the worst case scenario, these systems I develop can be easily yanked out and ported into a different project of mine. And in the best case scenario, should this project gain traction, all the vital systems will have been programmed to be modular and scalable, allowing me to expand the game to a larger scope without having to reprogram the entire systems to allow so.

I'd also like to mention my source of inspiration: The Fallout series. I started my journey into the series with Fallout 3 and I immediately fell in love with the lonesome traveling, the spooky underground exploration, the fascinating tales of the wasteland inhabitants and the absolute depressing sight of a post apocalyptic America. As the matter of fact, it may have been my first exposure to the Post Apocalyptic setting my I had ever gotten invested in.

 
 
The Setting of the game:

This game takes place in a post-apocalyptic America, confined within the walls of a partially preserved and simultaneously decrepit post apocalyptic Mega Mart. A dormant kingdom and ultimately the tomb of a failed capitalist venture of a selfish Entrepreneur and Magnate - Raymond Fletcher. The failed Mega Mart is the towering behemoth built in the middle of nowhere, and serves as the only remaining footprint of Raymond's Legacy in this world. That and, of course his obsolete and long since forgotten typewriters. The player arrives at the location in search of a piece of hardware for a supposed larger quest. A component which had been emitting a steady signal, dispute having spent decades confined atop the Mega-Mart structure.

The Mission:
As the players gain entrance to the ghostly dormant hallways of the mega-mart, he is confronted by the derelict, half conscious and malfunctioning robot, named Alpha - who pleads the player to help him reach his evil counterpart - Omega, who had locked himself within the master office atop the mall tower. With a memory full of holes due to ages of tape decay, unable to recreate the whole picture, Alpha explains that Omega is plotting to take on some sort of "venture of a lifetime", which in turn will bring irreversible ruin upon Alpha and his family.

Alpha and Omega are in fact two brain scans of the same man - Raymond Fletcher, the owner of this derelict mega mall. And the two robots with their two brain scans are stuck replaying the back story of the two stages of Raymond's life. Stages before and after he had made his self-destructive choices driven by his egotistic nature. They are two versions of the same man with two different world views and values pinned against each other. The player is tasked to deliver Alpha, who is a consequence grief and depression ridden version of Raymond, to Omega, who is the self centered egotistic Raymond, in order to reason with him. Alpha and Omega both do not have the whole picture as due to the limited technology of the time, only the brightest characteristics of Raymond's personality could be captured at once. Hence why Alpha can only feel sadness, grief and hopelessness from the consequences of what Omega is about to do, and Omega can only feel raw fight and strife to reach his dream of greatness at all cost, unable to forsee the consequences of his actions. The goal is to reunite the two together in order to make them whole gain, thus allowing Raymond a chance to repent. Both robots believe they are living in the moment of Raymond's lifetime, before the war but elude any clues as to who they really are until the player reaches the confrontational climax of the story.

Raymond's Repentance is achieved by him choosing to sacrifice his newly reborn life, by giving up the radio emitting beacon for which the player had journeyed here to find in the first place. A beacon which had turned out to be an atomic heart which powered him all these decades.

The progression:

Upon accepting to help Alpha, the player begins their journey to the very top of the mall, unlocking section by section, slowly bringing the power back on and re-awakening the commercial behemoth. As they do so, the various security counter measures come back online with it, which, having been set to maximum security mode by Raymond, perceive the player to be an looting intruder and attack on sight. As the player progresses through the regions of the mall, the back story of Raymond, his worried daughter Annabelle, as well as the conniving, smooth-talking scammer by the name of Roy Sullivan, is told via the gradually revealing remnants of the mega-mart's global intercom system. These recordings cause strange physiological reactions in Alpha as he accompanies the player throughout the many levels of the mega-mart, like a toddler trying to piece together an incomplete puzzle. Recordings which play themselves back to the player at the various stages of their exploration, which tell the story that preceded the event of Raymond frantically locking himself within his now dead kingdom and blowing his brains out.

 
 
The Characters:

The theme of the story is: Those who fail to change, ensure their own peril. The theme also ties into the modern American problem of rampant and uncontrolled capitalistic situation - where if the country fails to change, the sattirical representation of the game's America will more likely to become reality than satire. The location within which the story takes place, gradually reveals, in a format of a Pseudo Radio Play, the back story, family affair and conflict between three key characters: Raymond Fletcher, his daughter, Anabelle Fletcher and Roy Sullivan.

Raymond Fletcher:
An egotistic, self centered magnate, born and raised in a remote town of [Server Disconnected], who, the day he's inherited his father's Mining operation, had immediately sold off all assets, which was the bread and butter of the town's economy, and went off pursuing his own entrepreneurial ventures, leaving his young daughter abandoned with the townfolk. his had had set in motion the slow and steady death of the town he'd been raised in.

Raymond did manage to build a relatively lucrative business from his Fletcher Typist series of typewriters. A feat which had granted him the ticket to the high life. Raymond got accustomed to the glamourous life of a magnate very quickly. The caviar and wine, the fame and recognition from his Fletcher brand and lucrative venues which the middle class could only dream of accessing were akin to a Drug for Raymond. He loved the attention. Raymond loved every second if it, but the wheel of progress and innovation and as the digital age had started rapidly replacing and in turn being replaced faster than the industry could settle, Raymond's typewriters turned to paperweight, before the all-mighty office computer terminal.

As quickly as Raymond's empire rose to power, it had crumbled before he could do anything about out. In presence of the behemoth which had risen and dwarfed Raymond's business, he had sold his assets before it could bring his total ruin, and with the remaining fortune in tow, Raymond was left forgotten.

Anabelle Duds (Fletcher):
Daughter of Raymond, dreams of nothing more than to live a quiet, peaceful and happy life with a whole family, yet finds herself recruited and immersed in her father's mini mall business, helping out with running the mall. Anabelle respects and lives by, and even preaches about family values, and thus she cannot find it in herself to leave her Father all by himself. Anabelle pleads with Raymond to leave this old dream of his and come live a safe, common and quiet life with her and her newlywed husband in the city. Every time Anabelle brings up the subject with her father, Roy finds a way to convince him to stay and keep going. Roy had even managed to guilt trip her into thinking that she would abandon her father if she had left.

Anabelle would have stayed too if the stress caused by the work at the mall as well as her worry about her father's mental health and future had finally resulted in her miscarrying a baby. Raymond proclaims that it was too early to have the baby anyways and that if he makes the mall work, life would be easy for her as well. Anabelle is confronted by her husband, pointing out that Raymond's blind to the harm he's bringing to the family and makes Anabelle confront the fact that if she kept going, she would never find peace and her father would drag her down into hell with his delusions.

Anabelle finds the strength to let go of her father entirely and leave the town with her husband without notice, right then and there, leaving Raymond behind. Anabelle, against her family values and principles, manages to let go of her father and his delusions, and at last attains the peace she had longed for.

Roy Sullivan:
A sleazy failure of a salesman who barely makes ends meet and lives out of his car. Roy finally gets a big break in his salesman career when he finds Raymond sulking in the wake of his typewriter business going belly up. After hearing him reminisce of the good old days when his home town boomed with life, Roy sells Raymond the idea of "selling the dream of good livin' to america" by rekindling that same feeling back into the town. To do so, he proposed building a landmark mega-mall, playing on his fond memories and nostalgia. Over some time, Roy continues to sell Raymond all kinds of useless upgrades and tech under the guise of it being the key to making his dream come to life. Roy milks Raymond for every penny he's got until Raymond has nothing left to be taken. Roy is greatly distrusted by Anabelle as she sees right through him like a book. Anabelle realizes his ploy and tries to convince her father to see the same, but every time ends up with Roy turning on his snakelike charms and convincing Raymonds by playing on his dream.

All the riches make Roy lose composure and he lets the news of a superhighway slip in front of Raymond. This reveals his true colors to Raymond and he gets severely assaulted. This gives Roy a ticket to wrapping withs whole scam with a nice bow and thus he serves Raymond with a hefty lawsuit. This ruins Raymond and Roy gets away with a hefty earning. Roy does not let go of the dream and attains everything he has ever wanted.

 
 
The Premise:

The game takes place in the world of post apocalyptic America. An unbelievably proud country with downright fanatically patriotic population, gutted and bled dry and fallen from grace as a once "land of opportunity". In this world, we get to experience an alternative America. One, ridden with rampant unhinged capitalism in it's most diseased and uncontrolled manifestation. We walk the rotting, crumbling corpse of a country which had fiercely climbed it's way to the financial and entrepreneurial top of the world and immediately lost control the moment the very foundation it was built upon had moved on to the next juicy economic power rising at the time - the communist countries of USSR and China.

Before the Nuclear Armageddons. The explosion of innovation and entrepreneurship gave rise to a new financial superpower - a corporation. In the capitalist breeding ground, business-men who relentlessly created and innovated, found success, and those who had already built their fortune during the war of the WW1 and 2 in the previous decade, had swelled into unstoppable corporate behemoths. In it's prime, America had no fear of openly meddling with the affairs of foreign communist countries, so long as it served it's agenda in keeping it's greatest enemy - communism, broken up and unable to grow. It's unceremonious interference, backed by it's amassed military, industrial and technologically innovative might from the world wars, had given reason for the major communist leaders of the world to join forces, in order to assure mutual protection from America.

In the meantime, as dictated by it's nature, a capitalist entity such as a corporate conglomerate, is only interested in one thing - growth of profit. So much so that it cared not of who or what it consumes in it's path to attaining that goal, be it an individual or an entire country. And thanks to the unhinged, uncontrolled capitalist breeding ground, which America had deep rooted and cultivated into it's very foundation, it became the womb which gave birth to corporate titans who's financial stature dwarfed that of most small countries. And hungry as they were, these titans continued to bleed and gut America of it's resources with greater gluttony and fewer repayments to America each passing year. Tax evasions, Legal Loopholes, Exploitation, Bribery and Death Threats. The corporate titan cared not for the country it operated in. It only saw resource and it only wished to grow and consume. America was but a juicy stake, and due to America losing it's industrial competitive edge to China, to which it had let the corporations offload all it's labor, American lost it's rank among the world economies, and lost it's grip over the corporate entities it had spawned. The corporations, seeking bigger profits and witnessing annually dwindling incentives of staying on US soil, had moved to China and USSR, the next rising economic superpowers spawned from their new found co-operation against US oppression.

Soon after the corporate titans had began pulling out their assets out of the now dying land of opportunity, the communist counterparts to US have ceased to perceive America as a threat to their prospect. So much so, that they even proposed and publicly contemplated it to be mere prey, weakened and free for the taking. It was this fearless public contemplation, which gave birth to the american nightmare, a threat to the american way, a looming presence of the ever encroaching Red Menace. Fear among the American people had spread like a decease, and America, unable to withstand the pressure by way of it's economical lacking, had revealed the final form of it's once majestic bald eagle, to be mo more than a cowering and defeated vulture. And thus, began the invasion. But how could this be, exclaimed the patriotic america? How could this proud and once all-mighty country fall so far from it's grandiose state? America could not accept this. America would not have this. America refused to be consumed by the very entities it had helped create. And the now crumbling and dying America, cornered and desperate, had responded to the invasion with all the might if it's final pitiful croak. And thus the world had plummeted into darkness from the mutually assured annihilation.

The America we knew had perished... the people that emerged from it's ashes were lost and broken. And among all the chaos and destruction... somehow.. the capitalist spirit - survived.

 
 
The Enemies, Obstacles and mechanics

The starting point for game-play, is a series of mixed and matched challenges and genres. Combinations of Action, Horror, Ambience mixed with Shooting or Puzzle solving / level, clever environment traversal solution elements.

Obstacles:

Locked Gates w/ access terminals:
The gates which block passage to new areas, controlled by access terminals which require key cards of various privilege levels. The terminals are separate pieces of equipment sporting a displaying that correlates which door it is responsible for opening. The terminals being separate, means that they can be placed in other areas besides next to the door it opens. So access terminals can require multiple keycards or can be openned with either of several keycards.

Enemies:

Turrets:
Automated machine gun or laser turret, mounted on a swivel, allowing the turret to be placed on walls, floors and ceiling. Can be toggled and re-targeted via terminals, if one is connected.

Robotic Footsoldier:
A basic mechanical foot solider class unit. They usually come in sizable platoon of a dozen or more, and are controlled by a Rover Centurion in the vicinity. If the Footsolider travels too far from it's controller rover, it loses connection and has a chance of either powering down or launching into a self destructing strut towards the player. This the player cannot

Rover Centurion:
A bulky portable mainframe outfitted with a sizable mini-gun / poisonous smokescreen for deterring close encounters. Both the minigun and the smokescreen have multiple vulnerability points, available to be shot from different angles. The minigun vulnerability only shows itself when the weapon overheats and exposes it's control circuit. The unit also sports a vent exhaust, into which the player can try tossing a grenade.

The Mannequin:
Among all the enemies classes, the most threatening ones are the animatronic mannequins. The mannequin is a nemesis type enemy. No more than one - tree of them can be present at once. Where most robots speak and vocalize their offensive maneuvers against the player, the mannequin approaches the player in silence and mild hum of it's servo motors. The mega-mart is filled with mannequins in just about every clothing store. All of the mannequins are animatronic, but only a small group of them can engage the player all at once. The color of their eyes determines the toughness and behavior patterns of the various mannequin severity levels. The mannequin is tied to the security system of the mega-mart and only comes into play when the player proves to be too much for the regular security measures. It is a reoccurring enemy type, often deployed when the player least expects it. It is personal nemesis of the player with seemingly adaptive capabilities. It will shield various vulnerable parts once the player starts repeatedly exploiting them, showing that it can learn and adapt to players strategies.