If you haven’t read the Wikipedia entry on the Kowloon Walled City, you’re in for a wild ride. From the mid-1940s to 1994, the Hong Kong settlement operated as a dense, ungoverned city that grew from an old military fort into a sprawling den of gangs, gambling and drugs.
Kowloon’s jumble of towers is a fascinating example of oppressive urbanization and unfettered criminality, and it served as an inspiration for me as I crafted the dystopian culture of Contract Work.
Kowloon Walled City from above in 1989. Photo credit: Ian Lambot
Photo credit for header image: Ken Ohyama
When I discovered Kowloon, the idea immediately seized me as a natural setting for a cyberpunk roguelike. I could picture how a lone freelancer might infiltrate the bowels of a city like Kowloon, fighting and sneaking their way through different levels, stealing data before escaping to a roof for extraction. With this idea in mind, I started linking previously unconnected levels into a single journey from the bottom to the top of a corporate tower. As I made these changes, Contract Work began to transform into a proper roguelike.
I imagined a huge tower created originally as a corporate server farm that, over time, had decayed and mutated into something stranger. The tower is created to be unique each time someone plays, but it always features different types of levels like a huge layer cake. Hidden between these corporate-controlled levels are areas to buy supplies off the black market or connect to the hardline to purchase upgrades--another inspiration from Kowloon.
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