Looock.
EDIT OF THE SECOND EDIT: To quote a B12er, "HE BE TROLLIN". Youtube account says this:
Hilarious. People will believe anything these days.
Oh hai /b/. On a scale of 1 to 10, what would you rate this troll as? Seriously, I think it's decently epic.
OMG I CAN HAZ SERIAL KILLER SIMULATION?
No. No you fucking cannot. But hey, I've given you guys a bunch of good ideas so yeah. Roll with it if you want.
Also, simmer the fuck down. I'm not taking your interweb details. I couldn't give a flying fuck on a starless night about what you do online. I haven't been hacked. I was actually expecting a massively negative response when I started this thing, which would have made the trolling much, much sweeter. Everyone fucking liked it though. Eh. Shows how much I know. Bit of a cock block to the overall enjoyment, but there you go.
Yes, you can use the video or any of the shit I threw out there as a basis for your own game. Make it look exactly the same as it does in the video if you want. Use the same name. I don't claim any copyrights on any of it.
So the game's a hoax that was made for lulz. It worked alright. Since it isn't an actual game, I'll keep the following for posterity. Hopefully, someone legit will make an actual serial killer roguelike game, and it will be awesome.
SECOND EDIT: The original hoax was that his game was a hoax made to gather data for a university project.
This game is a hoax. The purpose was to gather statistical information for a University project. We reviewed individual YouTube accounts, as well as the forum posting history of various users who expressed interest in the game, to determine if they are also avid players of other extremely violent games. We paid special attention to gamers who sent us PM's with extremely disturbing, sexually explicit content suggestions. There's a lot of you out there. We only needed the statistics of around 100 users, though we've ended up with much, much more than that due to how quickly the game has spread.
There is hope in that a quantitative portion of gamers were repulsed by the notion of simulating serial killers as player characters in a video game. Kudos to you if you fall in that category.
For future reference, two university students were responsible for this small experiment. We both took turns posting comments under the same name, using various proxy servers, in order to keep up initial momentum.
Also note that no personal information (not that most users provide any on their actual accounts anyway) will be used, only anonymous statistics.
Original post follows:
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This:
http://www.roguetemple.com/forums/index.php?topic=1298.0I stumbled on it today, and I'm anticipating it very much, especially after having seen the video. It sounds very unique, and the guy even remarks that the materials system is based off of Dwarf Fortress, heh. I especially like the details on the character attributes that show up to the right when he's playing it--anxious, worried, covered in blood, at crime scene and etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WYQRURR_oI -
Original demonstration videohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r42uDyEtUsQ -
Character generation interface----
Someone helpfully suggested that I modify the initial post to throw in some info. Here goes. All the posts under spoilers have info garnered from CrimsonKing, the dev, who was answering questions in this thread.
Long term features of the roguelike:
* Randomly generated city with various districts, or a large, premade city based on a real life location. I prefer the latter. More character can be placed into the locations you create yourself.
* Dynamic AI that adhere to schedules (work,the eat, sleep and so on)
* Night and day with lighting changes to reflect the time.
* Realistic line of sight, realistic stealth and lighting.
* Starting house \ apartment for the player and real estate to buy.
* Regular jobs for income support (or simply steal from your victims or, hell, live like a hobo)
* Hunger and various edible (and not so edible) foods. Cooking.
* Multiple attacks for each weapon (edge, point & blunt for a knife, as an example)
* Trophies. Body parts, fluids and possessions. Place drops of blood on slides if you want.
* Fleshed out mental states, traits and psychological profiles. Experience hallucinations, insomnia, black outs, fits of rage and other conditions. Have traits that automatically perform actions against the players will -- a psychotic who randomly takes off his clothes and runs naked through the streets.
* Drug and alcohol abuse, which ties into mental states and can change your psychological profile.
* Realistic justice system. Get life or the chair for serious crimes, jail time or community service for lesser.
* Realistic evidence system. Police gather evidence and actively seek to find you.
* Disguise's and evidence prevention items. Wear protective plastic suits and masks during messy jobs to avoid spraying blood on your clothes and skin. Place sheets of plastic around the surroundings to reduce the risk of evidence exposure, Dexter style.
* The ability to kidnap characters and take them to any location. Keep them prisoner.
* Reports on the television and newspaper concerning your crimes. Media and public hysteria.
* Join various factions. Become a mob hitman, a crime scene analyst who uses his departments assets to track murderers (hmmm...), a dirty cop, a psychologist who eats his patients. So on and so forth.
Regarding prison: The ideal scenario would be to black out the screen and place an extremely accelerated timer showing the years served, and have randomly generated encounters (things like prison fights or Bubba trying to make you his bitch) that occur during your time in prison, at which point you'd play the encounter and, if successful, the black screen timer resumes. Maybe add opportunities to escape prison as random encounters as well. Kill a prison guard, take his uniform and weapon and stroll on out of there. That's late game stuff though and I'm nowhere near that point yet.
You won't be able to interrupt accelerated time segments, though there will be random events and encounters for some of the sequences, like jail.
You'll be able to attend day jobs, but those will be automated. You don't have to do anything, just watch a timer tick down till your shift ends. You'll need these jobs, or some other form of income support, to pay your rent or you'll have to live on the streets. You could become a hobo who eats human flesh. CHUDS or something.
As for pets, girlfriends and so on. Dunno. Probably not.
:
The cops, at the moment, will only shoot you if you fire a weapon. It doesn't matter where you fire it, if they see you, they shoot you. They have no melee attacks (at the moment), so they simply run at you unless you provoke them with a gun. That's one of the reasons I recorded the video more than once. I might try and fix that over the coming weeks
You'll actually NEED to dispose of corpses carefully. It's not implemented yet, but the plan is to have corpses generate increasing levels of suspicion as they decompose. If you leave a body in a public place, it will most certainly be found. Leaving a body in the house or apartment you killed them in should also result in dramatically increased chances of discovery, as family and friends would no doubt become concerned when the individual in question doesn't answer the phone or door for days on end.
You ideally should be able to bury them and cover them in lime and other chemicals that reduce the stench of rotting corpses, or incinerate them, cut them up and put them in a vat of acid, horrid things like that. But even these should have a random chance of discovery. Also, the chance of you discovering evidence that you unintentionally drop will be determined by your intelligence. You will have to carefully examine the crime scene and body to ensure you don't leave evidence, and a low intelligence character will miss the less obvious things like hair fibers and such.
Decomposing NPC's will have a circular radius created around them. Let's call it the zone of decay (like Miasma in DF). The zone of decay will expand outwards as time passes. Things like walls, chemicals and other things should slow or stop the radius from expanding further. If another NPC passes over a tile that has the zone of decay trigger on it, they will become suspicious. This will set off another trigger that will make the police automatically seek out the center of the zone. Then they will find the source. This concept can be applied to individual severed limbs as well.
...There definitely should be poisons. Sneak into someone's house, poison the food in their fridge while they're asleep and stalk outside the kitchen window till they wake up and have breakfast. Fire will be in the first release in the form of lighters so you can smoke and burn people with them, but you won't be able play as a firebug, lighting up entire blocks and such, for quite awhile. And you can [burn people's faces with cigarettes] and blow smoke in their faces.
The chain will work like this : Witness has seen your face. Witness has seen you trespass at location X. Witness has seen you light a fire at location X. Witness calls police and gives description of your face and the crimes you committed at location X, as well as the time. So if someone dies at that location due to a fire, they know that it was murder, and they will have your description, which increases heat on your character. It's possible [that I would make it able for the player to frame someone] with the evidence gathering system that I'm creating. Plant other people's DNA at crime scenes and such, but it'd probably end up being too much coding for too little reward.
NPC's will be divided into factions like police, civilians, petty criminals, hardcore criminals and so on.
:
There will also be victim profiles, types of people that your character prefers to target. You could make a Dexter-like character that only wants to kill other murderers, then join the police force and use their resources (criminal database) to find killers. You could also add a trait to make it so that he flat out refuses to kill innocent NPC's unless they try to kill him. There will be range of victim profiles in different categories. You could select fat men with dark hair, or tall, attractive blondes, and you'll be able to set how vigorously your character must adhere to them, so that various penalties and adverse effects will be placed on your character if you don't kill the victims that appeal to your character.
During character generation and nope, the side effects of ignoring the victim prefence won't be permanent unless, of course, your PC decides to take control from you and kill himself over guilt or because you messed up his "master plan" by not killing the types of victims he wanted. Also, the severity of the effects will depend on your characters psychological traits. You'll also be able to select "Anyone" as a preferred victim if you want a character that is able to kill anyone they want without psychological impact.
There will be a cooling off period between murders with the desire to kill ramping back up over time. The need will fluctuate. The penalties for ignoring the need to kill will depend on the psychological traits of your character.
It's hard to see in the video because of the quality, but there's a psychopathy checklist for the PC. The current settings are placeholders that will be overhauled to determine the PC's serial killer "class" as well as their base psychological state. I intend to code a comprehensive list of traits.
The effects of these traits will deepen the longer you deny the urge to kill. Deeply disturbed individuals will be increasingly hard to control no matter what you do, eventually leading to their downfall.
You will have cooling off periods between each murder. Killing the correct victim will create one of these periods, though it will gradually raise as time passes, requiring you to kill again. If you don't, the psychological penalties will begin to apply and your character will begin to lose his mask of sanity, raising suspicion. They might automatically go on a killing spree in front of everyone, or call the cops and scream "I'VE BEEN KILLING PEOPLE!" down the phone. You won't have control when the some of the more extreme penalties kick in. Game over pretty much.
Killing the wrong victim will alter the cool off time in strange ways, requiring you to murder more people or commit specific crimes to regulate it again.
The end result will be that you have total control over just how batshit insane your guy is, and some of the more afflicted characters will be very hard to control with their random desires (which they may automatically act on) to do weird shit that blows their cover and gets them caught.
There will be options to disable these features, as well as mundane traits so you will be able to create "normal" characters or pretty much any type of personality you want.
The crimes of many serial killers are often sexual in nature, so it does beg the question. I'm not particularly enamored with the idea of being the guy with the game where you can rape and sexually torment people, so I guess it's a no for the present time. Slicing and dicing them will have to do. And urinating on them.
You can torture people. Tie them up and whittle them down to nothing, but no, you can't interrogate them for information. Most serial killers don't kill for logical reasons or because they want "information", they do it because they enjoy it and\or are compelled to do it by desires they cannot or don't want to control. But I suppose it's not out of the question to include interrogations way, waaaaay down the track.
I've got no issues with adding child NPC's to the game once I've got some kind of family relationship system and proper schedules set up, so it'll be up to you whether you want to hurt them or not. I draw the line, for the time being, at sexual crimes. Everything else is permissible. If I ever do add sexual crimes, I can guarantee you that you won't be able to perform them on children. That's something I definitely don't want to touch.
Most skills will improve through practice. It'll be like Dwarf Fortress in that respect. Points for the stats will be added once I overhaul the shoddy stat system I'm currently using. I have to work out how to balance them all, and stop the random NPC gib explosions. [For now], the alpha will not contain any limits on the kind of character you create. A few of the stats will be useless though -- charisma and attractiveness, for example. You won't be able to use those until you can actually talk to people.
Nope, no vehicular murder and no traffic on the roads for awhile. You'll be walking everywhere until I come up with other travel options..
I haven't got around to adding an actual hunger stat, but cooking will be in there when I do. Both cannibalism and blood-drinking will be in the game.
I've got the basics down for nailing limbs to walls and objects. Haven't got the time to code it now, but you'll eventually be able to nail/sew/attach limbs (or any objects I guess) to anything, including other NPC's. Hell, sew together thousands of limbs and make a giant pissed off limb monster that cavorts through your dreams feeding on stray hobos. Or cut your own hand off and sew on a butchers knife or hook or something.
Of course, the problem with that is that I have not decided on map creation and how to divide the map itself. I've thought about random generation and I don't want it. The replayability of the game will be in the world interactions and the large amount of distinct characters that can be created. So the ideal way to go about it is to hand craft different districts with as much detail as possible. But the problem with districts is that I'd have to simulate the one's that you aren't present in, which makes the idea I posted above a challenge to implement.
Depends on what I make available for modifying. Like I said, I might include an editor so you can change the attributes of items, NPC's and some of the interactions. The application itself is protected against decompiling but it wouldn't surprise me if someone managed to do just that and added whatever the hell they wanted to.
Okay, to clarify : the initial release version will only have the features that you see in the video, as well as a few extra's that will be added over the next month or so. It will take place in a small test district with five or six houses, including your own. There won't be a day and night cycle : it will always be night. The NPC's will only have simple schedules. They will either sit and watch TV, wander around their house or sleep. The cops will behave exactly as they do in the video. No jail : the game will end if you surrender to them. Each NPC's scream or struggle will create a random chance of the cops arriving. The "You hear sirens!" prompt will be removed so you won't know when they arrive. You will have a simple character creation system, where you can choose your name, appearance and basic stats. The preset characters based on real serial killers have already been removed. There will be basic weapons : blunt weapons and slashing weapons, as well as pistols and shotguns. I'll also try to make it so that you can use severed limbs as weapons.
It will get boring after awhile due to it's initial simplicity. Your enthusiasm is awesome and it will definitely go towards me adding features and tweaking the game based on your ideas, but don't think all the awesome shit being talked about will be available from the get go. There will probably be a substantial delay after the first release, with months passing before new versions are posted. I've got a wife and a full time job, and this is merely a fun little toy that I build and play around with every now and then.
In conclusion, most of the things being discussed will not be available for some time and I have not set any of the future features in stone, so some might be scrapped or changed as time passes. I'm not a professional game designer. I'm an intermediate programmer with messy coding habits and this is my first attempt at any sort of game with actual structure and purpose. I'm used to coding applications.
Extra screenshots:
Author
Topic: Serial Killer Roguelike (Read 120325 times)