The World of NyTavangen (Patreon)

NyTavangen is the majority of what you've been seeing on twitter. The guy in the meat suit, the various cyborgs and robots, the handful of spaceships: all for NyTavangen. 

On Twitter I've posted a little bit of the premise, a little bit of dialog but mostly a lot of disconnected assets and renders, so here I'll describe the world and premise. As a complete dork I find it impossible to not post an excessive amount of worldbuilding info, so bare with me. There's mountains of this stuff. 

Hopefully this will intrigue you about the setting and keep you wanting to explore the world and meet the wretched clones, amoral cyborgs, and would-be-gods that populate this world. 

Hyper-Neo-Feudal-Etc. entities colonized space while the planet died. Trillions of dollars blasted into the atmosphere, pits of carbon and heavy metals as rocket after rocket goes up carrying infrastructure, people (before they began to manufacture people up there--the body has been industrialized), and resources. 

Mars is settled, badly. Deimos and Phobos, Mar's stunted moons are turned into important waypoints between the exploration and colonization of the outer planets. Thousands of people (only some of the legal entities--the majority are manufactured, altered, tweaked almost-replicants) live in O'Neil cylinders, Bernal spheres, bubble habitats clustering like mold spores.

The cost of ferrying people from place to place in space is calculated by mass. Travelers do their best to reduce their mass pre-flight to cut costs. 

On Earth and in the Void, there is an obsession with immortality, specifically through uploading. Ageless, bodiless, without matter but compose of energy--The dream is to be a being of pure thought, to take the Angel's leap into infinity. "Space is heaven and Time is Hell". 

Inside the ornamental  shell and animated avatar-face is the body and life support system of a semi-dead trillionaire. Every thought is recorded, his mind vivisected for the purposes of birthing him immortal and virtual into the world. 

Colossal server farms emitting more heat than a city contained massive amounts of information for the direct purposes of resurrection. Total surveillance turned inwards, to absorb every iota of information to more perfectly recreate a personality. 

Mind-states recorded via destructive uploading--The brain dissected cell by cell, reduced and purified into whatever information can be retained and digitized. The uploads created through this process are senile and bizarre: thought does not become ones and zeroes easily (or perhaps, ever) while those created through recordings are just emulations: glorified chatbots in a Chinese room of a dead person's memories. 

Beyond the mansions that line the spinning habitat walls there are the virtual palaces of the Uploads, where their fragmented minds define reality. 

As this system extends itself into space, in a paradox between a dream of infinity and the harsh constraints of space itself, which imposes its own brutal constraints and discipline by default, Earth undergoes a revolution that leaves these habitats cut off from the home world.  

While the habitats die or scrape by, the conflagration on Earth cools and a new regime forms: a federation of People's Republics, at least in name--the term is obligatory. As almost every country now proclaims itself to be a market democracy, so does every country in this future proclaim itself to be a managed, planned socialist state. Earth is rational. Earth is beyond markets, inequality, and the pseudo-religion of computer worship that lead the planet into chaos. The Earth is rebuilding from the environmental destruction and the brutal wars that marked the era of revolutions. 

Along the way there's been a few excesses: the destruction of the server-cities and the uploads, emulations, and pseudo-"AGI" within. Great massacres of the cloned, tweaked servitor-races regarded as living symbols of the old order, crimes against God/Nature, or just another form of life-eroding automation. 

The habitats consider all of the above to be monstrous war crimes. The enmity between the Earth and NyTavangen runs deep. The possibilities of a long, slow war in space are growing. For the first time war ships are being constructed for combat beyond Earth's orbit. A fleet is being built on Luna, and in the reclaimed shipyards of Mars.

The human body has been the world's most effective combat platform for thousands of years, making it the logical choice to use as a frame for any weapons system. 

The Earth wants its people back. The orbital habitats, those that are left, are a part of the total integrated web of planification that is integral to the process of "re-humanizing space". One by one habitats join with the Earth, with NyTavangen as a supposedly neutral habitat whose location makes it an important stop between the Earth's zone of control and the wilder outer habitats.  

A technician who's skull has been remade and remodeled for high intensity processing. The eyes are just fashion.

YOU are a spy and a saboteur, a member of Intersolar Intelligence, a new agency created for the slow re-expansion and re-integration of those people still alive in the Void. 

You are entrusted with a mission to infiltrate NyTavangen, assess the situation, and remove obstacles for the arrival of Earth forces while factions within the habitat pursue their own agendas.

Potential assets must be recruited. Security systems must be subverted, and enemies, both human and Upload, must be neutralized.

Arrogant, cruel, and completely ignorant of life in a gravity well. This character is one of the first you'll meet. 

An experimental prion disease has seeded your brain with programmed amyloid, protein deposits that are components in the distributed computing system that makes you capable of stealth and combat hacking, integral to your mission to prepare the habitat for the Earth's arrival. 

The Amyloid has already been uploaded with information on your mission, targets, dangers, and information about the world. In the beginning it is incoherent and jarring. As you integrate fully with the Amyloid you will learn its language and gain advantages you can put to use in exploring the world and controlling your environment. 

Remotely hack minds. Steal or rewrite memories, extract secrets, and overheat the overclocked braincases of cybernetic psychopaths. 

Michel Kotkin, a two-hundred year old cyborg and his softbot bodyguards. Kotkin is one of the founding shareholders of NyTavangen and an important part of habitat politics. 

In NyTavangen you will use a skill based system governing social interaction and hacking to manipulate people and machines. Disco Elysium meets System Shock.

Explore the habitat and its strange society, work with factions competing to guide the direction of NyTavangen, and finally, complete the mission that will decide the fate of the habitat and the Earth's mission to re-humanize outer space. 

Work, watch, and pursue your mission objectives. Integrate yourself into NyTavangen society, ingratiate yourselves to your new citizen-peers and the upload gentry above them, and try not to die like a dog. 

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If you guys have any suggestions for what you'd like to see on this page please me know, and if you'd like more lore and info about the world. 

I have plans to post animations as I clean those up and eventually, when the game becomes more playable, some footage of that. 

Farther down the line I'd like to share the first playable demos with you guys.

Any feedback on the world, aesthetics, and projected gameplay is hugely appreciated and something that'll help a lot in the development process.