Communication / Gaming.
I was talking about it last night, an apparition, that’s what it was.
So, last night I was looking at the screenshot of Fallout Shelter, a mobile game that I’ve been playing for days and days and hours and hours – because I’m not going to put in a dime that I don’t have for boosts – and it just fell into my lap.
I can say – I have to say : I’m sorry.
well… okay, this is a totally shameful and outrageous act of piracy on my part. So be it.
My starting point is, of course, Fallout Shelter – the mobile gaming version of Bethesda’s AAA Fallout series. Let me explain.
If you don’t know the engine of Fallout Shelter: you enter a shelter – the very famous Vault-Tech shelter of the big license – with a few level 1 characters, each with a more developed ability than the others. Some are better in strength, others in luck, others in intelligence, others in agility and so on. Each ability allows your character to complete dedicated missions faster and better than another – and rooms “labeled” strength, agility etc… –
You start the game by building 4 rooms: a bedroom, an electricity room, a water room, a canteen – the entrance hall is already there. You start all that, realize that you need a minimum of characters to make the rooms work and you understand the trick of character abilities depending on the rooms – you realize that your characters can fall in love and it takes hours for them to get together, and a night for baby to appear.
It’s absolutely cute.
Since it’s Bethesda, your shelter and residents will be killed by monsters if you stay in the cute. And here you are in the Desolate Lands, looking for treasures for your shelter and your residents.
This one – built for wonderful loves stories :
From there, you are taken on quests, creating weapons, costumes, surveys, other shelters –
But: your quests will always – always – be the same.
You arrive in front of a building – whose rooms are dark. You enter – you fight – you will die or not. If you die you start again – if the enemies are too strong you go back to the shelter: 20 hours or .. maybe… a boost? – and you understand that it would be better to have a better weapon and better characters.
What will change will be the number of rooms, the organization of the puzzle course – and the difficulty of the enemies.
I know you now see where I’m going.
So, my favorite bone to gnaw on is the AA App for Altair, right?
An app that’s fun for the entertainment world, that’s the goal.
I turn around and wham.
I’ve got my two pieces to progress, in two D’s – my theatre – my shows / my shelter – my quests. It was so, so, obvious.
The theatre at the beginning will be a barn lost in the countryside. Your first show will be that of the children of the school. Something in that idea.
A room for energy : the lights – a room for microphones : the sound – a room for the chairs : the machinery – a canteen. These are my 4 starting rooms. The auditorium is “offered” and is only activated when you are ready. It is therefore black at the start.
Initially, you will be outdoors and your goal in each room is to be operational for your first show: do you have spotlights that work? microphones and speakers? enough chairs, trestles, boards? enough to eat and drink?
I need to think about a rest room – Shelter’s one is annoying and left me with a “not finished” impression. anyway –
Before running the show and having your splendid executive desk, the game graciously offers you a distant director, who distributes the work to you.
With a good rainfall, you will be motivated to fetch wood and create real ‘rooms’.
With a small fire, you will be motivated to improve your rooms and make them hard.
etc etc etc.
The quests will consist of collecting shows for your theatre.
Of course, these will be the current shows for Altair.
Damn it, the next guy who tries to sell me his commercials, I make him eat his phone, his laptop and the batteries with it.
You see the trick? This is the game that will advertise the upcoming shows.
( that’s where I got the idea : genius – not when I hack Fallout shelter.)
And it is with the different quests that I can achieve everything that has been going through my mind since I gnawed on that bone.
Quests need enemies and challenges.
So, keeping the principle of the puzzle quest – it’s all about thinking about what you’re going to confront the players with. For example, we could plan things like this:
> associate “strange” words with shows – in a series of 4/5 words, find the right one. You’ll have a choice: either chance, or start over – or go on the internet if there are any clues – there will be. If you don’t find it, you don’t move forward – and you don’t have the artists. So you’re going to move forward – make a mistake – miss the quest or continue it.
> I’m thinking of adding “French enemies” – in France too we have cowboys, but they are so much less sexy than the Americans. Ours, they don’t like anything. They are against everything. They hate everything. You kill them with your 5G, your antennas, your modernity, your coconut theatres – they are not very powerful enemies, but they are very, very numerous. So there will be the French cowboy : the only way to beat him is to beat him.
For enemies, we can do the realistic or the fantasy – I think the fantasy is more fun and potentially more variable. And it saves us from the whining of people who will feel targeted by the bad girl’s game, who would have been able to put as enemies: the accountant, the eco-hipster, the pathetic girls, the victims of everything, the administrative, the king of paper, the lawyer, the tax inspector, the dumb producer, the communicator, the banker, the junky, the shareholder, the engineer, the poster boy, the drunkards, the anti-alcohol league – no no they won’t be there.
Actually they will, but they will be hidden. Enhanced and hidden under other appearances – to stay in the fun and not fall into dark, almost personal revenge.
But since it’s a game, you have to stay in the spirit of the game and beat your enemies.
As I like games very much, it’s obviously a matter of at least killing them with a shovel. – yes – I love : Shovel Knight.
But… as I know that there are nice and too cute people who love theatre…. I thought of other ways : the flood of words and reasoning that will make even the most aggressive retreat. Besides, I retreat when I’m faced with that.
Or a flood of unicorns, hearts, pandas, kittens, overly cute emoticons that frolic around the enemies – and here I have: using emoticons that are useless on our phones.
So wait, the work is in progress….
How will my enemies fight against your continuous stream of unicorns, roses, weird hearts? With a vacuum cleaner of course – yes, I also enjoyed playing Luigi’s Mansion. Hop, get rid of the dirt.
At that point, you’ll have to take other weapons to win – in all games, it’s wise to start with more than one weapon.
Obviously, this will give characters more or less able to use these various means of combat: Intelligence (it kills me, but I have to be nice) for those who talk to say nothing; Love for those who flood with their hearts etc.
Of course I haven’t forgotten my great ghost game – you’re not going to die like that – you’re going to gradually disappear – reappear – but if you die – then you’ll become the Altair ghost n° 243454456 – or 7, 8, 9, 60 etc…
And since I have a childish mind – what does a ghost do when it arrives in a shelter that looks like a labyrinth?
… he makes a noise like: gnap gnap gnap and he throws himself on everything that moves.
So, if your shelter has not been well designed from a “maze” point of view, all your residents will be eaten – transformed into so many altair ghosts. Bad luck – it will take a few hours for everything to return to normal. Or there must be some strawberry baskets to buy somewhere to satisfy the ghost’s spirit and restore normalcy.
You see what this can do?
Hmm… maybe you want me to summarize?
You build your theatre with various specialized “rooms” – theatre-style, of course.
Your theatre aims to improve, to grow, to welcome more and more prestigious companies, more and more strange events, stronger and stronger links with different video games.
So you are going to improve your rooms.
To improve these rooms, you have to do quests.
These quests are designed to enhance the current programming of the Altair Theatre: you’ll have to pick up a team from the train station – find me the drummer who got lost in town – convince the Royal Ballet to come and give a performance etc etc etc…. quests that are as infinite as the programming.
There will be different levels of quests, of course – we start with the easy ones, to go from an old hangar to a really nice theatre.
The quests are either in “one shot” – or in chapters – there you can almost offer little stories.
These quests will pit you against a number of bad guys that you will have to beat.
Either you use – in a very classic and satisfying way – weapons and kill the bad guys.
Either you use the flood of speeches
Either you use the flood of emoticons.
All these quests will allow you to meet, in one way or another, the artists and professionals of the ‘quest show’ transformed for the occasion into characters of the game.
If you want to have a balanced theatre, with all these rooms at maximum, you will have to use these three means.
If – or when – your quest character dies, he turns into an Altair ghost. It is up to you to make sure that: your other quest characters manage to escape him / your other characters in your theatre too.
When you become a ghost, you have a time penalty – and you have to wait.
If you succeed in the quest, you get a few objects/characters that allow you to improve your theatre.
It’s almost ready.
There is one last thing missing from my new toy = The Quest called Share.
I’ll talk about that tomorrow – and also about how we’re going to use the overly cute selfies that the audience will have made.
The day after tomorrow, if I’m still alive, I’ll talk about the game during e.sport tournaments – and incidentally during the different festivals.
So okay: it’s not a new Facebook – okay, I don’t like those social networks, I can’t stand them.
All right, it’s pure play.
But frankly? it’s definitely more in Altair’s mind than a lambda app where you talk with your grandmother instead of going to see her in real life. Me ? I’m unpleasant, me ??? Only sometimes.
ALTAIR - Concepts 