How Bowling's 'Human Element' brings real places into the zombie world
Human Element, the first game from Robert Bowling's Robotoki, will use Google Maps and Foursquare overlays to add a real-life tie in to its iPad iteration, which will in turn feed back into the "main" game. Bowling gave the example of hunting for medical supplies.
"You don't want to risk going out to forage in the game world, or maybe you did and can't find anything," he told GamesIndustry.biz, "but you know that there's a pharmacy four miles down the road in the real world. So you go out and you're out and about in the real world. You open up Human Element on your iPad. We're overlaying the world of Human Element onto the Googlemaps API, FourSquare business API, we're taking your real world and merging it with your game world." Bowling claimed this would be possible anywhere GPS data was available.
Bowling also suggested that connected experiences like the iPad game would begin to tell the Human Element story before the 2015 release date of the console game. "The 2015 deadline is the at-home, console experience. That experience, from a story standpoint, takes place 30 years after the event, after the apocalypse," he explained. "We can engage you in that universe a week, a month, a year after that event. Maybe through mobile, maybe through titles on the arcade, maybe through PSN, handheld titles. We can start telling that story leading up to that big event in 2015 where we tie them all together."
