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Serial Killer Roguelike (WIP)

Joined
Dec 31, 2009
Messages
9
SERIAL KILLER
roguelike

This is my first attempt at creating a roguelike, and I've been working on it off and on for nearly five months now. It began life as a Dexter roguelike, though I recently decided to generalize the game. As the title suggests, you play as a serial killer. The concept is grisly, though I wanted to try something unique when I started making it.

It's still early days though I have a videothat demonstrates some of the core features that I've implemented thus far. It uses a graphical tileset that I scavenged them from various free sets. I'll add better tiles at a later point.

Current features :

* Basic material system and combat, heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress. I've made skin, blood, oxygen and vital organ\artery layers, with more to come. You can remove any limb (eventually any vital organs as well), and characters can die from blood loss or suffocation. A limited number of bones can be broken at the present, but all it does is create pain which raises the chances of stunning and incapacitation. The system is considerably buggy at the moment. I recently bit someone and his entire body basically exploded into individual pieces.

* Character stats. Strength, agility, intelligence, charisma and attractiveness, health, sleep level, fatigue level and mental state are implemented. Mental states change depending on your actions and surroundings and will eventually be influenced by other factors like alcohol and drug use.

* Basic line of sight and stealth. Will be overhauled down the line.

* Crime tracking. Crimes in progress are tracked while you're committing them. These crimes will disappear if you go unnoticed. If a witness spots you committing a crime, they will call the police. If you commit a crime and leave the area before a cop or anyone else notices you, the crime disappears.

* Weapons. Only a limited number so far. Basic attacks are punch, kick and bite. Slashing weapons are implemented. Guns are there, though they are massively bugged at the moment.

* Targeted attacks. Attack specific body parts, with varying chances of success (and different effects) depending on your strength, agility, opponent and weapon. Characters can block your blows and can attempt to take your weapon from you.

* Basic AI. Civilian characters will either run, attack you or call for help when they spot you committing a crime. Victims scream at various volumes depending on what you're doing to them. Neighbors \ witnesses will call the police if they hear these, as demonstrated in the video. The current police are merely placeholders that spawn at the edge of the test district, moving to the scene of whatever crime you were seen or heard committing.

* Evidence. You can leave evidence at the scene of the crime, like bloody shoe prints, hand prints, bodily fluids, so on. There are no repercussions... yet.

The eventual goal is to create a large city with a day and night cycle, populated by NPC's who adhere to schedules. The NPC's will be clustered into factions (civilian, police, criminals, so on), so you can, if you wish, play like Dexter and find criminals to kill rather than civilians. I also plan to add day jobs that you can use to make money, as well as real estate to buy.
The police will eventually be overhauled, and they will investigate evidence you leave behind and try to establish a profile. The heat you receive will drastically increase if you kill people openly or fail to dispose of bodies before they are found. More heat will mean more police officers on the street, faster arrival time for police traveling to crime scenes and so on, which should provide a considerable degree of challenge.
 

BethesdaLove

Arbiter
Joined
Aug 7, 2008
Messages
1,998
WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU STEALING MAH IDEAS?!
WHAT NEXT? AN INSECT RL?

edit1

In my head, the most important part of the game had to be the police. The center of attention should be your wanted rating. Kinda the aim of the game to survive long enough with the highest possible attention on you.

edit2
Add an option to severe all bodyparts in one go. Its just tedious if you want to cut the body in pieces but have to do it one by one.
Also, if selected shooting, make the cursor automatically go to the nearest target.
I like how you can kill yourself. =)

edit3
where is the download link?
 
Joined
Dec 31, 2009
Messages
9
:O

My apologies, good sir.

Actually, an insect roguelike would be frelling awesome. Spider RL. You have to weave webs in different patterns to catch food, find the ideal nesting place, protect your shit from other predators, hatch a brood and so on. Awesome.

Edit

BethesdaLove said:
In my head, the most important part of the game had to be the police. The center of attention should be your wanted rating. Kinda the aim of the game to survive long enough with the highest possible attention on you.

That's basically the point of the game. You'll attract a great deal of attention if you don't dispose of bodies in an orderly fashion, or if you go on messy, random killing sprees. The police will aggressively seek you out, using witnesses to your crimes, evidence you left at the scene and other factors to find you. They'll patrol more diligently and arrive at crime scenes much faster if they know there's a serial killer about, so your margin for error drastically reduces during play.

There is no download link because it's a work in progress. Once it's stable and fully playable, I'll release it, though I don't know how long it will take. I posted the video here and at roguetemple for feedback on the controls, UI and such so I can improve what I've done so far.

BethesdaLove said:
edit2
Add an option to severe all bodyparts in one go. Its just tedious if you want to cut the body in pieces but have to do it one by one.
Also, if selected shooting, make the cursor automatically go to the nearest target.

First is easy. As for selected shooting snapping to the nearest target, I can do that. Something like push X and it cycles targets from nearest to farthest.
 

Unradscorpion

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Joined
May 19, 2008
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I'd play that, only it seems strange that a man watching television on his own would laugh
 

Castanova

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Where is the game, though? Roguelikes generally have very well-defined goals and I don't see any described here. I don't think it'd remain very much fun to wander around a city killing alphabet people for more than an hour.
 
Joined
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Messages
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Castanova said:
Where is the game, though? Roguelikes generally have very well-defined goals and I don't see any described here. I don't think it'd remain very much fun to wander around a city killing alphabet people for more than an hour.

Think of it as an ultra-violent version of Unreal World. The only true goal is to survive as long as possible.

Though I am planning on adding various randomly generated contracts and jobs for the factions that I intend to implement, so you don't have to mindlessly go around killing NPC's. The final release will be more of an open ended crime simulator than a straight up serial killer game. For example, you will be able to work as a contract killer for an organized crime family, a police officer (randomly generated crimes to try and foil), a thief (break into homes, businesses, steal and sell their goods to other criminals and pawn shops), a psychologist (provided you pick the required education trait) who eats his patients, so on.

Also, feel free to provide goals or any features you think would add to the game.
 

Castanova

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Well, in Unreal World you need to survive. In a serial killer RPG, you don't need to be a serial killer to survive, necessarily. Will you put in some kind of "hunger" meter like Dexter has where after a few months he starts getting the itch to kill someone and if he doesn't scratch the itch he risks doing something he regrets?

Also, I have somewhat of a hard time picturing how your kills will be done. If you've "mastered" the game, then you should be able to kill people with no fear of being caught which kind of takes the fun out of it. This seems especially true if the game is randomized rather than each kill being hand-crafted by you.

I don't know - I just don't picture the life of a serial killer being all that suspenseful. 99% of the time you're a normal person and it's not like you're outrunning the police constantly or anything. Basically, you've gotten away with the crimes... until you haven't. I think changing the focus to something like being a contract killer (a RL version of Hitman, let's say) would go far in livening it up.
 
Joined
Dec 31, 2009
Messages
9
Castanova said:
Well, in Unreal World you need to survive. In a serial killer RPG, you don't need to be a serial killer to survive, necessarily. Will you put in some kind of "hunger" meter like Dexter has where after a few months he starts getting the itch to kill someone and if he doesn't scratch the itch he risks doing something he regrets?

Indeed, 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. There'll be delusional types that see hallucinations, traits that automatically make your character perform actions (psychotics who randomly scream or take off all their clothes in the middle of a crowd), things like that.
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 down fall.

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 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.

Castanova said:
Also, I have somewhat of a hard time picturing how your kills will be done. If you've "mastered" the game, then you should be able to kill people with no fear of being caught which kind of takes the fun out of it. This seems especially true if the game is randomized rather than each kill being hand-crafted by you.

It will be difficult to master killing in the game. Mistakes are almost always made by real serial killers, even those who are well practiced at what they do, and the way I'm creating the game will reflect this. I will, after releasing a test version for feedback, find ways to make the game throw obstacles in your way to make successfully murdering NPC's a challenge.

Castanova said:
I don't know - I just don't picture the life of a serial killer being all that suspenseful. 99% of the time you're a normal person and it's not like you're outrunning the police constantly or anything. Basically, you've gotten away with the crimes... until you haven't. I think changing the focus to something like being a contract killer (a RL version of Hitman, let's say) would go far in livening it up.

Well, I figured the game wouldn't appeal to everyone.
 

snoek

Cipher
Joined
May 5, 2003
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Belgium, bro
This makes my day a little more, keep up the good work & deliver us something worthwile, pretty please :)
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Looks really nice. When can we reckon with the first playable version? What I've seen in the video already looks good enough to publish (and people can always help weeding out bugs).
 

Oggez_Rashas

Novice
Joined
Aug 25, 2010
Messages
12
Wow dude that's actually quite spectacular. I want to play it RHAT NAHW. Hell I'll bugtest it for you free of charge if you want. A few quick notes.

1: From your posts it seems implied (from words such as "bodily fluids" and by making sexuality a characteristic of their profile, and the fact that the killer in your video carried rope) that rape, murder, and things of that nature (in fact it's such an inseperable part of serial killer psychology that it would just wouldn't make sense to have a serial killer game without it.). I'm not saying it's a feature I'm looking forward to specifically, but what am am saying is that a game where you can run around raping and murdering at random before stopping by the coffee shop for a snack and then prancing through the local elementary school with a semiautomatic rifle just might makes some people very very angry. But if you're prepared for that, go nuts, the more in depth a game is and the more freedom you have as a player the better (even if it does make controls a little daunting to beginners).

2: I CAN NOT WAIT to play a hardboiled detective who apprehends criminals strictly with groin kicking (and a no-armed detective who fights soley with groin kicks would just be icing on the cake). Because that is HILARIOUS

3: I think you should consider biting people with explosive results to be a feature, not a bug.

4: I'm certain that I had more notes/questions but they've slipped my mind... I'll bring them up later if I can remember.

P.S. Dear forensic psychologists, I know that not all serial killers' crimes are sexual in nature, I'm just saying that a large amount of them are.
 
Joined
Feb 19, 2008
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Hell yes! Always wanted to be Zsasz.

Zsasz_Small.jpg
 

Oggez_Rashas

Novice
Joined
Aug 25, 2010
Messages
12
NOW I remember! I was going to ask you to PLEASE make another video? I've watched the first one about five times now, and I think I've gleaned every little detail I could.
 
Joined
Dec 31, 2009
Messages
9
First alpha version will be released within a one to two month time frame, depending on how quickly I can fix some of the problems. Could be a bit longer, shorter, don't know. I also want to add a few more basic features before releasing it.

Sexual crimes will not be included for now, but I have yet to decide whether this will change in the future.

If someone doesn't like the premise of the game they have the choice not to play it. Simple as that. It's a freeware roguelike and there is no law or legal clause that prohibits a game that simulates the life of a serial killer, and I most certainly do not subscribe to the theory that violent games can push people towards committing actual crimes. I believe, and if the literature I've read on the subject is worth anything, that you have to be severely disturbed to begin with to seriously contemplate murder for fun, or for any other reason than self defense in the most extreme of circumstances. I think some people prefer to shift blame to external factors rather than accepting the fact that some people are literally monsters.

I, myself, am horrified by the ugliness of the crimes committed by real life serial killers. I'm not condoning their actions in any way by making a game about them, and chopping people up in said game does not mean I would ever do it in real life, or encourage anyone else to.
 

Oggez_Rashas

Novice
Joined
Aug 25, 2010
Messages
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I never said you did good sir. In fact, I encourage the project wholeheartedly, and I find serial killers and their actions just as distasteful as the next guy. As for the sex crime topic, I encourage that as well, because A: Like I said earlier it's a neigh-inseperable aspect of serial killers, B: You just plain wouldn't be using the system's full potential. The way I see it, as long as you're not portraying it as positive (or God forbid comedic) it should be fine... if a little disturbing.
 

Zed

Codex Staff
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Codex USB, 2014
Oggez_Rashas said:
I never said you did good sir. In fact, I encourage the project wholeheartedly, and I find serial killers and their actions just as distasteful as the next guy. As for the sex crime topic, I encourage that as well, because A: Like I said earlier it's a neigh-inseperable aspect of serial killers, B: You just plain wouldn't be using the system's full potential. The way I see it, as long as you're not portraying it as positive (or God forbid comedic) it should be fine... if a little disturbing.
alcg1203.jpg
 

Oggez_Rashas

Novice
Joined
Aug 25, 2010
Messages
12
Zed said:
Oggez_Rashas said:
I never said you did good sir. In fact, I encourage the project wholeheartedly, and I find serial killers and their actions just as distasteful as the next guy. As for the sex crime topic, I encourage that as well, because A: Like I said earlier it's a neigh-inseperable aspect of serial killers, B: You just plain wouldn't be using the system's full potential. The way I see it, as long as you're not portraying it as positive (or God forbid comedic) it should be fine... if a little disturbing.
alcg1203.jpg

:what:

EDIT: Just noticed another detail about the video. Great choice of a song for the title screen. Aphex Twin - Come to Daddy, for those of you who do not know.
 

Zomg

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Joined
Oct 21, 2005
Messages
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There should be some kind of interaction between being more known (so you're like a Son of Sam type that goes out of his way to get more attention) but still evading capture.

Have an endgame where you've caused such a panic and public outrage at the ineffectual state that can't catch you that civilization falls. I think that would work in terms of game mechanics (escalating challenge, some kind of interesting notoriety mechanics) and if you were going for a Liberal Crime Squad vibe where you are half satirizing the material but also partly reveling in imagining beating people with clubs and so on
 
In My Safe Space
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Dec 11, 2009
Messages
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Codex 2012
Oggez_Rashas said:
Awor Szurkrarz said:
rape would be great.
Can I quote you on that?
Why? It's not like one can sink lower than murder.

Broken Orange said:
Do you realize that Game Informer website had a article on your little Sreial Killer game? The link should be here http://gameinformer.com/b/news/arch...what-do-you-think-of-serial-killer-games.aspx
Please tell me that it's just a troll article and people aren't seriously discussing whenever a game about serial killer is good or bad basing on anything other than whenever the gameplay is enjoyable or not.
 

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