Covet - Multiplayer Stealth Game inspired by Thief: The Dark Project

Original post was posted on July 11th and can be found here @ReachingPerfection.com

Join the Covet Mailing List to get updates and to join in on weekly public prototype testing. It is how I keep track of those interested. Updates go out on Wednesdays.

So all my life I've wanted to play a game that took the concept of Thief: The Dark Project (a stealth game about stealing artifacts and other such loot from various people) and apply it towards a multiplayer game. Last year around September/October I finally discovered a set of mechanics that can work together to create the experience that I wanted to create. I've been hashing out the design details for almost a year now and about a month ago I started on a prototype for it. Today (my 24th birthday) I introduce my new game concept (prototype in progress) to the world. Read on for a basic jist of the game.


The Initial Inspiration

Thief: The Dark Project (and the sequels) is all about sneaking past a ton of enemies using your black jack and other tools in order to obtain loot for some particular goal. Not only did you have to not be seen, but you had to not be heard while getting to it and you had to leave with it. Thief was the first series to truly introduce the concept of light and sound to create a unique first person experience. Stealth games nowadays are all about sneaking around and killing people. Thief plays off to similar characteristics, but focused more on avoidance, observation, and reconnaissance. I wanted a multiplayer experience like this. A game where players didn't actively stalk each other, instead they actively avoided each other and diminish their wealth without them realizing it immediately.


The Core Mechanics

With the concept of wanting people to steal from each other, there has always been the issue of player's loosing their stuff while offline or while they were off stealing stuff for themselves. Basically in either situation, stealing isn't hard. I wanted to build that tension on you always having a chance to get caught. So how do I get players to be online and not go stealing stuff for themselves for extended periods of time? Last year it finally dawned on me. A player's skill is directly tied to their wealth, but their wealth/skill is not based on what they carry or have done... their wealth is instead based on what they have invested in their house. A beautiful and large mansion with tons of vases/decorations/statues/etc is the sign of a successful player.

Your House

A player's house is a visual representation of a player's skill to increase their wealth. This concept plays similar to when player's make gorgeous works of art in Minecraft to show off, or build an awesome farm/restaurant/whatever in Farmville or similar games, or they buy a house and fill it with unique artifacts in Skyrim. Your house is your "proof of awesome". And if you don't add to your house then it doesn't count towards your representation of skill. You can steal everything you want, but if it isn't in your house then no one knows or cares. When you build your house it takes a couple seconds to add to it for each piece. So to add a wall you have to sit there for say 5 seconds while you "build" the wall. This time sink is important to keep you pre-occupied and distracted from what may really be going on. The way you build your house is a unique system and what I've been working on for the past month. It involves a more complex system to minecraft and instead of cubes it uses hexagonal prisms. I'll cover this in more detail later.

The Thieves

While you take time to add to you house you are ALWAYS in an online session (I am planning on a helpful offline counter part). At anytime while you are building any other player may join your game. House owners will NOT receive a notification. Thieves spawn a good distance away from the house in the darkness. At that time they can choose to do whatever they want. They can stay on the outskirts and observe the layout from afar, start sneaking around your house to find valuables, stalk you for more information, etc. At anytime the house owner may "boot" any thieves in their view with a direct line of sight within a particular range by holding the relevant button for somewhere around 1-3 seconds. Sometimes a house owner can just have a hunch that a thief is in front of them, or more often they will see them. "Booting" a thief from your property promptly respawns them at the outskirts of your house. They may choose to retry (knowing that you already know that they are around) or they can choose to leave and find a new house to try. There are more mechanics to being a Thief, but that will be discussed later.

The Artifacts

There is a special kind of "artifact" that exists in this game. These "artifacts" create a gold piece (or whatever currency) every minute or so and it holds the gold piece until it is "harvested". A new gold piece will not form in an "artifact" that already has one, so in order to keep a steady flow of income you must continuously harvest your "artifacts" when they refill. These "artifacts" are the real trophies as they increase your potential money flow. These can be taken by thieves. You can only carry so much gold in your coin purse at one time so you must also keep spending your gold in order to maximize your cash flow (so you can't just sit there and keep harvesting). Because you must keep "harvesting" gold from your artifacts, smart thieves can stalk you to figure out where you are keeping them. If you sense a thief is following you, then you could potentially also trick them in various ways like revealing their self by turning the corner and spinning around as they round the corner. These "artifacts" haven't been named or anything yet so stay tuned.

The Leaderboards

There is no true finite end goal of Covet. This game is about bragging rights. Leaderboards play a huge role in how players play. There will be 3 main leaderboards for sure (and possibly some smaller auxiliary ones). The main leaderboards are total value on your property, total square "footage" (or whatever units) on your property, and value per square "footage" (with minimums of course). These leaderboards will be easily accessible (like on the main menu when you login). The players at the top of the leaderboards will become the biggest targets. So the richer you get the higher chance that you will attract thieves. These leaderboards are also not traditional global leaderboards stored on the server. I designed a new leaderboard system just for this game. More on that later.

The Fence and UNIQUES

The Fence is your only NPC interaction in the game. He is mister know-it-all with his nose in everything. He interacts with you and other thieves. Some of his services will go to the highest bidder whether it be you or a Thief skulking around your property. He is also your store and your information highway. He sees Thieves that take stuff from you and can disclose their name based on some conditions. Thieves can also get info from him when they join your session like if any major UNIQUES are in your house that may be worth hunting for. These UNIQUES will be a one-of item that can drastically increase the total value of your property, they also serve as motivation quests for thieves that stumble onto your estate. UNIQUES will more than likely come out every week or month or so and they may involve community creation/design as well. Like some ancient sword or some gorgeous statue made by a community member.


Community Driven

I'm no idiot when it comes to game design. I know how important community feedback is and how important interfacing with the community is. I want the community to be part of the process. The community will playtest the prototype/alpha/beta/release candidate, they will offer suggestions and feedback, they will help make decisions, and they will help market the game. From start to finish and through its lifetime I want the community involved.


Technical Details

I am currently developing Covet with the Unity Engine. I purchased a Commercial License a couple weeks back so I am good to go on publishing. My target platforms are PC, Web, Steam, and the Ouya Console. In the future I will be looking at extending the supported platforms to things like XBL, Mac, Linux, and extensions for mobile devices. We shall see how things pan out.


How To Get Involved

Social interfacing is extremely important so I've started up a mailing list to begin the process of informing the world of Covet's development. Join this mailing list and tell your friends in the future I will be adding more social channels like Facebook, Twitter, etc. For now email will be your main source until things pick up a bit:

• Covet Mailing List [Covet@ReachingPerfection.com] - This email address is your most important resource. Every week I will send out an update with things like current plans, screenshots, videos, asking opinions, various important updates, etc. All emails will be sent to you BCC so your email address will no be shown to anyone else.

The mailing list is how I interface with you, but interfacing with each other is just as important to build friendships and begin a strong community foundation. I've setup a section on our forums specifically for Covet discussion. Here you can talk about your excitement, your ideas, your thoughts on stuff sent out in the mailing list, similar games, respond to polls, put forth fan made artwork, etc. Register and join in on the discussion. Be the pioneers of the Covet Community.

Register Here

Covet Discussion Forum


Screenshots


Spiral staircase tower I built just for the fun of it:




[Global Lighting ON] Outside of the spiral staircase tower:




Quick house I through together for a screenshot:




[Global Lighting ON] House design a friend/tester is working on

 

This sounds really awesome, I have been thinking about such a game for some time.
I cant wait to try it out!
Thumbs up for a good description.

 

Thanks Fennris. The game is actually publicly playable at all times throughout development from prototype to alpha to beta to release candidate. I update it weekly. Right now it is just the house creation system, but every week I add something more. Tomorrow I'm updating with save/load code for the house creation and next week I should have basic multiplayer stuff in place; server, chat, join session, etc.

Part of my goal as a developer is to be as transparent as possible and to allow the community to play it often and give feedback early so that way feedback actually matters. As a gamer I've always hated offering a suggesting that gets the response of "It is too late in development to implement that". So this is my way of countering that.

I would love to have your input bro and if you aren't already on the Covet Mailing List that is how I keep track of everyone interested and I send out the weekly updates through that. There are also tons of discussions on our Covet forums for fleshing out details and making sure exploitable scenarios are prevented.

 

That is quite a post you have made.
It is good to see someone taking the time to plan what they are going to do.

 

Love thief game series so looking forward to this one!
Tested the prototype and its nice so far, you cant remove walls? Also when you place a window close to your own position you wont get any glass in it, is that by design or a bug?
Also you might want to post a link to the latest prototype to get some more feedback.

 

Did that, and I will definitely try it out later.

 

Interesting concept.

 

There are several reasons for not being able to remove major structural pieces yet... both technical and design. On the technical side I am using a custom dynamic "CombineChildren" method that caches the mesh data of several objects and then uses them to construct objects and add them to premade material meshes on the fly. This saves on draw calls and was my only real option since dynamic batching doesn't work with deferred rendering and shadows and static batching/"CombineChildren" weren't options because objects are created on the fly. This is important because real time shadows hurts performance like crazy and it will always have to be a conscious battle against it as I move forward and learn better ways to improve performance. In the future I will be indexing every object made and the location of mesh data in order to be able to delete objects in the future.

Design wise I want players to be invested in their design decisions and suffer from consequences when they first start out to encourage a learning process. There will be a daydream mode in which they can pre-design their house in a globally lit environment (they can't see thieves in this mode) and they can add/delete placeholder pieces wherever they want with no restraints. When they feel comfortable in certain pieces they can go back to regular mode and add the piece permanently. There is a few second time sink (to pre-occupy you for thieves to have windows of opportunity) that allows you to change your mind before it is completed. Permanent structural additions also allows thieves to memorize house layouts and recognize it the more they visit it. They could also build hand made maps of houses they visit often and share this info with friends. Later on a player can sell their house (keeping the valuables if they so choose) and start from scratch w/ the money they got and using what they learned from their mistakes while trying out a new design or modifying their original.


As for the window that is a bug that relates to sketchup exporting and backface culling. I plan on attempting to fix it when I go back to rescale pieces. Now that it has switched from third person to first things feel much more claustrophobic and making things bigger is a good thing for combating performance issues as it spreads out light sources meaning less in the viewing frustum at a time.


As for the link not being present in the post, I did that on purpose. It allows me to help control the flow of info to testers ensuring that a good portion of them know what is going on when the test it. I don't want people just jumping in and playing the prototype without knowing the end goals as the mechanics are what matter here not the technical prowess. The mailing list is my way of controlling that flow of information. If you sign up for the mailing list I can keep them up-to-date and help direct towards other important information and keep track of everyone interested. This also ensures that those that are testing it are those that are actually interested in the concept. I definitely risk not having as many testers or as much feedback, but in the end I get more quality informed testers and more relevant feedback and weed out the riff-raff along the way. lol... Hope that makes sense.

Good to hear Fennris.

Thanks zero, if it is interesting enough I would love to have you on the mailing list so you can watch it evolve.

 

Well sketchup sucks for using with 3d games, i would recommend that you change to something else cause it will hurt performance in the long run. Cant wait for a bit more gameplay : )

 

I plan on it in the future. I'm just very used to sketchup and since I'm heavily focused as a designer with regular programming as a career I just wanted to get the idea out and on playable first and just improve it as I go. Having something to play with from the get go that is ever improving keeps motivation and allows visible quick weekly progress. I plan on learning Blender for more efficient models in the future. Thanks for the recommendation Virror.

Today I'm putting out an update that includes the rudimentary house saving/loading code using player prefs (since browser is a current focus). Next week is where I should have a basic server, join session (may not be with other players... lol or players that skate), and a global text chat enabled. I'm still very new to game programming, but I've dabbled in Lidgren already for another project so I know the jist of it and am fairly confident I can get something going by next Wednesday for the update. Thanks for your support everyone.

 

Your project sounds interesting and well conceived. But please follow the Work in Progress posting rules and post screenshots or a web player of your game so we can see the 'Work in Progress'.

 

My apologies, I was unaware. To keep with the controlled flow of information through the mailing list I've opted to leave out the webplayer link (at least for now until the game is in a playable alpha state) and I've posted up screenshots from the past two versions. I'll update the screenshots accordingly as time goes on.

Thanks for the heads up Meltdown.