You work for a large multinational defense contractor.
You're in a foreign nation on a mission to collect intelligence on a competitor's infrastructure and research.
Legally speaking, you are not a citizen of any particular country. Even in your home you're merely classified as a "lawful permanent resident".
Your name has been forgotten by the system. Any associations you have are completely deniable. You are now known as "Eighty-Eight".
Your own livelihood and the livelihood of your team depends squarely on how well you can direct and how long you can remain invisible.
In ages past, you would be disavowed. Times have changed a bit. Espionage units no longer wait for something to happen before they disavow associating with you. You're cut off early, and you're cut of completely. If you can manage to survive and not crash to the ground in the ensuing chaos, you'll have the privilege of doing it all over again.
You are…
Q&A
via Skype logs
Will Kite be multiplayer?
Not immediately, but there are plans for it. It's not going to be any sort of MMO game, that much is for certain. However, I do plan co-op and/or sandbox competitive play. The former would involve special missions that would really require more than one person to pull off and I may or may not actually do it. The latter however is more appealing and can be better described as follows:
A random world is generated for a set number of players to play in. This multiplayer game is savable if you want to complete it later. In this mode, you all start from the bottom rung and work your way up, hunting your opponents. What will you do? Risk a high paying job that might allow your opponents to find you faster, or take smaller, lower paying jobs in hope of keeping a low profile as long as possible? Will you try to trick your opponent to take a job that's actually from you and ambush them? The choices are numerous.
I suppose the next question is going to be "why not have this on release?", so I'll answer that one now as well.
I've always believed that a game has to stand well on its own before multiplayer can be considered. There will be a lot of balance issues to be considered before Kite can reasonably be allowed to have a good multiplayer, and before that, any outstanding issues with the single-player game will need to be resolved first. Naturally we'll need to trawl the forums for complaints/praises/suggestions before we can call the episode finalized.
Will there be as scenario manager to choose which one we will want to do?
Yes and no. Some things will be mandatory and when those pop up, you won't have a lot of choice. I'm just going to say now that if you act like a saint too much that I'm going to force a fair amount of these on you. I hate people that act too good. I'm not saying go murder people. Just causally accept a bribe here and there or the game might kidnap your partner and force you to do stuff you didn't want to do.
Will the scenario start at an undefined time?
The main one, you mean? Oh, sure. You can choose when to advance it, unlike with Uplink/Onlink. However, if you leave it to fester for a while, it's only going to get harder. Don't want you over-preping and making it all boring. That would make me sad.
Will we have the game in our own language?
Maybe. I'm sure not going to do it, but there will be support for it if you can find someone willing to do translations or would like to do translations yourself. We'll be making a new LanLade specification to this end to see what everyone needs. I'll make a thread about it in the next few days.
Will there be any modding download platform?
There will be an in-game "store". Except that there's not really money involved. So I suppose it's better to call it a "catalogue".
Is there a way to filter the unofficials mods from the officials ones?
There will be some unreleased code to this effect that handles mod "signing". There will be four categories of release:
Official - Developed and released by an official developer
Signed - Signed mods that have been checked to make sure they don't have severe issues or cheats. Conflicts may still occur but there will be eventually a tool to find such conflicts. Only "Official" or "Signed" mods will be permitted in multiplayer games.
Beta - These mods are tagged as potentially risky, and you can enable them in the game after checking an "allow beta mods" box. Any mod submitted for review and not signed yet will show up here as well.
Unsigned - Everything else. Cheat mods, poorly maintained mods, mods that break official releases, etc. You can allow these at your own risk. Basically anything goes with these types of mods. There could be absolute shit or absolute gold.
Will there still be secrets all around in Kite like there where in Uplink?
Of course. It's no fun if I can't tease you guys.
Will we be able to build/buy property and move around the world? Will we be able to rent buildings?
You'll be required to do these things later in the game if you want to properly stage your missions, since your team needs to meet up somewhere.
I would also like to say that many mechanics aren't going to be fair for some of you. For example, you can't lead the cops to a safehouse and expect them to leave you be because you called "base". I always hated that about some games.
via Forum questions
Are you going to be continuing with the storyline from Onlink, or has that been scrapped?
Depends on which one you're talking about. If it's the virus one, it's not revisiting. There will be a history of a similar event for the sake of lore, but such a story isn't going to show up.
As for the sections regarding Musana and such… well it'll be there but it's heavily modified in the way that I wanted it in the first place but the Uplink engine was too limited to allow.
To what extent does Kite expand on Onlink? Is there going to be any familiar game mechanics such as InterNIC routing/log deleting?
I suppose. You'll be needed to do a fair amount of breaking and entering into systems, but as you'll soon find, it's much easier in some cases to do your homework before launching the mission proper. As you complete a mission, you'll be able to do actual hacking with much more ease.
Consider:
You break into a company LAN. These guys have a single connection going in and a very complex password on their mainframe. It's going to be a bad idea to flood external connections trying to break this. Instead, you should make an effort to slave computers already on the local network and make a soft cluster of computing power to do the task instead. Or you can get into the mail programs of computers already logged in and see if someone was negligent enough to store a password insecurely.
There will be several ways to complete a particular mission.
Are you going to consider releasing as an Indie game on Steam?
Eh. We'll see. We've had, historically, a generally negative experience with software publishers.
Are you going to make some client for running the game that will check for updates automatically and show us recent changes?
I would like to say "yes". Right now, I'm not sure. In the case of Mac OS X, there's this handy framework called Sparkle that does this exact thing, and quite seamlessly. If you know of a cross-platform auto-update framework, I would love to hear about it.
Otherwise you'll have to download manually. I'll still show the change log (and an actual change log!) in the form of an in-game "email" (probably something like "your firmware is currently out of date"), but I would really like a framework that can download in the background and allow you to keep playing until you're ready to quit.
Are we going to be able to build our own programs?
Ha. No. As the player character, one of two things (or both) is going to happen. Either you will be too stupid to make programs on your own or you won't have the resources (specifically the time) to build your own programs. What you will have, however, is a team which you can recruit more people to in order to find a better way to do <whatever task>. Additionally, you might run across code bases or precompiled binaries that can also give you an edge. One would boost your research progress for a time, one would instantly upgrade you beyond your current research, but not help the progress itself.
There's also a scripting function planed. For example, if you're looking to hack an entire floor's worth of computers, you can write a script that starts by attempting dictionary attacks on the computers to break in. If that fails, you can tell it to brute force and so on. In Onlink terms, this would be along the lines of "if ISM, then brute force password; else if CM then brute force password; find admin's voice in databank; playback voice" and so on.
Are we going to be able to steal some programs (not buy them)?
Sure! There will also be viruses that ruin your in-game system and spyware that allows your enemies to spy on you, so be careful about your sources.
Will the new storyline have dastardly hard-to-find secrets, such as that thing that looks like the Dharma Initiative symbol in Onlink?
You mean this thing?
I think Tycho asked that same question at one point, when I never watched Lost or cared about it. My response was something like so:
You see, I'm a terribly violent person. To Tycho. For you, anyway, I'll prove a bit of an explanation, since it's going to be
integral to the main story.
The symbols surrounding the center image are better called trigrams, which are integral to the Taoist philosophy and are used in the I Ching. They symbolize a variety of natural forces and potential forks of the future. In short, you're going to see a ton of this arrangement and over the course of the game you'll come to find its use within the story proper.
Are you going to make it Win7 64 bit compatible?
Sure. NetBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, whatever. Anything that supports Python and can compile C code will work just fine.