Challenge 7 - First Strike

There are a lot of obvious choices for this one. My first thought was a game based on M.A.S.H., though outside the hospital, which would end up being pretty self-explanatory, but I think the funny would have outdone the paranoia.

So instead I am going to do this challenge about Battlestar Galactica, especially because Tom is taking the week off and this will seriously make him jealous.

The nice thing about Battlestar Galactica is the way the Cylon attacks are set up. Sometimes the Cylons attack the humans at random, sometimes in time-based patterns, and sometimes, after FTL Jumping to a different location, the humans simply bump into the Cylon fleet and are like "Oh... crap." This is the basis for the paranoia in the game.

In the game, it is your duty to control the Colonial Fleet on its quest to find Earth. You can select the entire fleet to move it around, but other ships have other uses as well. For example, Galactica, Vipers, and to an extent Colonial 1 are used for battle, while Refinery Ships are used to process tylium mined in asteroid fields by Raptors. There would also be on-foot missions where you control individual characters from the show, like Starbuck, Helo, Boomer/Athena, Apollo, Anders, and even Bill Adama. Individual units, much like ships, also have their own abilities, but as ground missions are more focused on completing immediate objectives rather than the general survival of the fleet, their abilities are focused accordingly.

I think in order to demonstrate the paranoia that comes from trying to outrun the Cylon fleet, I should make reference to the very first episode of the first season, simply entitled "33." In this episiode, the Cylon fleet attacks every 33 minutes, and as the fleet is overpowered and underarmed at this point, they have no choice but to switch on their FTL (Faster Than Light) drives and hope for the best, at which point the clock is reset. Though the game would probably be running faster than the assumed real-time events of the show (so let's say every 3 minutes and 30 seconds instead of 33 minutes), it would still induce the same kind of fear, like "Okay I need to process this much tylium in this amount of time before the Cylons attack... crap there they are! Crap I'm under attack! Crap my ships are getting destroyed! FTL! Crap I left 3 ships behind. They're dead now. Reset the clock." The goal of that specific level would be to simply survive until the Cylons stop attacking, meanwhile tensions run high throughout the fleet from all the jumping and your tylium deposits continue to drain quickly from all the jumping. Definitely not the friendliest of beginner levels.

I feel like this works simply because, in the show, the humans are already paranoid of how powerful the Cylons are. The Cylons have destroyed their civilization. The humans are not a species, they're a gang. They have to survive and are facing near-impossible odds of doing so, yet they choose to persevere in hopes of finding Earth. Bringing these feelings of paranoia and hope into the gameplay would be key to making this a successful game.