The Hit is a multiplayer stealth-shooter, set in an open-world city with tens of thousands of NPCs. Track down your target and kill them as quickly and cleanly as possible, before the other players can manage it. Try to stay incognito, or photograph other players and take out hits on them.
Here's a gif of my edit objects in action, just slowed down a lot. It's nearly fast enough to generate buildings at runtime, but I'm currently saving out the meshes, which is much faster. At some point, I'll add in an interval system, so buildings can be generated (and regenerated, if part of the building has been destroyed) in the background over several frames.
At the moment, the rooms, doors, windows etc. can only be edited in the Unity editor, but I'll definitely be making versions of these tools for the player, with the eventual aim of having editors and players using the systems in tandem, which will mean games can be written and playtested at the same time.
I love modular procedural generated stuff like this, its makes me feel excited how the computer can be utilized to create content automatically. If done right, it can potentially create infinite meaningful content on its own.
Yeah, but I don't think we're there yet. It's the 'meaningful' part that's the big problem. For instance, I love No Man's Sky. It's great fun to drive/fly the various vehicles, and the space-planet transitions are genuinely cool, but there's only a handful of things in that game that are meaningfully different. Each planet/spaceship/building looks different, but they're all effectively identical when you interact with them. Like there's only a tiny set of verbs and nouns, but a ton of adjectives. The combat also sucks, but that's more because there's no depth to anything, so the encounters are kinda samey and forgettable, like a soup which looks different every with every spoonful, but is disappointing to taste.
I'm trying to do almost the opposite. Every object (noun) in The Hit will have its own set of actions (verbs), and I'm hoping that the density of these nouns and verbs will give life to the world, and let players experience something they've never seen before. I'm kind of ignoring the adjectives for now, so my game's not going to look as pretty as NMS, but I think it'll have more potential for interesting player-stories.
Dwarf Fortress is probably the most interesting procedural world (If you haven't read the tale of Bronzemurder, you owe it to yourself: Eldritch.org), but that's kind of an 'event soup', where you can sometimes pick out really tasty morsels, but there's always a million other things going on, and they can often be quite dull or unpleasant. There's good stuff there, but you have to eat a lot of soup to find it.
With The Hit, I'm trying to create a ton of interesting stories and events, and a set of systems that will work them into whatever the player's currently doing. The soup's still there, and if the player wants to dig around then they'll be able to, but I'm trying to make the tastiest bits float to the top, if you'll allow me to abuse the metaphor one last time.
That is precisely what I'm hoping The Hit will be, so I'm really happy to hear you say that out loud. The effort that goes into this project is definitely worth it.
im still saying i hope you create a free roam mode to be able to experience it without the hit n hide mechanics (you cant notice how big and different several areas of the city are if are always on the run) also i think you already sort of did it as a way to test it before placing the mechanics theselves...
Oh, I'm with you 100%. I'm not placing any restrictions on the player, so if you want to ditch a mission and go exploring, that'll always be an option.