mid 1940s
D E C E I T
An open world lonely detective game set in London post WWII with highly impacting choices and dilemmas.
The game "Deceit" combines the detective elements from LA Noire with the carefully executed assassinations of Hitman and Assassins Creed. The game forces the player to think for himself and solve clues to get closer to their target. Once the player is comfortable that their target is one of the killers they can go onto the next phase: finding out their targets routine and planing an assassination. The player can carry out the assassination in many ways such as a solo stealth approach, faking a crime on the target to let the police do their part and many more. Killing the target in suspicious ways will raise the players notoriety in the mafia and have a higher chance of being discovered as a traitor.
The game is set in 1950's London where Britain is using spies to control their power; there's a spy trying to catch the player out so you have to be careful to not attract too much attention and not to leave clues.
Detective Theme
These two games put the player in a detective's mind whereas they both function very differently. In La Noire you're working for the police and therefore you are limited to certain actions as you're not allowed to perform illegal actions to progress on your case. The opposite is in Heavy rain, you're a detective for yourself and therefore you're allowed to carry out illegal actions but you don't get much help outside from yourself. My game will follow the footsteps of Heavy Rain as the protagonist has his own reasons and works for himself. The player is hunted by British spies so he also can't leave evidence behind to restrict the enemy spies
Hitman Theme
Both games focus on killing high priority targets in silent ways but also not restricting the player if they want to go loud which will be punishing but not impossible. The time frames of these games cancel each other out to the era of when the mafia was around so it gives me an idea on how a hitman would work in those times by compromising both games. In Hitman there is a much harder emphasis on planning out your kills and being rewarded for not killing guards or civilians, my game will build on this as the player will be punished if he leaves bodies and and kills civilians as it will give the spy that's tracking you down another trace to find you.
Other Media
Joker game is an anime about a group of Japanese spies spying on each other on the brink of WWII. The characters use all their skills to try and reveal the enemies intentions whilst keeping each other in check to make sure there's no double agents. The anime puts the viewer in their position and make it feel like someone's watching you and information is being hidden from you. This makes the viewer feel uneasy but sometimes it take the restricted information theme a bit too far and the viewer is often annoyed that they're missing bits of the story.
The game Deceit will have a much more serious and mature approach to open world assassination games and therefore it will be aimed at adults, If I was to simplify the game it would appeal more to the younger audience which would be beneficial but then the game would lose its niche and would be out-competed by giants like GTA. Not only has there not been a serious game in a while but the niche of a detective assassin hasn't been widely explored in the industry. The game will be a breathe of fresh air and nostalgia as the older audience will remember their old games on how you had to think for yourself and not be held by the hand the whole game. To avoid the same mistake Joker Game did, Deceit will have statistics to show how many players did the same actions as you and vice versa. The statistics will encourage the player to replay and choose different actions, which will prolong the game's lifetime.
Substance Painter and Arnold
Substance Painter by Allegorithmic is a texture authoring tool which gives you the tools to create amazing textures but at a strong hit to performance. Unfortunately there's no direct way to export from the painter to maya's Arnold engine and still make it look like the painter's iray engine. This causes a large variety of problems which can only be solved by going in to hypershade and manually adjusting the gamma of the roughness and the f0 of the material. Most of the time the gamma correction can be set to a value of 2.2 but sometimes it's worth slightly adjusting it to fit the lighting of your scene.
This turntable is much more experimentation than expected as it was my first time making a car and clothing. I usually stay away from biological models as it's very easy to go very wrong. The human reference was taken from Maya's content browser then rigged to make him lean against the car. A large part of making clothing look successful is having good edge flow on your human in which you extract and slightly offset to create an outer shell around the body. Then you create creases and smoothen the shell to create the illusion of clothing.
Whilst making the cape I've found a new technique which is extremely handy when elongating smooth surfaces. I used soft selection to drag down the torso and slightly made the bottom larger, this caused the model's topology to be stretched. High quality modellers do their best to ensure an even density of polygons across the model, this however doesn't apply for low poly models as they don't have the flexibility to add extra edges. To make the topology even I used the relax tool from Maya's sculpting tools. What this tool does is it looks at areas of high density of polygons and contrasts it against the areas with a low density snd proceeds to send some polygons from the higher density to the lower trying not to disrupt the shape of the model. This creates a much more balanced topology and smoother meshes.
Using lighting to create an illusion of a professional movie set
A quick way to make your renders look like a movie is to create an edge and a fill light. The edge light must always be behind your focus point, this helps separate the actor from the foreground and background which creates a sense of depth and feel eery. The fill light is your main light used to light your actor or object, it should be warm to contrast with the blue edge light. The edge light is the opposite of your fill light as its behind the actor and a cool colour. You should also try to light points of interest in the background with a warm light but it must be blurred with depth of field otherwise it will direct attention away from the actor or object.
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Theme
- Detective, Hitman
Setting
- Late 1940s Britain, London
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Genre
- Detective, hitman open world with mystery solving
Game Engine
- Cry Engine
- Core Gameplay Mechanics Brief
- Single Player
- Open world with side missions similar to GTA games
- Third person
- Free roam
- Main quest + Side quests
- Branching linear main quest
Objectives
Player can complete the game through only doing main quest, side missions only build up on the world and assist the player in many ways such as giving the player clues or better gear.
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Targeted platforms
- PS4
- Xbox One
- PC
Target Audience
- Adults
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Monetization model
- Retail purchase
- Digital download
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Licenses / Hardware
- Maya, Substance Painter, Mudbox, Marmoset, Crazy Bump, Photoshop
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Team size
- 20
Combat Model
- 1940s weaponry, mainly pistols. Environmental kills presented in games such as Hitman will also be highly prevalent.
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Influences
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91 Days
Mafia Infiltration and difficult desions
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GTA Games, The witcher 3
Open world with side missions
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Assassin's creed, Hitman
Killing high priority targets and hunting for their clues
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LA Noire, Heavy Rain
Detective game, finding clues
Project Description
The game Deceit combines the detective elements from LA Noire with the carefully executed assassinations of Hitman and Assassins Creed. The game forces the player to think for himself and solve clues to get closer to their target. Once the player is comfortable that their target is one of the killers they can go onto the next phase: finding out their targets routine and planning an assassination. The player can carry out the assassination in many ways such as a solo stealth approach, faking a crime on the target to let the police do their part and many more. Killing the target in suspicious ways will raise the players notoriety in the mafia and have a higher chance of being discovered as a traitor.
The game is set in 1950's London where Britain is using spies to control their power; there's a spy trying to catch the player out so you have to be careful to not attract too much attention and not to leave clues.
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D E C E I T
Evaluation
The concept behind the game is a great idea as not many games adopt the mature mystery solving genre, combined with components of other games that fit the play style would make a fairly known game from its uniqueness. In this project I started experimenting on using substance painter to create realistic models with baked lighting and appropriate scratches; the software did succeed in that aspect but the problem arose in what to do after. Substance painter would export several maps for your model which you then had to manually assign to the correct material, but this wasn't the end as Arnold would render the material way too dark. raising the gamma of the material will cause the colour to be way too bright but the rest will be more normal. To fix this I had to go in to the hyper shade and manually adjust the f0 and specular nodes by filtering them through a 2.2 gamma adjustment, then attaching the filtered nodes to their appropriate sockets. This is a very unfortunate and tedious process you have to go through in order to make your materials render correctly. The node management can be seen here.
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