Just In Case: Context

Just In Case: Context

It's a simple society, in a complicated city:
There's police, and shopkeepers, they like each other.
and drug dealers, and street gangs - they get along
then there's wandering freaks - religious people - they need everybody and no one likes them,
big companies, and hackers - enemies except when they need each other
pick your place in that system and then duke it out!
It's a city. It's the future. You're dumped into this context with your own apartment and a cheap, old battered laptop. You figure it out.

That's the economics of it. What makes each of the street gangs different from the others is culture - how they dress, what language they speak, how they fight, and how they party. In the infosphere, things appear corporate, dry, technological. But between all the wires, there's a kind of freak religion.

Players enter the game after designing their own character, along the lines of any RPG that measures character abilities in terms of statistics.
See the example of Third Courier's character creation.

Just In Case

Just In Case is a first person urban cyberpunbk adventure game.

You play the protagonist, Case, a young man stranded in a large unfamiliar city. With a few tools, you've got to learn to hustle information, avoid or defeat thugs, and eventually hack your way into a place of power.

you create your characters background, which determine his relative strengths. These are articulated in RPG style, in numbers. As the game progresses and you exercise either your mind, your body, or your soul, you come to excel stastically at the according attributes.

You start in your home base, your apartment, in the lowest rent district of a large city. you have a laptop and a dead power supply. you gotta leave your apartment to score parts to keep yourself online. the city is filled with associates of urban decay, street uglies. As you come to vanquish them with ease you find that the real enemies grow increasingly official until you come to lead the street uglies whuppin' the tail of the man. Your directions come from odd post-millenial holy wo/men. Some of their heretical rantings are true, some are just a prelude to begging or combat. Between your computer and climbing up the street culture, you'll have to figure out which.

You play a protagonist (Case in the singleplayer), stranded in a large unfamiliar city. With a few tools, you've got to learn to hustle information, avoid or defeat thugs, and eventually hack your way into a place of power. Pick the streets and their gangs, or the ethernet above and the marauding cowboys.

It's a 21st century Young American Male Fantasy. Think films like The Matrix, Hackers.

Then think Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash - a virtual reality populated by sociaizing people where the samurai stands tall.

We'll meld these pop culture outgrowths into a online fulltime simulator, training for future info-warriors!

Much of the city in the game has a gritty feeling, like BladeRunner. Neon and rain and darkness. But it is a large city; some parts are hot and dry, some are sterile offices indoors.
The perspective here is first person, over the shoulder at best. You are the character, facing the world. You could use the game as a place to chat. You'll have to talk to people if you want to gain the edge that networking will get you. Or, you could just go back to your apartment, get online, and try to hack your way into the power of the other players.
Non Player Characters talk to your face - you will read their expressions as well as their words to decide whether to trust them or not. Most of the nonplayer characters are lively weirdos who will show you a new part of town you haven't seen or might promise to augment your powers in exchange for something of value.
Gameplay consist of either walking through the city, encountering people or visiting shops and bars, or gliding through ether space looking for fat databses to feed off of.
If you grow rich, you become a leader of a gang, or you could open a shop, a cafe, a bar. Use your resources to stimulate conversation or conduct a senseless war!

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