© 2006 Santiago Zapata. All Rights Reserved.
MechaBusiness.com is a browser based game that lets the player assume a role as a person living inside the world of Joseph Hewitt’s GearHead, focused on high level activities such as owning a mecha factory or a news agency. The world is continuously simulated on a server to allow worldwide interaction over the web.
Kiri is a hardcore roguelike fangirl; she has been playing roguelikes since 1999, starting with ADOM and slowly getting involved on the idea of writing her own roguelike; she got into roguelike development and thus got to learn about project for new roguelikes, finally getting to see GearHead. It is currently one of her favorite roguelikes.
Looking for a different activity to spend her spare time with, Kiri finds out about MechaBusiness.com; she knows enough about GearHead and always wanted to be able to handle a mecha company
Kiri starts by creating an account at MechaBusiness.com, this is a simple
process, where she is asked for an username, sex and a password. After this she
is prompted to create her character. She created a 21 years old man named Aaron,
and selects some skills for him as well as a photo.
She is then directed to the control panel page; hereby she sees the status of
Aaron, his possessions, capital and life.
She decides to go straight ahead to establish her new company. To do this, she must first have a physical building. She contacts a construction company, telling them where she wants her factory built and the specifications. Alternatively, she could have bought or rented construction machinery and hired workers to build the factory, but she decided not to worry about it.
The construction company replies after some hours, they say the factory will cost $15000000 and will take about 2 days. Kiri replies accepting the offer and the construction factory starts working.
She clicks the news portal to get informed about the latest news, hereby she sees that a racing championship is about to start in 3 months, and some racing teams are looking for tech support.
2 days after this, she notices her factory is ready. She pays the construction company the money and proceeds to design a new racing mecha. She does this by defining its structure and the kind of part it uses, she gets an average cost of $95000 and a assembly time of 3 days.
She emails one of the racing teams, Locust, after browsing through some teams, to offer them a racing mecha.
After a while, the Team Locust replies; they are interested on the mecha. Kiri contacts a bank and asks them for $50000 that she needs to produce the Mecha.
The bank approves the credit, and she starts the production of the mecha by some mecha parts from a Part Manufacturer. She asks them to be delivered directly to her assembly plant.
After a day, the parts arrive and she assigns a production line in the factory to assemble the mecha. The parts, the pay for the engineers and workers and the assembly materials cost her about $70000.
After 2 days, the mecha is almost ready. However, she sees in the news that team Locust is shut down by the Federate Government, after finding out they were being founded by a band of outlaws. Their offices where destroyed after they tried to defend using a customly armed BuruBuru mecha, which had to fight against two well armed Mecha Cavaliers. All of the members of the company are presumed to be dead.
Having got into debts for the development of the mecha, Kiri has to find another racing team to use the mecha. After mailing some teams, she finally finds a team, but it is smaller than Locust and thus cannot pay as much; they offer $80.000. Kiri accepts their offer and delivers the mecha to their facilities.
The racing championship finally starts; after two days Kiri sees her mecha win the 2nd place on the championship. This will surely attract more people to make business with her!
Some of the more important screens, where the user has the most complex interactions will be described below:
Builds structures. Needs construction machines and construction workers.
Gives money to companies for interests, Invest on venture companies. Needs economists.
Makes software under requirements. Needs computers and programmers.
Protects facilities and personnel. Needs Combat Mecha, weapons, body guards and combat pilots.
Gives information about the events on the world. Needs journalists
Designs, makes and sells Mechas and Parts. Needs production lines, assembly lines, mecha parts, mecha designers, engineers and test pilots.
Fights on Mecha Tournaments, Needs combat mecha and arena pilots
Races on Mecha Tournaments, Needs racing mecha and racing pilots.