[WIP] Project Hardcore Action-RPG

[Przemcio]

Hardcore Action-RPG is an ambitious one-man project, and it's exactly what's its called - an RPG with heavy PvP elements and organic interactions between players for hardcore gamers, who are seeking exciting and stressful experience. If you want just to chill - it's totally not for you.

The main goal is to design a deep, but user-friendly and consistent (in terms of simplicity) experience. The mod contains a narrative tutorial intro and UI is consistent to each other, it doesn't feel like 10 different people was trying to make something, it feels more like a standalone game than a mod.

There will be a lot of screenshots and gifs - forgive me, but it's the best way to show you what's actually being created here, without writing whole essays.

HARPG is set in San Fierro, but in Night City version (not visually, just atmosphere), where "sky high rate of violence, and more people living below the poverty line than anywhere else. Can’t deny it, it’s all true. But everybody still wants to live here". It's kept in 90's like "normal" GTA: SA.

I'm a gamer myself and what the most important things I value in games is atmosphere and sound design - from what I've experienced in MTA, my mod is on a whole nother level in terms of building a climate, with carefully chosen high quality ambients/music and sound effects for many things, you won't experience freesound.org-like sounds there, everything is on near-AAA level.

Despite the mod revolves around PvP elements - HARPG doesn't rely solely on shooting everyone on sight, in fact, it's quite opposite - you need to make conscious decisions, as murdering in cold blood is pretty well punished (more on that later), often it's better to just intimidate someone, or make them lose their consciousness, which is a seperate mechanic - it's not punished at all and you can still loot an unconscious person. But it's harder to execute than... just execute someone : D

But what about combat itself?

• Weapons has recoil

 

 

• The camera is shaking while aiming (it's not drunk level)

 

 

• Weapons has their condition, they can jam (the jamming rate based on condition) and you can install modifications, such as suppressors, stocks, scopes with or without NV/TV (for sniper rifle) and many others

 

 

• Both shotguns, sawed-off and country rifle (here: Winchester) has normal reloading animation

 

 

• Weapons does not appear magically in hands

 

 

• Custom weapons, such as Taser

 

 

• Pocker taser

 

 

• Pepper spray

 

 

• And grenades - Flashbang, Stun, Incendiary, or Smoke

• Decals system - bullet holes and blood on the walls + altered sparks and cinematic smoke effects, to make the combat spectacular and satisfying

 

 

• Various speed of reloading, also, guns reloads by magazines (like in Mafia 1 or mil-sims), rather than magically adding bullets to magazine, like in most games

• Local injuries system - shooting in the leg has better chance to KO someone, but it's dealing less damage, similar with shooting an arm, but with a chance to disarm someone, and, for example, when an enemy is running or jumping, there's a much more chance to KO them

 

 

• Death animations resembles more of the SP anims (even better, I must say), rather than boring and unsatisfying default MTA dying

 

 

• Molotov coctail must be ignited before using + when someone is burned, their skin changes to burned one (death by explosion has also seperate skin texture)

 

 

• Very high quality sound effects with animations sync, which makes combat actually fun

• You can hold your breathe while aiming with a sniper rifle

 

 

• Statuses show various things, like attack/killer/wanted status, medicaments/drugs effects and side effects

 

 

• and many more interesting mechanics

Probably most important gameplay mechanics, as they're responsible for making HARPG an unique and exciting experience.

• System detecting who attacked first, if assisting, if killed in cold blood, if killed in self-defense

• Anti-logout system, you won't be able to logout for 2 minutes if you aim for someone, or anyone aims at you, techically, you'll be, but your character will still stand there, helpless and ready to die and loot.

• After killing someone in cold blood, you won't be able to logout for 15 minutes (you can kill in self-defense as many times as you'll have to defend yourself), after 2 more murders when your kill status is active (it's refreshing after every frag), you'll be marked on map and there will be bounty for your head, and, of course - you can't logout. Every further homicide increases your bounty and refreshes your logout status, so you'll need to survive for some time without killing anyone, even if self-defense.

 

 

• Psyche system - killing in cold blood isn't easy for your character, if you get a PTSD, you'll experience hallucinations and panic attacks, in general, the game will be harder to play for you for some time. However, as you get more experienced in killing, the PTSD chance is getting lower.

 

 

(there are many more effects, but I don't want to spoil them : D)

 

• After death, you'll lose everything in your inventory, every penny you've gathered in your wallet, you won't be able to login into your account for 30 minutes and your dead body will by lying on some gutter until 30 minutes pass. But most importantly - you can die only 5 times. It's the end of the line after that, so you better be careful.

Like I said before, my goal is to make a simple, yet deep and stressful experience for hardcore players, that's why crafting is also simple, with only 5 materials and easy-to-use UI.

 

 

With all above combined, there is essential RPG mechanic - a character progression, there are 8 attributes (strength, endurance, agility, perception, proficiency, IT, chemicals, medicine) and many skills (they work more or less similar to single player).

Attributes are developed naturally - by playing, for example, strength is raising when you take a damage, endurance when you drain stamina/oxygen, and proficiency when you craft/take apart items. You can also boost progression speed with drugs (which has a nice addiction system) and doing something in a particular weather conditions, for example - proficiency develops faster at night, and endurance develops faster when it's scorching outside.

 

 

Some of the things that you can earn from leveling up:

• Strength lessen a KO chance, increases HP, carry weight or let you use weapons

 

 

• Endurance increases stamina, damage resistance, lessen the timespan of negative effects from taser or special grenades

• Agility increases combat, climbing, running, getting up etc. animation speed, and lessen the chance of being disarmed

• Perception increases range of seeing name tags, brighter the nights, or increases a chance to inflict bleeding status with ranged weapons

• IT is under design right now, but it will be connected with your cellphone (yeah, not realistic, but it doesn't need to be : D)

• Proficiency, chemicals and medicine are used mostly for crafting and materials, but they have some other benefits as well

 

 

• Skills works roughly the same as in SP, with a few differences - weapon skills for example, impacts reloading speed, camera shake or recoil. Not much to say there.

 

 

There's an automatic work mechanic (when you're offline), the more endurance attribute, the more you can work offline, but your main goals should be production of drugs, medicaments, weapons, controlling neighborhoods or businesses, cause honest work won't make you much.

Or you can just practice "stabbing, strangling, bludgeoning, crushing, hacking, drowning, igniting" ; )

It's still far to go, but maybe after this post I'll know how many people are actually interested in something that experimental like this. I won't drop the production, cause I'm passionate about this project and it's almost 1,5 years of development already, but it's always nice to hear some feedback ; )

Some other screens, that didn't fit anywhere else:

• Inventory

 

 

• Tutorials

 

 

• Settings

 

 

• Controls scheme

 

 

• Drop cash

 

 

• Character creator

 

 

• Dark nights

 

 

There's no Discord for now, there's a Youtube channel though, but it's in Polish right now and mostly depracted stuff, I'll post some videos to you after I take a better care with that channel.

Thank you if you read everything!

Edited June 26, 2022 by Przemcio

[Sons]

Sounds good

[Forthwind]

Holy :~, this looks amazing! Can't wait to see what else you're going to do with this.

I do like to ask you, speaking performance, how is everything holding up? Are lower end systems going to have a problem?

[Przemcio]

Thank you for your opinion ; )

As for the performance, every power-hungry features like decals and smoke can be turned off, there are just two exceptions, that may be an issue - flashlight, it needs to be a custom light, cause nights are darker than normal, GTA:SA's lighting won't work there, and PTSD effects. I don't think that things like recoil, aiming shake or custom damage system would be a big problem for low end systems though, it's just a bunch of calculations. Unfortunately, I don't have access to a very old PC, the oldest one that I have is a laptop with GTX 850m and it works fine there : p

 

If you're interested in more, I've started to make some short videos:

Custom grenades

Fast travel

Out of bounds event (you can see how much time I put in making an atmosphere there : D)

Edited August 5, 2022 by Przemcio

[Forthwind]

On 05/08/2022 at 22:27, Przemcio said:

Thank you for your opinion ; )

As for the performance, every power-hungry features like decals and smoke can be turned off, there are just two exceptions, that may be an issue - flashlight, it needs to be a custom light, cause nights are darker than normal, GTA:SA's lighting won't work there, and PTSD effects. I don't think that things like recoil, aiming shake or custom damage system would be a big problem for low end systems though, it's just a bunch of calculations. Unfortunately, I don't have access to a very old PC, the oldest one that I have is a laptop with GTX 850m and it works fine there : p

 

If you're interested in more, I've started to make some short videos:

Custom grenades

Fast travel

Out of bounds event (you can see how much time I put in making an atmosphere there : D)

For nights, I assume you are using the dl_core resource? On my pc, which runs a rx 580 8gb i have no problem running it but on my laptop, that has a built in graphics card my FPS tanks by as much as 10 when the resource is running.

The way i counter it is by allowing to disable it and have nights just a bit less dark. Still dark but light enough to be able to see what's around you. Maybe you can do the same for the potato users among us?

That out of bounds video really put me on edge, tbh was expecting a shark any moment 

[Shady1]

successful project, admirable

[Syntrax#]

Great work

[Przemcio]

On 06/08/2022 at 22:53, Forthwind said:

For nights, I assume you are using the dl_core resource? On my pc, which runs a rx 580 8gb i have no problem running it but on my laptop, that has a built in graphics card my FPS tanks by as much as 10 when the resource is running.

The way i counter it is by allowing to disable it and have nights just a bit less dark. Still dark but light enough to be able to see what's around you. Maybe you can do the same for the potato users among us?

That out of bounds video really put me on edge, tbh was expecting a shark any moment 

I'm just using setSkyGradient + setFogDistance - no need for any shaders in that case : D

[Przemcio]

Just finished advanced weather system, I guarantee MTA: SA wasn't that atmospheric before ; )!

 

 

[Przemcio]

The mod is under total UI redesign now, as it was surely its weakest point, majority of the overhaul is done already (at least the worst ones to redesign). Along with the UI overhaul, I've "unharcoded" every word, so translations will be easy to do and I've also optimized the UI in general. Here's how it looks like:

 

Login panel:

 

 

Character creator:

 

 

HUD:

 

 

Inventory:

 

 

Attributes tab in dashboard:

 

 

Attribute description popup:

 

 

Also, you may want to see how login panel looks "in action", cause there are some animations too ; )

 

 

 

Edited September 27, 2022 by Przemcio