To be up front, my reason for sharing this information is twofold. One reason is to share with my friends what I've been up to and why I've neglected my writing as much as I have and two is to hopefully find people willing to invest in this idea in exchange for future compensation over a two year span as the game sells.

Over the course of the last two years I've been leading a team to construct an online multiplayer video game entitled Extinction Event: Nanite Apocalypse. While the primary desire of the game is to make enough money to not worry about money anymore for myself and each of the members of my team, I also have the hope of subtly encouraging the games players into a more self-reliant, rational and reasoned way of looking at the world around them. Hopefully those virtues will highlight aspects of their actual lives where they can consider if what they are doing, how they are looking at life and what they expect from life as it measures up to what they now know. While this may bring an understandable chuckle to some of your lips, the reality is that games like this, because of the camaraderie evoked in multi-player gaming and the hundreds of hours groups of people play them, can and does influence people.

Extinction Event: Nanite Apocalypse is a client-server windows based sandbox survival type game for 50-60 players.

Back Story
On November 18th 2038 a powerful solar storm struck the earth temporarily crippling all electronics. Quickly devising and implementing energy solutions which would guard against future widespread catastrophic outages mankind stood confident that it was well protected from future solar events, and it was. As months passed a new threat began to arise, a subtle threat caused the the solar storm. The revolutionary medicinal nanites constructed to improve the human condition and extend life had mutated. Driven by their primary directive, as the first of the nanite hosts began to die their bodies, driven by the mutation to maintain their human hosts, began to seek out the chemicals needed to keep themselves powered and replicating, they turned on the living. Quickly, exponentially, the nanite plague spread from one infected to several non-infected.
Within two years mankind was facing extinction. Scientists and engineers, seeing the fall of civilization looming early on, constructed technological settlements to house, protect and preserve mankind until such a time that the nanite plague lessened. Hundreds of millions undead now openly roam the earth looking for nourishment while mankind, hunkered down in bunkers of one sort or another, clinging to their technology and scavenging for what they need to survive number in the thousands globally.


Objective
A player in spawned into the world at a randomly generated location. The sole purpose of the player is to survive. Survival includes eating, drinking, shelter, avoiding or overcoming the undead and avoiding or overcoming other players or Non-player characters. In the environment players will be able to build their own shelters, craft tools, weapons and devices. To obtain raw material to craft objects and construct shelters player must scavenge what remains of the world.

Licensing
Players will have three license purchase options; none will leave a player defenseless or entirely unprotected. Each option: Basic, Capable, or Advanced will afford a player with a certain degree of protective gear, a certain amount provisions, a certain amount of skills to use, and a type of weapon. Players, no matter where they are or where they spawn, will always, regardless of license level, have the ability to "craft" crude weapons from items in their surroundings.

Strategy
Players will possess and develop a wide variety of skills (Carpentry, Metal Working, Electronics, Mechanic, Medic, Marksman, Farming, Hunting, etc.) and bolster attributes (intelligence, Endurance, Stamina, Strength, etc..) to help increase their odds of survival. Mastery of a skill is influenced by the developed attributes. Skills can be improved upon by locating and "consuming" how-to media (CD's, Books, films), being taught a skill by another player or NPC (non-player character), and/or being awarded information for the successful completion of a quest.

Players are strongly encouraged, but not required, to join together into groups as the numbers of skills an individual possesses will not amount to more than 25% of the total number of skills available. In adding to the skill "pool" a group can construct stronger and more technologically advanced base camps, a group can more easily sustain themselves with food and water, and a groups is better able to enhance protection from the undead and other players.

Game Philosophy
The individual is paramount. There is no law outside of a Settlement and little rules if any within a group. Each player does what is in his or her best interests to keep him/her self and those he or she cares about alive.
Group membership is not mandatory, but there are obvious advantages.
Killing other players, non-group members, for gain is permitted at anytime but will eventually have a way of coming back at a player (Consequential Rules and Karma).
Consequential Rules System
The underlying strategy that has a player eventually account for what he or she does. Cause and effect.

Karma System
Each thing a player does has a behind the scenes, not visible to anyone, tally marker. A player who's tally marker is a positive number, as opposed to a negative number or zero, will add to or take away from any probability based decision points throughout the players lifetime.
Example, a player kills someone in the wilderness unprovoked, without witnesses. He gathers food, weapons, and other supplies and moved on. Later he meets a group of people in a a minor settlement. The odds of someone in that settlement recognizing any of the gear the player had taken from the murdered player will be influenced by Karma.

There is much much more to be said about the workings and the setting of the project but I'm hoping what was posted would be enough to whet the appetite of some here who would want to get involved financially to bring this project to live testing and then to market. In 24 months we have not been idle. Many of the foundation systems are constructed (inventory, storage, health(thirst), stamina, damage, restoration, base building, crafting, custom character creation, custom undead creation, and likely more I'm not thing of offhand) and we have models for male and female characters and several variants of our undead characters (with basic AI - recognize, pursue, catch, much and or die). These things need a live on-line server to be combined into making a fully operational and publicly accessible beta platform prior to going to market.

The attached screenshots are draft images from the game itself.

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