Neofeud

[SilverSpook]

[embed=1020,630]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQAMJgs5euA[/embed]

Get Neofeud here:



If you have any issues with figuring out how to buy the game, or with playing the game, please let me know.  If you're interested in buying the game directly from me or with cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin, please contact me and we'll sort out a deal

Synopsis

2033 - We create AI. Sentient robots arrive, but not as our Terminator overlords or our Singularity saviors -- conscious machines are humanity's unwanted bastard children. A few are geniuses who design flying cars, beat cancer, invent teleportation, but millions of defective prototypes roll out of factories -- mentally challenged, motivationally-challenged, criminally-inclined. Legally conscious, but unhirable, these "Defectives" are shuffled through public housing and welfare assistance, straining the already overburdened back of the meager social safety net. The robots who don't end up in prison are dumped, as a last resort, into a massive landfill known as "The Pile".

Humans engage in perfection of their species -- or at least the powerful and well-connected -- genetically engineering children with human and animal DNA. The failed eugenics experiment "Frankenpeople" are discarded into "The Pile" as well. The new dynasties, 'Neofeudal Lords', live in towering neon glass castles, shuttle around in pristine nanotech-enabled pods, minds and bodies full of cyberware, spending most of their time taking selfies and "optimizing their monetization schemes". A race of supermen concerned only with their own status, their prestige, their success. Where machines have become all too flawed and human, people have become flawless, perfect, cold machines.

Karl Carbon is an ex-cop, dishonorably discharged from Coastlandia PD for disobeying an order to shoot an unarmed sentient humanoid. Karl is exiled to "The Pile" as a lowly social worker. There he counsels gangbanging foster-kid robots and confiscates chimera-children from deadbeat half-wolf parents. Till one day a case goes horribly sideways and Karl is drawn into a sordid conspiracy that could threaten the strained fabric of Human-Robot-Hybrid civilization -- or save it.

FEATURE TIME
- Tricky yet satisfying, point-n-click detective work, interspersed with action shootouts.
- Handpainted, uber-gritty, noir futureland. Makes Mad Max and Rick Deckard crap their pants.  1366x768 resolution for MASSIVE, fully realized backgrounds.
- Endless bombardment of witty one-liners from a veteran hardboiled cyberpunk writer.
- An original world and story that will (hopefully) make you question some of your core beliefs. Or at least my sanity.

Silver Spook Games

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[embed=1020,630]http://youtu.be/wVxUMWqIGIg[/embed]

[Darth Mandarb]

A tremendous amount of detail and very intriguing.

However... There is still only one in game screen shot!  Please add one more (as required by the rules) because I would really hate to have to lock this! !

[Gurok]

Wow! What an excellent concept! I saw some of your art in the C&C threads, but you were obviously saving the best for this thread. I look forward to playing the finished game!

P.S. Clovis Stanniston I reminds me of Jason Bateman.

[SilverSpook]

A tremendous amount of detail and very intriguing.

However... There is still only one in game screen shot!  Please add one more (as required by the rules) because I would really hate to have to lock this! !

Thank you kindly, sir!  Apologies- the second image is now an in-game screenshot.

Wow! What an excellent concept! I saw some of your art in the C&C threads, but you were obviously saving the best for this thread. I look forward to playing the finished game!

P.S. Clovis Stanniston I reminds me of Jason Bateman.

You are too kind!  And I look forward to finishing this game, however eventually. 

And a very keen eagle eye you have!  The character of Clovis is in fact modeled on an armature of Jason Bateman's "Michael Bluth" character from Arrested Development.  A mostly genuinely good, pants-wearing headpiece of a family dynasty, holding together the whimsical and immature little princes and drama 'queens'.

[Stupot]

Interesting stuff indeed. All the best bringing this to the table :-)

[Darth Mandarb]

thank you kindly, sir!  Apologies- the second image is now an in-game screenshot.

Thank you kindly. However... You still have only one "in game" screen shot (menu screens do not count as one of the two required screen shots).  You need to add one more, thanks!

[SilverSpook]

Ok, second screenshot added at the end of initial post.

[SilverSpook]

Another creamy slice of portraiture. Antoinette is a billionaire's daughter and beauty school dropout eagerly waiting for her chiseled prince to arrive and court her away. Until then, she engages in random and needless shoplifting at designer stores, iPad-filming herself in public, and binge-watching reality TV.

[Cassiebsg]

This is just lovely!
Love the way you did the hair.

[SilverSpook]

Thank you very much!  It was created in Art Rage with a Wacom Intuos after several experimental attempts at getting curly-ish hair.  THis one involved three or four layers of progressively narrower and lighter brush strokes.

[SilverSpook]

The Elysian suites of the Coch-Jobbs Stratoplex are an island of 21st century moneyed comfort amongst the sordid chaos of the 11th. With .50-cal-proof Saphira-glass windows, signature Steinway grand and security detail handpicked from the President's secret service, the discerning trillionaire can luxuriate and rest, assured.

(Work In Progress)

[Atavismus]

Unusual, intriguing, very interesting... ("added" on indiedb)
Good luck!
Btw, I already love Antoinette: she remembers me one of the "Filles du Feu" (Nerval).

[SilverSpook]

Apologies for failing to post here for several months.  Production took a long work/child rearing-related hiatus, but now:  Progress, progress, capital-p Progress on all fronts!

Silver Spook Games now has its own Facebook page! Welcome to the post-noughties, or the "teenies", or whatnot! Please Like! us, we need friends! Our therapists said so!

Apart from several cyberpunk-tastic new grimescapes, character designs, assorted gadgetophile gizmos (like Zippo-lighter flamethrowers and Nintendo Powerglove-style cyborg arms), we've added an illustrious mind-frakkingly talented new team member to the fight against the Illuminati game development.

Please welcome, Kiel Bryant! Our new, "resident pencilist", AKA concept designer. An award winning illustrator, designer, and writer who has worked with such august names as Dark Horse comics and the Aliens franchise. We're going full-fangirl here; it's like a birthday, Christmas, and a Neil Blomkamp premiere, all rolled into one!






Here we have Coastlandia Public Housing. Used to be mixed-income, mixed-species, gentrified real estate. Now it's a mixed-travesty. The Laissez Faire Market did its thing, Section 8 overflowed, now we have Section 9. A Third-World-quality ghetto for the millions of half-animal genespliced deadbeats and the battery-acid junkie robots who qualify for foodstamps and welfare. Welcome to Paradise.



CONTEST: Name all of the sci-fi / cyberpunk pop-cultural references in this pic and win a free shout out in the next news post + insider access to some of the latest top-secret Neofeud material! Just post in the comments

The smattering of the junked flying cars and decommissioned DoD mechs will serve as a major motif in Neofeud. A metaphor for the inevitable "luster-loss", the hype fading of the new hot tech, the "bohemia", becoming yesterday's canned PR presentation, and then appropriated as a pretense to Gentrify, and to Develop.

[Fitz]

Looking good, I like the color schemes and the art direction.

And that's a Delorean, isn't it? That was the first thing that struck me about the image, even before I got to the part about this being a little pop-culture quiz.

[SilverSpook]

Bingo, Fitz!  Nice catch.

[Darth Mandarb]

Is that the mysterious "red matter" from Star Trek (2009)?

[SilverSpook]

Good call!  Even I didn't recognize it until the artist explained the concept post-facto.

[SilverSpook]

Neofeud character sneak peekz!



Proto-J "Ninja" Connor.   Father was an A-list Hypetech scientist with a God-Complex, feckless disregard for Turing Police regulations, and fatherhood issues.   Conceived of a million lines of LISP, a bleeding-edge neuronet and graphene sheets "Prototype J" was possibly the first fully-sentient AI, born in a top-secret, polarized-window laboratory.  His "dad", a pasty ubernerd, spent more time sticking him with electrodes, running him through IQ tests, and playing Minecraft, than actually parenting. 

He was later confiscated by Hypetech, his creator indicted with "intellectual property embezzlement", then put through a thousand hyperscans and stress-tests, taken apart byte from carbon-fiber from actuator, like a piece of billion-dollar Lego.  The corporation then discarded Prototype-J into Coastlandia's Section 8 housing when they could no longer squeeze any more R&D out of him, and the Robot Rights activists came knocking. 

Shuffled through the foster-bot system, in and out of Toaster gangs, he later shortened it to "Proto-J", which he signed on ATM machines and police droids after bricking them, and also served as his MC-name during his brief, failed career as a robo-rap artist.

Having perp-walked the kid through Coastlandia PD in electrostatic cuffs multiple times, protragonist-cop Karl Carbon attributes many of his grey hairs to the boy droid, having developed simultaneous annoyance and paternal responsibility for Proto-J.  He taps the boy as an ear to the alter-human street, and later takes him on as a reluctant Robin to his Batman, when The Conspiratorial Plot starts going sideways. 

POLICE RECORD:
-3 counts petty theft
-1 count assaulting a human officer
-5 counts assaulting a mechanical humanoid officer
-1 count welfare fraud
-3 counts aggravated assault
-2 counts indecent disposal of sulfuric battery acid in a public space
-22 counts defacing public property

(Portrait is WIP!)

[AnasAbdin]

Cool concept would definitely love to see the final version.
Kinda reminds me of Farscape's Chiana too.

[SilverSpook]

A Song of ICEbreakers and Firewalls (Neofeud Recap, E01S01)

Citizens of Coastlandia, Silverspook Games bannermen...  I hate to be the three-eyed raven bearer of terrible news, but... My trusty indie-dev steed, my Windows 7 Dell Lattitude e5510 and possibly-maybe work laptop just went utter AWOL.  All the King's safemodes and all the King's BIOS settings, can't put Humpty together again... 

Presently trying with my Flashdrived Win 7 image to salvage whatever silos of PNG, javascript, and binary data, unspoilt by the contagion of bad sectors in my mortally wounded workstation...  But prognosis remains uncertain.  The maggots of poorly rolled-out Windows Update installs continue to fester, tearing registry setting from kernel, like crows feasting upon flesh of a corpse.



(Artists' rendering of Silver Spook's black-death-afflicted laptop.)

I have, however, at Wired and Larry Page's behest, "migrated to Cloud Country", to some extent.   I've ventured "Beyond The Wall(ed Garden)" of my PC.  I have a Google Drive backup zip from a week ago of the Neofeud edifice, including game logic, level matrices, spritework etc.  I also have most of the art offlined in a Thumb-vault, canted between my Bitcoin Wallet prepper-egg and my scanned W2 tax forms for the past decade.  I keep my Van Goghs, Hirsts, and K. Bryants (our virtuoso concept artist), all those invaluable pocket-retirement funds sealed up tight against the data looters and bit-rot zombies.



"Backup your brainchildren, gird your System Restore images, for 'format c:' Winter is Coming!!!"

Neofeud hath suffered a blow, not unlike the Wildlings with the death of ***** ******* in S01E01 of Game of Thrones that my wife and I just finished watching as a cheer-me-up.  A most hit-point-decimating magic missile-to-the-laptop.



  (Artist's rendering of me after 8 straight Rockstar-powered hours of Dell driver-questing, hacking away at SATA configs, and generally being my own geek squad.  Also an in-game screenshot of Neofeud.)

But Silverspook Games' Library of Alexandria survives!  the Arthurian Quest For the point-n-click holy grail, the epitome of Retro-Adventure Game Perfection continues on!  Neofeudalism prevails! 



(Artist's rendering of Neofeud Masthead (Seriously).  Manifested as a Commodore-64 arcade box, played by young John Connor in Terminator 2 circa 1988)

Now I return to my regularly scheduled Westeros heroin-withdrawal, until next Sunday (or next io9 or Gawker reviewer with questionable conscience auctions leaked episodes 5-8 to the highest Pirate Proxy bidder.)



(Screencap of Neofeud prevailing through the fire and flames of computer FUBAR.)  Three parallel versions of Win 7, valiant slaying of Win Update, and resurrection of a WD hard drive later, and I've since completely restored the laptop.  Thus we continue our ascent to the annals of adventure gaming glory.


P.S.: Fun fact!  Neofeud was in fact originally inspired by spin-off roleplays of the Game of Thrones world that Mrs. Spook and I nursed our addictions on, between episodes of GoT.  The concept was "Feudal real politiks in a cyberpunk setting".  Things have evolved, but the core concept remains.



(Original Neofeud box art)