Sleepy Simon

I read a german hacker thriller a while back, called Sleepy Simon.

It had a pretty good plot, and I thought I'd post it here possibly as some inspiration for our own game ;)

Basically, heres the story:

Theres a teenage kid called Kai. His dad works as an internet security or sumfing, but he doesnt really like him, so he decided to start hacking…

Anyways, he managed to succesfully hack into a pharmacy company's network, a network which was said to be unhackable. To prove it to his hacker mates, he downloades a random file.

The next day, he keeps noticing wierd things, such as his computer suddenly being on when he had left it off and nobody else was home.

After a whole bunch of stuff including him running around at the mall with his friend, he realises he's being stalked. He goes to an iCafe, and tries to get some help from his hacking community. They tell him too leave them out of it, and that he should have stayed away from the network in the first place.

He meets a girl in the iCafe, n after saving him from being shot in the bathroom by the stalker, she takes him back to her house. After inspecting the file he downloaded, she realises why he's being stalked. Kai downloaded the test results of an experiment that was testing a cure for aids. On closer inspection, it explains how the test needed lots of people with enough aids, more than where quickly available. So they infected people with aids, to speed up their test. They would be pretty screwed if that got out to the public.

So, the two of them write a virus together, called Sleepy Simon. The virus is set to send the test results to every major news agency, unless set to sleep every couple hours by a master password. This ends up saving their life, as they are needed alive to prevent the data from being sent :p

Thats basically it for the hacking part, the last part is a little irrelevant for a hacking game.

If we do plan to have the game partly 3d first person, there are quite a few ideas that can be taken from the story. Otherwise, I hope it provided some good inspiration to get away from the cliche hacking story (company hires hacker and turns evil).

Well that made me want to buy the book rather than giving me ideas

ya i think it would be really cool like after an objective is accomplished a flash video plays that makes the transition from one objective to the next to make the game more fluent and fun. the flash's or whatever else is used would need to be pretty good so people good on graphics might want to think about this.(i am def. not a good graphics person so don't ask me to lol)

What may also be interesting is attempting to work with the Valve Source Engine, so the player can actually get up from the computer and walk around ;)

What as in an actual game on a CD. I though this was going to be a series of challenges.

mozzer wrote: What as in an actual game on a CD. I though this was going to be a series of challenges.

I thought that too :-/

BluMoose wrote: the player can actually get up from the computer and walk around ;)

It is a series of challenges, wouldn't be much of a hacker game otherwise would it :P I was thinking it might be interesting to have non-hacking missions (related to the plot) in which the person actually moves around. I realise this would be pretty hard tho :P

blumoose, read the conversation I had with mr_cheese which I pasted a link to in one post in this section. just open the other threads and ctrl-f for "ftp://"

It is a series of challenges, but that story sounds sweet, too bad we can't just copy it.

so what people want to do, they want to go with another story similar to "sleep Simon" or do they want to go with the paramacutical idea?

and bluemoose, we cant have a games engine etc, i for one cant code a game and i doubt many others have the programming experiance to code a fulyl functioning 3d exe game. so it'll be a series of challenges with a plot, honey pots, easter eggs, flash animation, mini video's to show what you do offline.. etc

so pick a story guys! if you want to go with the bio weapon story then let me know and i'll write everything up in finial so we have teh background + story ready. then we can work on charachter development and then finally get coding it!!