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[JoshuaFH]

Assassin Roguelike

SO I just had this awesome idea, bear with me while I straighten my thoughts out, I want to put this onto paper before it shrivels up and dies:

The goal of Assassin Roguelike is simple: Become the best assassin you can be. Earn as much money as you can, for as long as you can, while remaining undetected by society at large until some arbitrary amount of cash is attained or some other tangible goal is achieved, or you get killed or become permanently incarcerated.

Now, this isn't the run and gun type of assassin like you might see in an action movie or in the Hitman videogames, what I'm imagining is you having to personally carry out every single action that an actual assassin would have to do, from getting into contact with clients through any number of methods, researching your hit, planning the method of kill, executing the kill, extracting yourself to avoid capture, taking care to leave no evidence that can be traced back to you (as the crime scene WILL be combed by police after you leave), getting paid, and then repeating the process but gradually taking better paying and more difficult hits as your reputation spreads through rumor in the underworld of criminals that might want your services.

When not doing Hits or other contracts, you can do other things like explore your randomly generated city on foot or car, maintain your hideout or secondary hideouts, buy supplies at stores, speak with locals to become familiar with how to fit in and important things that are going on, speak with felons or members of criminal organizations that you become familiar with while taking contracts, try to recruit partners in crime to help with a particular hit, purchase weapons from licensed gun stores or from black market dealers, or maybe just covertly kill people just for the fun of it.

Your character isn't intended to be a powerhouse, quite the opposite actually. He'll go down as easily as anyone of the people you take down, which is very easily. Just avoiding direct combat isn't enough, you also need to avoid having your identity figured out or leave incriminating/identifying evidence, because even if you escape from a gunfight, it doesn't do any good if the police figure out who you are and come knocking on your door, and you can't walk around in public anymore. In which case, you either need to have a secret hideout prepared to stay in until your face falls out of the public eye (though the cops will always be wary of your identity if they're chasing you for murder), only do hits at night and only with assistance moving yourself around, or just skip town and move to another town or city where police won't think of looking for you, or even better, to another country where police can't look you up either, granted that it also sets you back at square one for accumulating helpful friends and hideouts, and swag.

For this reason, it is essential that to become good at the game, you always blend into society, carefully plan every move, have an escape and backup escape plan, research your target carefully, and choose a method of execution that'll be easy and leave as few pieces of evidence to identify you as possible, if any.

How I imagine the game looking is in traditional ASCII style, ala Nethack or games like that. In this way the game can be detail oriented and precision movement and actions. I'm thinking the game would be Turn-based, since that allows for strategic thinking. Being a roguelike, I would also think it'd be best to have the one-life and your save is deleted when you lose style of gameplay, something I've always appreciated.

Now, you're definitely not alone in this game, you have the many ordinary NPC civilians that would probably have randomly generated names and personalities attached to give the game a bit more character and atmosphere, and any you interact with might be saved so you can build civilian friends that are unsuspecting of your actual profession. Maybe it'd even be prudent to build friendships so you can hide out in their homes for a bit should you ever need to dive into a place.

There'd also be police officers, politicians, criminals, homeless, store owners and employees, you know, not everyone you could possibly think of but would be relevant to your Game Character and to you the player.

Now, the way I imagine it, there'd be something of a dynamic conversation system, but the only way I could think of it being meaningful is if it was context sensitive, based on what you happened to be carrying, what you're dressed as, what situation you happened to be in, and to whom you're talking to, you'd be presented with a few dialogue choices to give in response if anyone speaks to you, and some things to say to spark conversation if you want to talk to someone.

Now, when I say context sensitive, I want to further elaborate in that you might be given some generic things to say when starting a conversation, like introducing yourself with a real or fake name, asking who they are, what they're doing, maybe giving them compliments or a generic small talk option to increase friendship with that person, and maybe just simple questions to where to “Location name” or what do you think of “person name” and they'd give you an answer. However, when they spark the conversation they may be asking you a question, and you'd be given the options to speak the truth, tell the most convincing lie or one of a range of lies you can tell (context sensitive in how you're dressed, where you are, etc; so it can range from playing dumb to pretending to be an employee, etc), or you can try to change the subject, or if you want to be a showoff, you can oust yourself right before executing your target.

Now I've said a whole lot on the subject of identifying or incriminating evidence, and why it's not a good idea to be leaving it around, but what qualifies as evidence and how to not leave it? Now, when you commit a serious crime, such as murder or attempted murder, and you escape the scene, the police will comb and plumb and examine everything. They'll find where you shot from if you used a gun from bullet hole trajectory triangulation science, what weapon you used, will get records of stores that sold that might have sold that weapon recently, they'll find the fingerprints of anything you've touched barehanded (and haven't wiped them off), they'll find blood if something caused you injury, they'll take note of footprints left in blood you've stepped in, surveillance camera footage will be collected, and most importantly eye witnesses you leave alive will be able to give testimony and a description of you or your getaway vehicle/license plate. It'd be cool if it even went as far as say, if you used the same knife for every Hit, and if you didn't clean it between Hits, you'd leave the residue of previous victims on the bodies of the new ones.

What I'd really like is the ability to dress the scene of the crime up as an accident, or going to elaborate measures to dispose of the body or engineering circumstances where the death just isn't investigated for long periods of time, or even planting evidence that incriminates other people. Like, say, taking something from one of your civilian 'friends' house that has their fingerprints on it and planting it at the crime scene.

I've talked a whole lot about being an assassin, yet almost nothing about actual assassination! I'd like to keep the game as open and unconstraining as possible to give the player a lot of options. Though you might be limited in choices depending on how your Hit protects himself in his day to day life, and your money to buy more elaborate weapons, and you're patience as a player. I think that being an arsonist that sets the Hit's home on fire in the night is a perfectly legitimate way of going about things. If you want to buy a sniper rifle with your hard-earned assassination money, memorize your Mark's path to work every morning, camp at the top of a building and take him out just as he stops at an intersection, that should also be open to players.

To make things more interesting, I think that when you're contracted for a Hit, and because hits are procedurally generated as well, the contractor might request that the Mark be killed in a certain way in return for a significant boost in your reward. This would require you to think creatively, learn more about the limitations of the game and your character, and think on the fly. For example, say a client wants you to eliminate the mark through strangulation, this would requires that you get close to your Mark, eliminate them in this fashion, and then get out. Suppose you follow the Mark, and then find they own a business, and you dress up as an employee to infiltrate it, and then trap him in his office. Maybe even lock the Office door behind you so you have a few hour headstart before anyone questions why he hasn't come out in a while.

That's just an example, there could be any number of things could do. Maybe if you even become part of criminal Family, they'd be happy to provide you with false Alibi's should suspicion ever fall onto you.

It should be mentioned that you don't get infinite tries at a Mark, should a hit on them fail, they'll flee town or go into hiding, and your contract with the client is canceled unless you can find them before some arbitrary time limit, be that through some paper trail you'd have to uncover or stealing files from a government agency or police department.

Performing hits very well though will attract the attention of people hearing rumors of your prowess, and will approach you with increasingly lucrative and increasingly difficult jobs. These scale up from purely domestic contracts, to business owners, local politicians or prominent activists for thousands of dollars, and then the game would transition to other locales as you're contacted to perform Hits on prominent figures in the criminal underworld for hundreds of thousands bordering on millions of dollars, and then to other countries to perform hits on national figures for tens of millions of dollars.

I've also mentioned doing research on your Mark before following through with any plan. Given a car, you can tail them, stake out their home or workplace for information, or given the proper tools, break into their home for documents related to their life, or to set up a trap for them when they return. It might also be cool to dig up information you can use to extort and blackmail the person for additional cash, but that might be detracting from the main focus of being an assassin.

I'm thinking that there'd be a day and night system, with so much time passing for every turn in the game, with everything and everyone focusing on a schedule that's adhered to and you need to become acquainted with it to have an idea of where Marks and other NPC's will be at at certain times of day. When by yourself, it'd also be fair to have a Wait command you can use to pass either large stretches of time until you're interrupted or for until a set amount of time has passed.

I don't think there'd be any RPG elements, so your character starts out as good as he'll ever get, though maybe he'll earn distinguishing scars from conflicts maybe. The meter of tangible success would be your bankroll.

Speaking of money, I haven't talked about items yet. I'm imagining your character has a very small inventory, only being the pockets of whatever clothing he is wearing at the moment, and his hands to carry stuff in. Naturally this doesn’t lend itself well to stealth or being prepared, and you aren't going to last very long if every NPC happens to notice you carrying a machete around. This makes carrying a bag or case of some kind around invaluable. A duffel bag can carry a number of supplies, can look inconspicuous being carried around, and can be thrown to inaccessible places for later retrieval. Sniper Rifles and other guns could also come with specialized suitcases just for that gun. The disadvantages to having a case or bag, is that it adds another distinguishing feature to your character that can lead to his identification, and they can be cumbersome.

I'm not sure if it would be prudent to require eating and drinking, but I'm tempted to force the player to go out and make cash if only to eat, and to punish him if he needs to go into hiding for a long time, and his hideout isn't properly equipped with foods to keep him sustained for that time. If there would be, it'd be a very slow draining type of nourishment meter. PLUS, it would add another element of evidence that could be left on the crime scene, say if you hid in your Mark's home for several hours, and drank out of his milk jug to replenish some nourishment and then, OH HEY the cops found some saliva on the rim of the jug! ... something like that.

Now I'm rambling, but let me give an idea of what I think the beginning of the game would be like:

You're just an ordinary guy, down on his luck in this terrible economy.  You don't have a job or girlfriend, and you're just scraping by in your crappy apartment. You go to your favorite sleazy bar to drink your worries away. You take a seat at one of the tables, and just start to relaxes when a feverish looking woman walks in. She stands around for a bit looking around nervously, and then notices you. She comes over and sits opposite to you.

“Are you the guy?”
“...What guy?”
“The guy Roberto said would be here.”
“... Sure, that's me. What do ya need?” You had no idea who this Roberto fella is, but you could yank this lady's chain for a bit. Just for laughs.
She fumbles a picture from her purse, and hands it to you. “This is my ex-boyfriend...”
You stare at it for a moment, just wondering why she sowed you something like this
“And I want you to kill him.”
You restrain your surprise, it took you a second, but you've wrapped your head around the situation. She speaks up again as you take another sip from your beer looking at the picture.
“I can give you 3,000 right now... it's usually half first right? I've never had to do this before and... he just forced me to do this, I don't have any choice. He's backed me into a corner and...”
“Lady,” she stops herself, “You don't need to explain yourself to me.” She quiets up.
You took a long look at the picture, thinking about it. This is a bizarre opportunity, and where an ordinary person might feel repulsed or disgusted at the thought, you feel only indifference, so hey why not?
“Yeah lady, that'll do. Give me the rest of the info.” She looks really relieved, and tells you where he lives and works. “Just give me a couple weeks.” she hands you the three grand, and you finish your beer as she walks out looking like a big burden has been lifted off of her.

It would seem that today is your first day as a hitman, how do you intend to go about it?

Of course, this is just another of my ideas. No real initiative to act on it's creation besides just devoting it to writing so it doesn't feel like a wasted thought.

[Kadzar]

I don't know if this will help at all, but it's a free online version of a book some lady wrote in the eighties about how one would hypothetically get away with murder as a hitman.

[Trapezohedron]

I thought this was Assassin's Creed: The Roguelike, but this is just as well.

And while I'd like to see this come true, I don't have coding skills, so yeah.

But please let this thing actually become a thing.

[Lectorog]

This sounds interesting. There are a few problems I noticed, though.
- The constraints of a roguelike graphical system.
   - There are a limited number of tiles to work with (standard 80x25, but leaving or resizing the console is a possibility). This limits the area in which you can actually see. An entire house could be covered in a limited number of tiles, but you also want a significant area around that house. I think large areas of vision are useful, if not necessary, for this sort of game. Additionally, you can only see one level at once - making things like a rooftop sniping very difficult.
   - Everything has to be represented in tiles. This is the biggest problem in houses, where there's a lot of stuff. Objects laying everywhere - on top of tables, on the floor, etc. depending on the individual. Furniture is rarely large and evenly spaced to the degree of being able to be represented by square tiles. This would also be an issue in crowds: assassinating your target in a crowd would be interesting, but not realistically difficult if everyone takes up their own separate tile. (And people don't actually crawl under each other when areas get crowded.)
- It could be difficult to get into. If you're not good at the game, you're going to lose. And losing in this wouldn't be very fun. Taking all of the time to learn about your target and going about it cautiously, only to realize that you missed a couple of details and you have to run, handicapping you further.
- Random generation. Randomly generated realistic architecture could be a pain, but doable. Randomly generated hits are harder. Getting all of the details about the individual to work together; tying that into their place of residence and other locations frequented; having it work so that there's a good approach to assassinating them. The point of random generation is to keep a large number of possibilities for infinite entertainment, but the number of things that could actually work is rather limited.

I think it's possible to make a good assassin roguelike. It would be difficult, though - much more difficult than any other roguelike game I can imagine.
None the less, this was a very interesting read; thanks for sharing your ideas.

[Lord Dullard]

If you want to make this a roguelike, it's entirely doable. Lectorog brings up some points but most of them, as with any system, are solvable with a little bit of intuition.

- Using libtcod, you can use any console size very easily.
- The tile problem is just a problem of abstraction, and can be solved away using numerous methods. For a roguelike assassination game I actually don't think this would be terribly difficult. Yes, it's a detail-oriented game, but you don't have to include EVERY tiny little object in a house/apartment. Just the ones that matter and some other generic flavor items.
- Difficult to get into and boring if you suck at it? That's EVERY roguelike with permadeath. ;P My suggestion is to make permadeath optional, with either a score modifier or restricting an online score ladder to permadeath-only.
- Maybe it's just me, but creating hit personalities that would allow you to suspend disbelief about them does not sound as insanely difficult as some other things I think are completely possible within the bounds of procedural generation, but it actually sounds pretty damn fun.

Again though, some of those points are good, and creating any roguelike (and making it enjoyable) is undoubtedly challenging. I just wanted to offer you some counterpoints, though. If you had the motivation to write that giant text block down, go and start writing the game.

[JoshuaFH]

I suppose if I knew the first thing about programming, I could get started on this right away. I heard Roguelikes require maybe not as much technical skill as other types of games, but it's still something that's way over my head at the moment. It's why I can extrapolate and say "the game should be this and this and that and this", because in a way there's a little Bunky Bartlett that lives inside me that doesn't know the technical limitations of the medium he wants to create on.

I could always look at some learning resources to see how much investment it would require from me, and hey, maybe I could start coding something if it's not too hard to do.

But yeah, the game would have to be carefully crafted to that attention to detail is possible, but still works in the ASCII format. Permadeath was just always a thing I enjoyed subscribing to as it punishes mistakes so harshly, but I can see people not appreciating it and allowing a different mode that allows saving in your home or something.

[Lectorog]

I'd support permadeath in an assassin roguelike. Being able to save and endlessly redo a contract takes away a bit of the fun. Punishment for mistakes makes a game more fun and replayable in the long-run.

Roguelikes are actually incredibly difficult entry-level games. The graphics are easy; a few hours learning your library of choice and you're ready to start. The random generation is the tough part. Algorithms and algorithms and algorithms. Effectively generating architecture, furnishing, other objects, NPCs, and meshing it all together, as well as AI for those NPCs.
This will definitely not be an easy game to make, but it's entirely possible. I'd recommend you get some experience making more basic roguelikes first; perhaps work off of a basic engine.

Difficult to get into and boring if you suck at it? That's EVERY roguelike with permadeath. ;P

This is a more slow-paced game, though. Most roguelikes (ex. NetHack) put you in a place of immediate action. While varying in detail, the structure is the same - you're just descending into the dungeon, fighting monsters. This would require long periods of planning and preparation; there's not much action. Reward is required to keep attention; and a lot of play without reward is no fun.
There could be ways around this: easier missions at first, until you become more well-known; and/or police are more lax until you start getting significant numbers of kills.

Optional permadeath would probably be the best way to go with this; not everyone likes permadeath, but many roguelike fans do.

I just had the idea that viewpoint could be not focused on the player, but rather the player's view. If you're doing something like stalking through someone's house, it'll be focused on you; but if you're scoping in on someone or watching them through binoculars, you'll see that area instead. (This also allows the possibility of someone sneaking up on you, if that fits in.) This would avoid some of the z-level issues, but not all of them.
Changing perspective in some cases from top-down to side is a possibility (for things like looking at the face of a building to observe the windows), but that creates many new problems, and deviates from the roguelike approach.

[Scelly9]

This sounds awesome!