Players will be able to scavenge for supplies with their iPad
Robert Bowling, former creative strategist of Infinity Ward and founder of Robotoki, has discussed the studio’s upcoming debut title The Human Element with GamesIndustry International.
The Human Element is a zombie survival game in which Bowling reports character creation will play a central role. Bowling described specifically how your company affects the game, “Are you an adult alone, which is inherently easier because you just worry about yourself; an adult with another adult, which has advantages but means you have to share supplies, or an adult with a young child – that translates to the hardest difficulty and adds a whole other layer to that survival mechanic.”
Bowling stressed that combat was not necessarily the focus in all possible playthroughs, explaining how more survival-based options were available, “When I was young [my survival plan] was very action oriented. I was fighting zombies, I was fighting other survivors – that’s what I was worried about. Then when I got older and had a kid…you think about survival very differently. You want to rebuild some resembelance of society. You want to avoid confrontation, build fortifications. That mentality lead to these design decsions.”
The Human Element will also feature cross platform play, incorporating tablet versions to augment the main version. Describing it’s uses, Bowling stated, “Say…you’re hurt and you need medical supplies. You don’t want to risk going out to forage in the game world…but you know that there’s a pharmacy four miles down the road in the real world. So you go out…you open up Human Element on your iPad. We’re overlaying the world of Human Element onto the Googlemaps API…taking your real world and merging it with your game world. So now you’re checking into places in the real world and you’re scavenging in those locations for supplies that are dynamic to those locations…You’re feeding those supplies back to your character in Human Element – these are not independent experiences, they’re additive to each other.”
The Human Element is currently in production primarily for next-gen consoles and PC, and is targeted for release in 2015.