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[Jack A T]

If you really want to run around beating people to death in prison, raid the prison from outside.  You even get to bring a real weapon.

I like nenjin's idea.

[cappstv]

I just really want to escape from super prisons.
Of course this has to be as hard as possible.

And may take years in game time. But it would be worth it.

[Jack A T]

Also, we could really use more people mapping.

[Soulwynd]

I dunno why. Maps can be random generated. The mapped areas are similar to what vaults were in angband. I mean, sure we will have a huge diversity of 'vaults' but most of the map will be random.

[nenjin]

I know I'm going through a lot of potential mechanics, but I'm using this sort of as a note pad.

On the heat/evidentiary system.

This system needs to be complex. It relates directly to the core of the game; breaking the law and not getting caught. Of all the things in game, this needs to make sense, be meaningfully complex, and be balanced.

I see 4 questions that relate to evidentiary chain/increase of attention from authorities.
1) What are you doing to generate heat?
2) Do the police know who you are?
3) What evidence have you left behind to convict yourself?
4) How does the game "know" when you're being bad?

I propose 4 stats.

Identity.
Notoriety.
Heat.
Evidence.

Between these 4 stats, I think we can accurately simulate all the aspects of criminal behavior, getting caught and avoiding getting caught.

Heat: How interested authorities are in your activities RIGHT NOW. Higher heat increases the likelihood of police activity near you. This is an important distinction. Notoriety tracks your overall behavior, but heat is a moment-to-moment value.

Notoriety: Your general reputation in the criminal world and elsewhere. This is essentially the player score. The more they do, the higher it gets. What it does is serves as a MULTIPLIER for heat. The higher your notoriety is, the less it takes for police to become actively interested in you, because they want you BAD for the things you've already done.

Evidence: Evidence is what allows authority figures to arrest you and is factored into your trial results. It is rated on a scale of 1 to 100. When you commit a crime, you generally leave evidence. DNA. Witnesses. Descriptions of yourself. Footprints. Ect... Better skills or stats would reduce the amount of evidence you generate. Some activities would generate much less evidence than others. Some activities, like attacking a police officer, generate maximum evidence. Some items or behaviors might REDUCE evidence, like changing clothes, wearing disguises ect... NOT doing somethings might increase the rate of evidence gain. Like not wearing a disguise to a bank robbery where there are security cameras.

Identity: If the cops aren't there when you commit crimes, they need to identify you before they arrest you. This stat would govern whether or not police officers try to arrest you on sight. It can be increased by doing or not doing some things, just like evidence gain. DNA and finger prints for example, are as good as as photo ID these days. And identity can be decreased by taking certain actions. The game should store certain things like what the player was wearing, so when they change the identity value drops.

All these values except notoriety would degrade over time. More later.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

I'm out of commission until further notice. I simply can't wrap my head around the absurdity of the current situation I'm facing.

[nuker w]

Hmm. This is in Lua i'm guessing? I'm ok with See Plus Plus if you need anything like that. I might have a look into Lua and try and give you lot a hand.

NINJA EDIT: Yea, i'm in. Realised i've done this to a degree before anyway. So count me in.

[Kusgnos]

I'm out of commission until further notice. I simply can't wrap my head around the absurdity of the current situation I'm facing.

You'll be okay. Take a good rest!

In regards to Nenjin's heat system, I think it's pretty...pretty damn good. So if every single crime were assigned a heat value, every little slip up in evidence was assigned an evidence and identity value, it'd make the system work out. To make it more complex, each district could have different rates of police response, depending on how crime-filled the area was. I'd say that an area with more crime has less chance of police intervention, but more chance that the people there are going to be prepared.

Disposing of clothing and switching outfits sounds very interesting. It'd be even more interesting if police might mistake bystanders for you, if that particular npc was wearing an outfit like yours when you committed the crime. It'd also give people incentives to obtain/buy clothing and wear as much as they could, so after committing the crime, they could ditch the cap, hoodie, and gloves, and significantly lessen the chance of cops nabbing them based on the identity stat.

The heat system of the game, like Lap originally said, is meant to be one of the central cores of it. So this sounds good to me. I like it!

EDIT: Also, for those who are too lazy to get the tortoise SVN client set up to download all the goodies in our Sourceforge SVN, I've posted some of the sprites up in the blog. http://crimelike.blogspot.com/

[nenjin]

I think we easily have enough items, descs and floor plans for an alpha. Now we need to hash out mechanics and get the coding started. I.e. all the hard stuff.

More on Identity, Notoriety, Evidence and Heat:

Identity and Evidence: Anyone who sees you commit a crime adds to your identity and evidence score (even something like pulling out a gun.) You can immediately remove those increases by killing that person. But their body too generates some evidence if it's not destroyed (say placed in the dump.)

Killing anyone creates evidence. Certain items (Chainsaw, certain guns, ect..), certain combat methods (HTH, biting?) or certain deaths will generate more or less than average evidence because they are more or less noticeable. (Modus Operendi)

When YOU get wounded, it generates more than average evidence, and generates some identity as well. This evidence and identity can only be removed by a time consuming clean up action, and may be based on skill. Something like "Forensics" knowledge should be the primary determiner of how much evidence you leave and identity you generate when you kill and when you clean up. 

Certain objects, like security cameras, will increase identity and evidence hits when you commit a crime near them. This value however should be modified by whether the player is wearing a mask or face covering. An If X then Y but if Z then A statement.

At a certain threshold of identity, say 100%, every law enforcement officer that sees you will recognize you. Others may recognize you too.

Other ideas for reducing evidence/identity per crime increase, or after the fact: burning down houses to destroy evidence, changing clothing or appearance, wearing masks and disguises. Hacking police databases and destroying evidence.

Heat and Notoriety: When you complete criminal actions, you generate both heat and notoriety. The action committed determines the extent of both. Heat determines how large of a police response is called to any criminal action, and is factored in with identity to gauge when police forces raid your safe house. Certain people should choose not to deal with you if your heat is too high.

Notoriety is a long-term modifier that affects heat, but also dictates a lot of other things that can happen to you. High notoriety may make you the target of other criminals as well. It might serve as a "level" to get access to more connected drug dealers, weapon dealers, fences and the like. It might have an effect on your results in prison.

Long term scales for heat and notoriety:

Heat should have a llllaaaarrrrgeeee scale, and be fractional in increases, because we don't want it giving you 1 out 100 total possible for heat for every item you steal, or every drug deal you make. There needs to be pacing involved in heat gain, so the increase in police attention is noticeable by the player. Heat gained from criminal actions might also be increased under certain circumstances, like performing actions in front of cops. We could approach the situation like in real life...what kinds of behaviors would get police VERY interested in that particular suspect, very quickly. Suicide bomber vest? AK47? A Tank? There are all sorts of places we can tie things into these mechanics, while keeping a lot of it from the player.

Notoriety likewise needs to have a large scale to accommodate paced game play, since it and heat are intrinsically tied. Heat should be able to spike independently of notoriety. Notoriety should probably have the largest scale of all.

All things, probably even notoriety, should decay over time.
Laying low should really be a benefit. There should be a rest option, of sorts, where the player just has to pay upkeep for their living space and food, so they can bleed off the attention from epic criminal feats. That said, Heat, Identity and Evidence should be able to go to values above 100%, so the player can really go over board and not know it. Evidence should probably decay slower than everything else, since law enforcement keeps that information for a long time (Finger Print databases and DNA databases) and evidence will need to be used in any trial system.

A hierarchy of stats for coders, of sorts.

Notoriety
  Evidence
    Identity
       Heat

Foreseeable issues: The game is going to have to recognize when something has been done once and shouldn't be counted against the player a second time. Killing multiple people should increases all the relevant scores. Pulling out your gun, putting it away and pulling out again shouldn't be two crimes. So tracking criminal behavior has to be tied to actors somehow, where each object and each person witnessing a crime tracks what's been done and knows to exclude the right redundant actions. It would be helpful I think if all that information is deleted when the player changes areas, leaving only the modified Identity, Heat, ect.. scores, so the game isn't have to track a ton of shit building up over time.

How I see it working:

Player stands at house. All scores are at zero. Player is totally unskilled and totally unprotected against identity/evidence. (No gloves, no hood, no mask, no jump suit.)
Player forces entry into the house. (Heat +1, Evidence +5, Identity +5)
Player steals objects. (Heat +5, Evidence + 5, Identity +5, Notoriety +5)
Home-owner sees player. Player is trespassing. (Heat +5, Evidence +10, Identity +15)
Home owner hits player with a bat. (Evidence +10, Identity +10)
Player kills home owner with knife. (Evidence -10, Identity -15, Heat +20, Notoriety +20)
Corpse created (Evidence +10)
Player takes body and runs, and buries it at the garbage dump. Corpse destroyed (Evidence -10)

Result for this one combined burglary/murder: Heat: 31/10,000*, Evidence: 20/100*, Identity: 20/100*, Notoriety: 25/100,000*

*Theoretical maximums

What I think this system can accomplish:

With different possible combinations of scores, I think you arrive at different kinds of criminals.

Low notoriety, high identity, high evidence, high heat = A new punk about to spend some time in prison.
High notoriety, high identity, low evidence, low heat = The notorious criminal the authorities know about, but can't touch for lack of everything.
High notoriety, low identity, low evidence, high heat = The professional, anonymous criminal cops lose sleep over at night.
High notoriety, low identity, high evidence, high heat = The accomplished but sloppy criminal who the authorities just need to identify before they've nailed them.
Low everything = either a new criminal or a criminal who has been in hiding so long, virtually everything about them has been forgotten.
High everything = A criminal mastermind that's not going down without a fight.
High notoriety, low everything else = The legendary criminal that can't be touched. KAISER SOZE!!111

I think you arrive at a pretty good spread of criminal types through this. That there are many aspects that play off each metric will add layers of depth for people to get into, characters specialized manipulate the system in different ways. With notoriety we don't even need levels, we just need an xp pool for skills and perhaps stat growth. Notoriety will in the end control the pace of the game and how fast the power scale is doled out to the player.

[Acanthus117]

Goodness, you have this IN DE BAGH, MON

I can imagine playing 1.0...

OH MY

[head]

As soon as the source code is on the svn.

I can get cracking.

[nuker w]

Hmm. If you killed someone (and they made no sound), how would the Cop's know to come?

[nenjin]

We'd need a separate mechanic for police response. Weapon + Time of fight + random NPC shouting = alert. Location and heat determine response time.

But let's say you kill them in their sleep. The effect of that is abstracted. Nothing is generated but the evidence of the body and any evidence you leave. Let's say you do nothing and just leave the body there. You assume someone finds it eventually, the cops are called, it is investigated, ect... I don't know if putting a time delay on that would be doable or not, so we assume all the scores for evidence, notoriety (word of you killing spreading) ect... apply immediately. Because word essentially travels instantaneously, the scales for stuff need to be really large so players don't notice it as much.

[Deon]

If we used LCS-style districts, all "body finding" stuff could happen after you leave it.

Just make "green zones" which are likely to be visited (streets, stores, public places), yellow zones where they CAN be found and orange red zones where they have little luck to be discovered, based on the map features.

Also if the person has no relatives/job, he shouldn't be found until late time when neighbours start to notice a pile of milk bottles near his door or the fact that his car is in garage but there're no lights during the night and something else like that.

[Soadreqm]

A mechanic for hiding corpses with a chance of someone finding them later would be cool. I think CrimsonKing's fake plans had something like that.

The numbers would have to scale enough to represent virtually any level of wanted-ness possible, yes? From petty vandalism to stealing a purse to shooting down the president's airplane during takeoff. Pretty much any action should probably only increase the counters to a certain level, after which the cops wouldn't really give a shit. Even if you shoplift infinity times, you would never get the FBI after you.

If this grows sophisticated, some kind of news feature would be cool. Gruesome murder headlines, mentions of missing persons, stuff like that. Also, disguises and disguise skill sound like they could be quite integral to evading capture. Being insanely good at disguises and being a legendary master thief to the tune of Arsene Lupin sounds like it would be cool. A lot of people have seen your face, but it never looks the same. And you leave calling cards on the crime scenes and send letters to the newspapers describing your burglaries.

Would it be worth it to add some kind of public support mechanic at some point? So that you could be either a notorious mass murderer or a merry outlaw. Like, if you make a point of never killing anyone, and maybe made a big show of things with stuff like leaving notes for the police to find, the papers would adore you. The police would still try to catch you, although they might be less inclined to shoot you on sight than if you were wanted for an orphanage massacre. A similar mechanic would be needed for being a vigilante; if you only killed criminals, the criminal underworld would start hating you. I'm not sure what good public opinion would actually do, but it'd be neat to be able to play a "good guy" if you really wanted to, and have the game acknowledge it.

Maybe split notoriety among factions? So that every group would have their own "I hate this guy"-counter, and some groups would hate some actions more. The lawful authorities would probably want you caught no matter what you do, but it should be more conditional to things like criminal syndicates and large corporations and whatnot. Maybe even have kind of meta-groups that aren't working together but kind of occupy the same niche. "This guy has a habit of murdering drug dealers, so I don't want to do business with him."