Nova Factor

Nova Factor is a 1 versus 1, competitive first person shooter.

A match consists of five total rounds.  The first round of the match only contains the players themselves.  As the players navigate the map, shoot, jump, etc, their movements are recorded.  The second round spawns the players into the map in exactly the same way as the first round.  The addition to round two is a replay team mate that also spawns.  This replay will exactly play out the previous round’s movements until it becomes unshackled.  The unshackling process is activated by three different conditions.

A.I. Unshackling Conditions

End of Recording

The first condition is that the replay has reached the end of the recording where at that point the AI unshackles and becomes a free-roaming, hunting bot.
Visual Change
Something has changed in the recorded path.  Something is seen that wasn’t there in the recording of the previous round, causing a different condition to exist and therefore unshackle the bot.  For example:  seeing the enemy player from the current round that didn’t exist in the previous round.
Taking Damage
The replay takes damage when it wasn’t supposed to.  After taking damage the AI will become free-roaming and react to the new situation.   A player cannot shoot their own bots to unshackle them immediately.  To avoid this game breaking strategy, friendly fire in the game does not exist.

Round Replays

Each successive round spawns like the previous round.  The replay characters of those previous rounds are shackled to their recording from that previous round.  The replays are locked into playing out their recorded actions until they become unshackled. In the fifth and final round each player will have a full team of four AI bots and themselves.

When a player dies, they have the option of jumping into any unshackled bot, that is still alive, to continue the battle.  The icons located in the upper part of the screen represent the number of rounds that have been played in total, which includes the current round.

The Heads Up Display provides a player the means of keeping track of the round numbers and the current state of both the player’s and enemy’s characters.  These round numbers assist the players in tracking who is still alive in the match and what state that character is in.

For example, an X icon under a round number represents that the character from that round has been terminated.  If a character is possessing a character then there is a running person icon underneath the round number. If there is a robot head icon under a round number then that represents an unshackled AI is controlling that character.  A spinning clock icon under the the round number represents that a replay of a previous round is currently active on that round’s character and has not become unshackled yet. A character cannot be possessed if it has not become unshackled yet.