# Laniakea

## Elevator pitch

A game about a parent and their super smart and supernaturally powerful daughter traveling across a semi-physical digital world, with both the parent and the child complimenting eachother's skillset.

## Laniakea, the network to rule them all

The year is 20XX, most people live in a pseudo-physical interconnected network known as laniakea, laniakea is visually a big endless sea with spheres, each sphere is a separate world.

In this timeline the EU banned encryption, resulting in important data and cargo has to be trusted to humans who will protect it with their life while travelling across Laniakea in their trusty travel ships.

Laniakea is not like a typical virtual world, people inside it are not merely controlling an avatar from a room somewhere, but they become physically converted into computer data, meaning if your data gets erased (AKA you die) you're also forever lost in real life.

## Milk

Milk is the companion daughter character, she is a smart young girl with psychic and telekinetic powers, she has a twofold purpose, she's a character we want the player to grow attached to and want to protect, but we also don't want her to be a sitting duck.

She's a "glass-cannon" character, she's super strong but has low health.

She also has some utility, such as being able to be sent through small holes (like ventilation shafts) to access areas you otherwise can't.

Milk is special and physically immortal, she's not able to die, however if she takes enough shots from enemies her powers will become temporarily unavailable.

## Parent-daughter complimenting each other

Most games with companion characters are tedious and either have them permanently attached to the player (such as in pokemon and death stranding) or have them walking around and potentially become an annoyance due to technical reasons such as path-finding.

For this it is reasonable to do a middle of the road solution: She can walk around but she's super slow, making carrying her the most reasonable option.

You can carry Milk with you in various different ways, on your shoulders, on vehicles or at your back, you are also able to leave her behind in the PS050 if you feel like she's not needed for the mission.

While being carried on your back, you can effectively "control" her as a weapon, and have her shoot energy blasts or lift objects with telekinesis.

You're also able to throw her at groups of enemies to act as an area of effect energy "grenade".

## The PS050 - The moving base

The PS050 is our moving base of operations and where our characters converge, the player use it to move across laniakea.

Milk also has her own "attached" assault ship attached to the PS050, the ZZW40, it is much smaller and more maneuverable which can be used to defend the main ship when encountering enemies while navigating Laniakea.

## A world made of independent spherical worlds

Each spherical realm within Laniakea can be visited with the ship, each one has its own "biome" from 3 possible ones, each one has unique terrain.

The biomes are:

- Desert
- Tundra
- Forest

Realms that are part of the story can be authored by hand (by using procedurally generated terrain as a base and modifying it afterwards), but fully procedural worlds can also be explored for secondary missions.

## Ordinary people surviving

The overarching theme of the game is surviving, not as a survival game but rather in a more realistic grounded way, this is why we shouldn't have something like a revenge plot or an overall conflict with a singular resolution, our protagonist simply doesn't have time for that.

We want the game to feel like you're just a person with your daughter trying to make end's meet, surviving together by having to deal with what the world has given you, which is a reality that many people will feel inspired and represented by. Our protagonist does have a moral compass, he does what he thinks he's right, but reality sometimes prevents him from following his moral code completely.

This doesn't mean there don't have to be story arcs, it just means they should be similar to the ones a typical person would find themselves into in their ordinary life.