This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
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Notes -
I know that I will never make this RPG video game, but a man can dream, can't he? Literally, in this case. I know that people find it unbearably boring to listen to dreams of others, but I think it's somewhat interesting that for literally one and only time instead of mish-mash of randomness and neuroses I saw a fully formed RPG plot in a dream.
It would be a cyberpunk setting, the game itself in the style of the Shadowrun trilogy for the PC. Act 1 begins with the main character, a detective of a vestigial government or a corporate fixer, investigating a death of a middle-level corporate officer. Typical cyberpunk events ensue, mysterious hackers leave messages, heists are performed, the player character survives attempts on his life himself, etc. The climax of the first part is the revelation that the initial murder happened because the corporation was secretly developing an AI against whatever treaties and regulations still exist in the setting. Maybe the man was an attempted whistleblower, maybe it's the opposite and he was a key scientist, but that murder is irrelevant now, since it's all about stopping the project now. Act 2 would be combat-heavy, whatever forces marshalled fighting against the corporation's PMC, the corporation splintering among office politics and people on the player side turning coat, etc. The key plot development: it was not a singular rogue project, three corporations were in an AI arms race. Since the initial murder screwed everything for them, they abandon the secrecy and, in whatever states they currently are, erupt in incredible violence with a zero to hundred tempo of half a second.
Act 3 is the AI war. It's not the corporations fighting against each other using the AIs. Neither is it the AIs exterminating the humanity, that mounts a brave Resistance. The AIs are fighting among themselves, and pay as much attention to humans as humans paid to anthills during Vietnam. A tank brigade might be left alone, while a refugee camp gets leveled because it occupies a good staging ground. In all this chaos the main characters desperately tries to do something, find a shutdown button, or find a safe haven, or just survive for the day. And then he finds himself at the right place at the right time. Two men explain to him that the entire apocalypsis is their carefully orchestrated plan. That the AIs don't seek to destroy each other completely, but this is their way to credibly claim what share of the world each deserves. That they will soon negotiate to merge, and their something-something-technobabble preference matrices will be proportionate according to those martially determined shares. And the plan of those two men is to hijack the process with a microsecond precision, replacing the preference technobabble with the contents of their own minds instead of AI data. The problem is that it used to be three of them, but one died in the ensuing chaos. And they offer the position to the player. Who can agree, or backstab them and replace all three parts with himself, or decide to screw it all and let the AIs be the next step of evolution unimpeded. (As I write this I realize that the dead part of the trio could be the murder victim from the beginning, but that was not how it came to me originally.)
Does this sound like a serviceable plot? And more importantly, did I subconsciously plagiarize it from somewhere?
I think you might have incorporated a lot more Deus Ex 1 into your plot than you think. The ending choice is very similar and there are other similarities such as the 3 act structure, the loyalty twist where the main character discovers that their organization is evil and flips sides, etc. (also it features the wearing of trenchcoats and indoor sunglasses at night)
Deus Ex is a foundational cyberpunk property and if you're too young to have played it in 2000 it still holds up after you use a graphical overhaul mod on it.
It's hard to tell because of the graphics tech, but JC's and Paul Denton's eyes are supposed to be unnaturally (luminescently?) blue as a side-effect of their augmentations, not just an ordinary blue. The sunglasses aren't to keep moonlight out, they're to keep JC from looking inhumanly creepy when he interacts with the public. There's an in-game text about a similar problem with the "Men in Black" agents: "... we are still continuing our attempts to isolate the source of the albino traits present ever since the Series L, but so far the simple addition of sunglasses and dark clothing appear to have resolved the matter in a practical fashion..."
The trenchcoats are just because trenchcoats look cool.
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I think it sounds rad. Like an alternate-universe set of Metal Gear Solid sequels.
Little bit of Max Gladstone’s Three Parts Dead, too. Makes sense as it’s like cyberpunk but for necromancers.
Act III might be a bad fit for a game since it relies on taking away player agency, at least until the final decision. Visions of the Mass Effect “Reapers go away” buttons, except in that series, your character has always been making a difference. There’s a real risk of not just nihilism, but unfun nihilism. I remember almost dropping A Fire Upon the Deep, despite its amazing premises, because of how bleak it felt for the protagonists to run and run with no expectation of a turn. This kind of plot can be done, but it’s not trivial!
I can’t think of much mainstream fiction which handles that sort of AI race plot. Maybe Marathon approaches it on a very fantastical, seed-that-instantiates-the-AI level. Reminiscent of Hyperion Cantos, I guess.
For less mainstream stuff, uh.
I’d say these are all amazing on their own merits, but I have weird taste. For all I know you’ve already read half of them if you hang out on /r/rational. I also never read any of the Twilight or Madoka Magica rationalfics, which have a good chance of conspiratorial AI takeoff plots.
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