Games Open World Thief-like game

My motivation for posting here is to make the effort to connect with the Unity community.

The game is untitled and I'm mainly working out the visuals at the moment with a little scripting here and there as I develop the mechanics. It's a bit Thief meets Skyrim and will hopefully be character-driven with diverse settings. I'm just gonna post some pics now, feel free to ask any questions.

 

Looks great!

 

Thanks Raven.

 

Nice! By Thief do you mean the 2014 reboot or the classics?

 

Oh the classics for sure. But I haven't played the latest version. It looks pretty but there's a vibe missing - Thief 3 had it and The Dark Mod had it too. I wouldn't pretend I can match those games but it's certainly an influence.

 

Nice! I'm a huge fan of the classics too. Probably the closest recent game I've played in terms of mechanics was Alien: Isolation. The biggest design choice that marks things like Thief, A:I and classic Splinter Cell games as great stealth games is the inability to go into direct combat. The first two Thief games had such clunky sword fighting mechanics that meant it was exceedingly difficult to win in direct combat. That factor, more than any bonuses or different endings (like what Dishonored did) is what made it an exciting stealth game for me. You have to hide, or you probably won't survive.

 

Looks cool! Always been a fan of stealth games. I'm excited about how you're implementing the stealth outline mechanic. Are all enemies going to have that outline or only enemies of interest? I recall in Dishonored they used a similar mechanic but it had a time limit, given the obvious strength behind abilities like that.

 

Do you mean the visual/shader outline-like glow that appears around enemies or objects you can interact with?

if so then - I do plan on doing that. Haven't quite figured out how yet, but I'm trying different things. Toon Shader seems the obvious choice - will look into that next.

Also, I was gonna post an update anyway so here are some pics of the new level I built (doesn't look very Thief-y at the moment, I know, I'm just finding it much easier to build with the lights on):

At the moment I'm prototyping object interactions with plain text and things turning yellow. If my poor old laptop can manage I'll post an OBS capture of the interactions/animations so far. I was trying to do everything with Rigidbodies and full user control but it's beyond me and the meagre assets I use to cheat, so I've opted for much smoother animation and simple triggers where possible.
(Apart from using the quite excellent Rigidbody Pickup script from the asset store).
At some point I want to prototype some physics puzzles with the pickup script for getting through dungeons and sneaking and stuff.

The knife above is part of a 3-choice system where players are guided to a chest and pick one of 3 items: a knife, a torch or a set of keys. The choice determines how you approach the rest of the game. Or at least up to a point. I'll be prototyping that over the next few days and it will likely also form the basis for the menu system - and eventually the interaction-system as well.

 

Here's a short playlist of some things I've been working on: general environment set-ups, basic mechanics prototyping, characters, interaction-highlighting, tools, carrying objects, sneaking and staring at things for extended periods.

 

A bit rushed but hopefully good enough for my Unite Melb submission....