Prison break - An Non-violent Educational MMO?

[Picho]

Prison Break – one of the first Educational MMOs?

Prison break is designed to be an educational MMO with a dark method of teaching. First of all, its not an educational game about breaking out of prisons despite its name. The education is actually a collection of many many things.

The game starts off with your character in the lower security zone, you learn little things along the way, and begin a political exercise with the other inmate and guards. Eventually you work your way around, but are never able to escape out the front door.

Much like prince of Persia, the environment is the puzzle. You will have to work together with other inmates to get through the game. Unlike a real prison mind you, as you progress through the game, you gradually progress into higher secretly zones.

Also unlike an MMO, there is no real level systems, its all a matter of getting people to work together and learn how to best the puzzles. As time goes on, more puzzles appear in the game, everything from the rubix cube to math problems.

By talking to NPC’s you can pick up on things, everything from simple addition, to more complex formulas, even begin to learn a second, third or even forth language. Everything that can be taught via a computer system will attempt to be in a fun and exciting way as you try to make it further into the prison.

Originally there was supposed to be combat, which there still may be, but as of right now that is removed. The journal keeps track of everything that you learn so that you don’t need to write down things, but does allow the player to create their own journal entries.

The game is also designed in time zone fashion, in other words each time zone has their own set of servers. (even ones where hardly anyone lives) This is to allow you to log into any time zone whenever you want so that you can complete objectives that are needed to be done at certain times. The use of language primers and such are intended to allow players to communicate using romajii <sp> language, using English letters in a verbal pronunciation of words.

[GamePolitics]

Link?

Sounds interesting...

[Picho]

Unfortantly there is no link at this time.

As i get the production details compleated, hopefully i can unite some people to make such a game, even if it is greatly modified into more of a HL2 <or other engine> mod.

If anyone is intrested to help work on a game that is quite diffrent from others, shoot me a line please.

[KN]

So you're going to make it? Well, prepare to dish out 10.000 bucks to get a Source license. You don't just get it somewhere and tweak away at it, you hand Valve money, and basically any modifications you make are handed back to them to incorporate into the existing engine (they welcome that though). So you'd need some funding. Unless you happen to be lucky like Garry Newman, who just got the license if Valve got a 50% cut of the profit. I dunno if they'd make another exception like that, considering Gmod's popularity pretty much guaranteed the 20.000 sales Valve would need to get the 10.000 dollars back.

So, an MMO that isn't also an RPG? Valve is working on an MMO-FPS right now, so to get people hot for the idea of an MMO that doesn't involve epic gear, they might want to show people other games like it. Their resources could make your idea absolutely great. I dunno any other developer or publisher that would be interested in indie MMOs right off the bat, but that's probably because I play too much WoW.

I think I'd play this.

[Picho]

Oh no, the first versions of it, if a half-life mod would not be entirly for profit, but more of a way to get peoples taste buds wetten.

After all, if you say an educational game to most people they tend to shrival up and run away.

Since after all most Educational games tend to be happy fun time in play land with barny and barbie. So to create and Educational game that adults would like more, it would need to be darker, but still non-violent.

There were a set of 'educational' games out there before, called adventure games, Like kings quest. Not so dark, but it still was something darker then what you see now, since the player could still die often getting a humors message afterwards. Like if you fell down a stairs it would say something like "That was one small step, and one giant fall for Prince Alexander"

The last kings quest decided to cut out alot of the darker humor, and the lighter humor as well. Instead it foucused more on the violence and bloodshed, and turn out to be a total flop.

With valve, Portal somewhat inspires this idea of mine, as well as many other games. Did notknow that valve was making a MMO-fps, might need to look into that, since thats kinda what my other idea for a game is. (see stardust memories)