Visiting an actual pharmacy and firing up Human Element on iPad would net you medical supplies, for example. The team are using Google Maps API and FourSquare.
Players can 'scavenge' the real world for critical supply needs in Human Element "anywhere there’s GPS map data," boasted Bowling. You'll be "feeding those supplies" back to the main game.
If you don't feel like all that mobile device scavenging then you can ally with someone who does, he says, and have them ship off what they get to your game. "So, say my girlfriend doesn’t want to play the console experience but she wants to play on iPad – she likes that experience. If we have an alliance she can play the resource management game, that scavenging mechanic, and she can be benefitting my game by sharing supplies with my survivors."
Bowling says this "cross-genre, cross-platform experience" excites him most of all about Human Element. The survival sim is being developed by start-up Robotoki and it's expected to launch for next-gen consoles, PC and of course mobile devices. The studio was founded by the former Call of Duty creative strategist.
"We’re overlaying the world of Human Element onto the Google Maps API, FourSquare business API, we’re taking your real world and merging it with your game world,” he said.
“So now you’re checking into places in the real world and you’re scavenging in those locations for supplies that are dynamic to those locations. We can do that anywhere there’s GPS map data.”
In Human Element we determine how we'll start the game; a single adult, an adult with an adult companion or an adult with a child. These will impact the general day-to-day survival methods we need to employ but we also choose a class such as intelligence, action or stealth.
"When I think about the apocalypse, zombie or whatever, my plan changes drastically with my age. When I was young it was very action oriented. I was fighting zombies, I was fighting other survivors - that's what I was worried about."
"Then when I got older and had a kid - I have a daughter that turned three last week - you think about survival very differently. You want to rebuild some resemblance of society. You want to avoid confrontation, build fortifications. That mentality lead to these design decisions," explained Bowling.
"The interesting thing is, that, since it's an open world and the situations you come across are very dynamic, based on your identity and where you are in the world - we're not telling a linear A-B kind of story - how you engage in the universe changes drastically depending on the device you're using."
There's great news for PC gamers as right now they're "developing for very high end PC. In the past we've developed for mid-spec because you're trying to get the most audience or whatever, but since this is a very forward-looking project, by 2015 they're going to be mid-spec." Bless you, sir.
Check out the full interview between Robert Bowling and GamesIndustry.biz.
