Bandwidth Membrane is a mystery game set within a computer. You are - or at least you were - Katie King, terminally ill transhumanist pioneer. Navigate your computer and steer the course of five short chapters. Explore forums and darkweb markets, delve into your files, talk to those that come to your doors. Your only hope of survival is the Bandwidth Membrane.
Check out a short video of starting the game:
I’ve been implementing the conversations currently. You have six different security camera feeds of the warehouse, and people can either wander by or ring the bell to catch your attention. I took a lot of inspiration from the Disco Elysium conversation system and have a stat point system that alters your chances of different tasks.
You have six different stats with the following descriptions:
- Fidelity - Convince others.
- Compute - Raw power.
- Storage - Remember who you are.
- Uplink - Quickly find knowledge.
- Cognition - Solve your problems.
- Defrag - Hold yourself together.
Here’s what the probability graph looks like for each difficulty. The Y-axis is the probability that a roll will succeed, and the X-axis is the stat point level between 0-20. It’s very linear right now; I should look for more of a falloff curve, I think.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t what this should look like… Thinking about what these success chances should be is interesting. You never want it to be absolutely guaranteed, perhaps excepting the Trivial case with like a full 20 stat. And it should be worthwhile to invest in a stat so you can beat Hard rolls on that stat.
And here’s what a conversation looks like (NodeCanvas is a great little Unity tool you should all check out).
