Hi. I'm new to these forums. I registered in order to post a game idea that I cooked up a while ago, and have since refined. I only have a (fairly detailed) general concept. But here it is: The game is a fairly realistic (closer to Ghost Recon than Unreal Tournament) FPS, set in or close to the present day, possibly in an alternate universe. The game is largely centered around multiplayer play. Players take the role of hit men or assassins or spies set loose in various large cities, with the objective of killing each other. It would be cool to have the maps be actual sections of New York or Los Angeles, say, but I don't know how possible that would be. What seperates this game from other FPS's is the key gameplay factor: you have no clue who your enemies are. The cities are populated with reasonably intelligent bots that amble around and simulate city life. Players adopt different disguises at the beginning of a match, and are visually impossible to tell from bots. The gameplay therefore revolves around finding out who your enemy is by looking for suspicious behavior or other indicators (someone with a weapon is obviously an enemy, as is someone standing completely still or running across two city blocks). While doing this, you have to be impersonating a bot as well. I think (or hope) that this would lead to stealthy following situations, and high-powered chases. Players can designate other players as foes with both a camera (civilians have cameras too, so less conspicious) or a laser tracker/GPS device, which gives you away if someone sees you. The camera takes some skill to track a traget with, since many players and bots look alike, but the tracker gives you a Halo-style nav point. If your cover is blown and you are "tagged" you're pretty much dead. All other players can see a laser marker, and weapons are accurate and deadly. There are, however, supply caches around the map that let you change disguises and weapons. You also get a new disguise when you die. Voice chat would be preferred, as having your character stop when you type a message is suspicious. Also on the lookout for spies are the police. Police react mostly to gunfire sounds, and arrive at a murder scene in an amount of time depending on the weapon fired. Shoot a pistol and you can walk on out pretty safely, but shoot a machine gun and you'd better run or hide. Police are well armed and arrive in large numbers. They prevent a "shoot everything that moves" strategy. Other things would be standard FPS fare. No ultra-sci-fi megalasers, but guns and knives. Vehicles would be cars and motorcycles, but no tanks. The player could also use public transportation. Game Types: Just ideas. Deathmatch: Standard free for all. Options would be things like police difficulty or bot population. Team Deathmatch: Standard team vs team. The catch is that you have to avoid looking like a team at all costs. Hunter: Free-for-all where each player has a target. They either have a photo of the target or a laser tracker on them. Targets don't know who their hunter is. If you kill your target or your target kills you, you get a new target. So, what do you think? Is the idea flawed? Are there any glaring abuses that you can see? Should I be more specific? Should I be less specific? Any ideas for features or a title? Thanks in advance.

The game idea sounds great. One thing I'm wondering about is where their weapons are. Are they visible or do they only carry pistols? Trying to imitate a Bot sounds interesting, I've never seen anything like that. As for the mark if one player was spotted, by shooting at him wouldn't you then be marked? Take public trans and go on a drive by? Sounds fun!
Anyway I just hope you aren't planning on doing this by yourself. Making maps based on a major city would take dozens of hours even for a small map. And of the things like public trans is a great idea but would require a lot of work.

Thanks.

The weapons would be pistols, maybe knives or smoke grenades, a sniper rifle, and a close combat weapon (shotgun?machine gun?). Pretty basic, but with some variety. I'm thinking you could carry one weapon, one sidearm (pistol/knife), and a camera or laser.

Good point with your second comment. A person who opened fire would either have to do it in a back alley, with a sniper, or finish the target quickly and run like hell to get another disguise.

And I would never attempt this by myself. For one thing, I know next to nothing about code. I'm hoping to work on it later in life or submit the idea to a large company.

Hi,

I'm liking the basic concept here, I think this could be quite interesting if done correctly.

I think you could have a LOT of problems with this though.

Here are some of my ideas/thoughts/problems:

1)

I think it should be set in an alternate universe for sure. This would allow for much more variation and fun.
For starters instead of everyone walking around in jeans or suits you could go mad on the style of clothes worn in the alternate cities. People walking around in full robes and other such awesome getups!
Second you could then basically invent guns and transport. So instead of taxis and underground trains you could have zepplins and other more exciting city transport which would never exist in a real city.

2)

As you point out police arrive on the scene, basically meaning it would be possible to 'shoot everything that moves' and run like hell to a good hiding place before they arrived. Basically stopping people from just gunning everything down will be quite hard.
Perhaps anyone who kills to many inoccent humans would automatically appear on everyone elses displays?

3)

Making it hard to spot actual people playing will be VERY hard. Forcing them to act like the reast of the city will get very tedious. For starters all the normal people in the city will just be walking around getting on with life, forcing all players to always walk everywhere (while they are out in the open) making the game very slow paced. Getting the 'random' factor in the city folk AI will be a really difficult task.
Not to mention trying to generate enough people to simulate a real city.
This would probably be made easier if as mentioned before it was set in an alternate universe (ie. its normal for regular city folk to wander around carrying guns or a hucking great sword on their back!) This would also help with the killing everything problem, as regular city folk could defend themselves.

4)

Random 'caches' where you can get weapons and disguises sounds like a bad idea as it would break the more realistic sense the game was aiming for.
Having to actually get disguises and weapons would be good though. Each character could start out with some of course. But then to get more the character must actually make an effort.
For example you could use a pay phone to call in an 'accident' and when the paramedics arrive you could kill them and steal there uniforms or something.


- Chris

You should take a look at The Ship, a Half-Life modification that sounds very similar in concept to your idea. A nice opportunity to see such a concept at work. :)

If your serious about making it, I do 3d graphics and would like to help, give me a mail at simpsonsfan@priaze.com

If you do this, and i hope you do, i think you should focus on Multi-player and that alone. I think a single player mode would take away from the charm.

It would be great to play over the net with people you dont know and you get randomly placed in games where you dont know how many or how skilled the other players are and you just have to kind of figure it out as you go along.

There should be alot of focus on survival, just a few hits and your dead, but you can escape in various ways.

Dont let players respawn, let each map have a skill level and if you die you fall back into a lower skill leveled map with new people. If you are the last man standing you will move up to games with more skilled players until you have the guy on top.

Make the players work for the equiptment they have, im not sure if you want it be people who are prepaired to kill or poeple who are all of a sudden supose to kill. So maybe you start with a knife and need to go find your guns.

I might add things other than weapons should be important too, like disguises and aid kits and maybe even things to booby trap your foe.

HAHA, just thought of an idea on how to make your character blend in...

The various NPCs will have things they do like any human, Walk, Run, Stand etc.

Well they should also have other animations like looking around, sitting at benches, waveing talking on phones etc.

NOW give players some Emote options so they can look like the random bystandard waking to a loved one, or reading the newspaper at the bus stop.

Haha im so enspiored by this, PM me if you need help with anything.

I think this game idea would rock if executed properly.

Im on a roll, heres another one...

You should be concerned about more than just the other players, but every time you commit a crime, from killing an enemy or bystandard to breaking into a building, you should be investigated by the cops. So you need to be descreate, so you dont have the Po Po on you the whole time.

Heck maybe at one point you could become wanted and have your face on posters, they both players and some bold NPCs will know what you look like and do you harm on sight.

Wow... thanks for the ideas, everyone.

Alternate universe does sound more and more like the way to go. It allows me much more freedom in terms of weapons and vehicles and disguises. It would also let me have the player actually go anywhere in city traffic (have you every tried finding a parking space in NY city?)- perhaps cars are less common in the other world.

I like the idea of innocent-murderers being revealed to everyone after a certain amount of civilian deaths. The limit should be pretty forgiving, though, so people aren't afraid to shoot for fear of their target actually being a civilian. You should probably be revealed to the police too.

I like Dasubermechen's system of moving up to a higher server if you win. It's like matchmaking, except without giving anything about your opponents away. I imagine it would help reduce the learning curve too, as it must be pretty huge.

Emotes... meh. Depends on how easy it is to impersonate bots. I don't want it to be too easy, but walking slowly down city streets is probably irritating enough without having to stop and press a button every few seconds. As for the other point about game pace being very slow, perhaps we could make jogging the default speed for both bots and players. Sprinting is used when you want to get somewhere very fast, and walking is used to make less noise when you sneak up on people.

So how would you suggest players work for their weapons? I don't want the game to be just seeking out the best weapon and killing everybody with it. My reason for having the caches was to make a place that the player had to go to, to prevent them from camping. But I just realized that that doesn't really solve the problem, because you don't have to go get weapons if you have a good one already. Maybe a player that doesn't move for a while has his location revealed to everyone.

Does anyone have any other ideas, for a title or new gameplay modes or imbalances that they spotted?

(Forgot to say- The Ship looks awesome. Just goes to show that no idea is ever original.