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The Future. Benevolent God-AI runs the world? League of Evil Asshole Masterminds manages the clockwork Earth from the shadows?
Nope. Just a lot of buggy paramilitary drones blowing up schools, incompetent elite wrecking the planet with endless financial crises, and mass unemployment as robots shove workers out of offices and into endless breadlines run out of bread in bankrupt states. Yeah, it's a mess.
There's a Tahrir Square, an Occupy Revolution every day as robots replace 60% of humans in the workplace and crushing austerity measures create unresolvable social unrest and upheaval. Countless popular and revolutionary movements have sprung up across the planet -- from grass-roots resistances like World Class War to Humanitarian NGOs like Fenix foundation to armed-insurgents like the Washingtonians. But as New York, London, and Tokyo crumble into Detroit-like necropolises scarred by class warfare between jobless insurgents and robotic riot-soldiers, trillionaires bunker into the "Pluto-claves" -- private cities run by AI and defended by fleets of autonomous drones armed with gatling railguns and tactical nukes. The Archangels' smartbombs wipe a dozen Occupy Movement-saturated blocks off the Manhattan map, daily. The class war is stacked against the 99% as the kleptocrats have holed up behind a dozen feet of steel and Skynet armies that make the Pentagon look like a posse of peashooters.
But as veteran hackers will tell you -- no security perimeter is fully impermeable. Machines run the world, but no machine is foolproof. There's always a back door, a security hole.
Take on the role of an operative in the Hex Gen network, a decentralized movement of hacktivists resisting the economic pillaging conducted by the unholy alliances of Big Tech, Big Military, and Big Finance. United over a loose constellation of ad-hoc mesh-internets, Hex Gen (AKA Generation Hex) are a new class of freedom fighter. Though necessarily shrouded in secrecy, Hex Gen thus far is the only group to have carried out successful attacks against the Plutos. They've dealt crippling DDoS attacks to crooked corporations, tanked corrupt investment banks with electronic financial manipulation and successfully taken control of drones and androids in the armies of CyberSec -- the leading "counter-insurgency" military/law enforcement contractor. Still, some believe Hex Gen is just a gang of criminals and thieves in it for their own profit. Perhaps time will tell.
Ubiquitous 3D fabrication means everything from smartphones to TVs to cars can be printed in your living room. The Marxist Egalitarians have declared the Age of Abundance -- except the Copyright Cartels have bought ownership to not only every mp3, movie, and book ever written, but also the "fabprints" to every physical object as well, and won't hesitate to have a Predator drop a hellfire missile on your home if you're caught pirating a Honda Civic. Oh, and Big Agro also owns every species of plague-resistant food crop in the plant and animal kingdoms. Starvation, they say, is the ultimate motivator.
The superhighway to the Future is leading toward a sixteen car pileup, and no one's behind the wheel but idiotic megalomaniacs making their Golden Parachutes as Rome burns and crap software hacked together by low-paid Chinese sweatshops. Fasten your seatbelt.
Will you join the code warriors, the Info-Pirates and rip the global kingpins a new one with your wits and technological know-how, or will you become a Made Man with the white-shoe Monopolists, live it large in orbital villas far away from the artificial famines below?
Features:
* Facial, vocal biometric capture devices
* "Nohface" electronic face projector for thwarting surveillance/drones which cover almost every inch of city
* Wireless internet-Darknets: all web activity is fully surveilled, thus you need stealth not only in meatspace but in cyberspace
* More types of hacking: cryptography, DDoS, spoofing.
* Write your own malware, unleash it on the internet to infect machines to create your own botnet army.
* Hunger: experience real economic destitution as you slowly die of starvation and are forced to beg, steal, or even kill for a piece of bread.
* DIY: Upgrade your hemp trenchcoat with solar trim, syphon electricity from the private power grid.
* Mechanical hacking: Take apart old phones and radios to hack together an EMP gun, reverse engineer a captured police-state drone into your own personal bodyguard.
* Nature Punk: set up a hydroponic garden in your squatted flat so you don't have to kill for every meal.
* Biohacking: play God with your own DNA to give yourself bone-hammer knuckles, bat-like sonar, or cheetah-like musculoskeletal structure. Just be careful not to turn yourself into Frankenstein or give yourself an artificial cancer!
I'm right now a one man army here working two other jobs, so if you can spare some help or a donation to help me focus on this mod it would be hugely appreciated!

17 comments by SilverSpook on Apr 21st, 2013
Update 5/9 - Voice acting for seven small parts (one female) still needed. If all of these parts can be completed before June then the mod may see an early release! Please comment/message if you can help with voice acting, thanks. No prior experience required for these parts.
Good news, supporters! I’ve got my biohacked vision trained on a Terminus Machina beta release
by this June!
The bug extermination squad continues putting dissident snaggles of code out of their misery, and the result is the near-present dystopia has shown a 50% increase in dystopicness this quarter! Extra thanks to all the hard work testers have put in, with extra kudos to redrich and Dentonoid who have taken the lead with gametesting.
In order to get the game out by the June deadline, I will have to call on the community to get a swath of tertiary and a few larger-role voices cast. So if anyone at all, or anyone you know might be able donate a bit of time in front of their mic of any quality, then I would sure appreciate it, and so would everyone who wants to play this thing. Message me / comment if interested in voice acting.
For your econopocalyptic viewing pleasure, I present the Terminus Machina introductory cinematic, which should throw you head-first into the genetically warped sludge-lake of the Terminus Machina world.
WARNING: Not for the faint of heart or the willfully ignorant of mind. Contains scenes of extreme reality.
And here's a freshly redesigned logo for the Hex Gen hacktivist group. Hopefully capturing the peer-2-peer, decentralized, populist nature of the movement.
Honestly, I can see the starvation system getting REALLY annoying very quickly.
Overall concept seems pretty solid though. Cyberpunk revolt against the 1% and their SkyNet army! What's not to like? Getting a rather tongue-in-cheek feel from the whole thing. :P
Awesome concept with the biomods as well. Transhumanism (as well as cyberpunk, natch) is always a fun genre, and one that I'm happy to see more of.
Geeze, the mod is a little rough around the edges but this still looks bloody amazing.
I'll watch it, for now.
This mod looks great as it is. The additions like the crafting and hacking sections look fantastic and seem like they will be a joy to play with! I can't wait until I can get my hands on this mod!
Thanks! I'm planning for some time in January. Just trying to finish up the first major area and make sure that everything is working enough for players to get a taste of all the new features.
Can't wait!
looks awesome
I love the despised-masses-on-the-treadmills screenshot...tragically, the heart of this scene is absolutely true TODAY!
Brilliant, and I don't mind the almost humorous approach that you're taking in this scenario.
I'm REALLY looking forward to this mod's release.
Are you planning on having drones patrolling the skies, such as what we already have? Only, of course, they'd be more numerous and sophisticated in your mod's timeline.
Also, are you planning on implementing ironsights into your mod? I think that would go a long way to deepen the sense of immersion.
Keep up the great work. That screenshot was a nice present for Christmas. Thank you!
Thanks for the complements!
I'm planning to get this out as soon as I can finish up the first level-set/area, which looks like it probably won't be by the end of this year but sometime in January, barring unforeseen issues with bugs, assets, RL, lack of help, etc..
On the drones: yes there will be drones in the skies, although more in an ambient, creeping sense. They will tend to sneak up on you, especially when you have given away your coordinates. For example, you're wireless sniffing/hacking the CyberSec intranet and they trace you, grab your GPS coords, the military AIs route an autonomous drone to wipe you off the map. The exact time and place which the drones strike will be fairly unknown, though. Hopefully this captures the sense of paranoia and terror that an actual target on a drone army's hitlist might experience, afraid to wander out in the open for too long, etc..
On ironsights: I'm not sure exactly how to accomplish ironsights, although I'm open to adding them if someone wants to help with that.
Amazing, I like how this reminds me of a mix of modern stuff and 90s stuff like the Johnny Mnemonic movie. Amazing!
Thanks! Yeah, there is definitely some inspiration coming from Johnny Mnemonic and some of the earlier CP books/movies.