Square Mountain a small indie games studio consisting of 5 students. We would like to share the development progress of our game NO TRACE, a top-down stealth action shooter.
What Is NO TRACE?
No Trace is a modern, indie take on the classic hardcore stealth genre, focusing on assassination, infiltration and espionage style gameplay. No Trace is being developed in Unity 5 and will be releasing on PC.
Meticulously plan your approach and assassinate target(s) without detection or go in all guns blazing with precision gun-play. Infiltrate, kill, and vanish. How you complete the mission is up to you.
Study your target’s profile, observe them and case the environment. Discover weaknesses that can be exploited such as, habits, behavioural patterns, and potential ‘death traps’, using many creative and inventive ways to silently move through the environment and assassinate your target.
Activate inspection mode at any point to pause the game, and freely move the camera around the level to find points of interest, see character profiles, and plan your approach.
You can sign up to be a beta tester on our website Here!
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Nice, nice stuff… AI is very important for this kinda game imho though. Keep in mind though that the games you mentioned they use a ‘patterned’ AI, which is less realistic but improves gameplay dramatically, compared to a more realistic one. I’d like to see a game like hitman where the enemies were a little bit less predictable, like, taking slightly different ‘patrol’ paths (i’m not talking about ‘deviating’ their paths randomly, that would be awful), for example, skip a room sometimes and enter a different corridor, also, it would be cool if they were more dynamic like, going outside a few secs to smoke a cigarette, or going to the bathroom, talking on the phone, etc. One could explore that as a ‘discipline’ scale, so, say, military or highly trained personnel would do less these things, while the gangsta next door would take a whole hour break to call his momma or something :).
Really? Look at the walls… It seems the second one has an edge highlighting shader that I frankly dislike for that art style. If it was cartoonish or something like xiii then it would be good though. Just an opinion.
I also liked the colours of the “Vertical Slice Prototype” image better. On the new ones the colours of the neons are combining what looks odd imho, and also, I’ve no idea why that wall painting is glowing :P. heh.
If you are talking about the ultra-subtle highlights on the bricks behind the coke machine - yes I see it now. It’s so subtle it’s a negligible detail, unless it’s obvious in motion.
It’s obvious to me… that whole wall is very different… the kabe cola machine has a cel-shadinish outline, the bricks are much more visible, not to mention the door handle.
We are looking into making the AI have random patrol paths each time you play the level, somewhat like in Payday 2.
Yeah main difference is the slightly cell shaded effect we’ve given to objects within the scene, as we are experimenting with different kinds of art styles to hopefully make the game stand out, rather than going for a generic realistic looking art style. We’ll continue looking experimenting with it and post updates soon!
It’s not that I don’t like cel-shading, but I don’t like mixing pr (photo-realistic) textures with non-pr shaders… for indie titles non-pr graphics are a good option, but imho consistency is important.
Here’s our disguise system. We are currently just using capsules with materials for all of the characters within the prototype at the moment. We are aiming to work on basic character models and animations next month.
Don’t get me wrong, so far everything is fantastic, but imho that puzzle is too simple. In the end it’s just a simpler hangman with a tip. I don’t know your audience but I probably would be bored by that. A password game that I personally really enjoyed was the Fallout 3/NV one. Although it has its flaws too.
That’s a nifty hacking game. An alternative thought for one (not claiming this is perfect, but might be a fun try), make a memory game, where users can uncover a series of words. There are two tiles for each word, and you have to select the prompted word’s two tiles which have been covered. And you have to match all the passwords/keywords by memory while making a maximum number of mistakes.
Some people may not like memory games like that, but I think the majority of people can appreciate a memory game. I think it’s particularly nifty because so many minigames do not challenge anyone and can be insultingly easy.
Over the last week we’ve been thinking of potential ‘hooks’, and ways make our art style less realistic more stylized & eye catching. This will hopefully, give the game more of an indie feel, and in-turn, dramatically speed up development time of assets and levels. For these reasons we’ve decided on a low poly, block colour art style.
Here’s a quick glimpse at a small concept/prototype scene of a Diner rendered within Unity.
We’re proud to officially announce NO TRACE - A stylized top down stealth action game featuring deadly combat mechanics.
Meticulously plan your approach and assassinate the target without detection or go in all guns blazing with precision gun-play. Infiltrate, kill, vanish. How you do this is up to you, agent.
machine has a cel-shadinish outline, the bricks are much more visible, not to mention the door handle.
