mass hysteria/mystery Thread

ok, so heres the basic idea
a group of players is dropped into a map, one of them is randomly assigned to be "the killer", simply the goal of the killer is to kill everyone else, but the goal of everyone else is to kill the killer, the problem being, that there is no dffrence between the killer and the players, so that the people have to find a way to discover the killer.

possibilities
-im thinking first person, everyone can use weapons
-players dropped randomly in map or players dropped in certain location in map
-there could be clues that lead to the killer so that people wouldn't be just standing around in the middle
-i.e. "the original victim was discovered shot/killed in some way"," the bullet/wound has been matched to this gun/item","this item has (killers) handprints on it", the players would peice all the information together after getting it from various locations
-there could be a vaoice chat implemented where it only talks to the players in a 10 foot radius (so that the killers not clued in),and another thats like a radio to anyone(classic)
-players who arent the killer would lose points for killing anyone not the killer, plus they might be suspected as the killer themselves
-all the players models are left behind to show evidence of them being killed
-the game could either be a entire mod, or maybe just a play mode mod

i cannot create this game, so if anyone finds it intresting, they have free reign to it. just tell me how it goes

ps has this been done before?
pps this should be similar to case's like in salem or the red scare where fear got the upper hand. whats the best name for it?

I don't know if losing points would be a viable solution to stop people from just shooting everything. I'd assume the killer's screen would have some sort of GUI effect letting them know they are the killer.

Anyways,

Would the points be assessed at the end of the round, level, game, etc? If you have them decrease during the round, people could easily use that as a gage to find out who is killing innocents or the killer, since they would lose points, so those would need to be calculated at the end of the round.

Also, I don't think you would be able to stop people from just slaughtering everyone on the map. However you could have it like if someone kills an innocent they also become a "killer", but be worth less point value. Thus you have multiple killers, worth different point values. Would add some element of strategy in order to maximize your point gain. But in the end, you would really need to come up with a decent penalty for killing an innocent.

I'd work on thinking out how to prevent this, and it could become an interesting dynamic.

Assuming the nature of an internal conflict amongst friends and people trying to find a serial killer, you need to make things suitable to the setting. So no awesome machine guns and RPGs to kill a killer. In fact I doubt anything bigger than a handgun at the maximum. What sort of clues would there be? For example, bullet cartridges left on the ground to indicate a type of weapon used (for example whether it was a 9mm, .45, .38 etc) or maybe splinters,type of cuts on the bodies for melee weapons. Hell there could be signs of asphyxiation if someone strangled someone. But yeah, strategy and a clever brain would be driving the game. Then it is up to the players to keep everyone in check. If there are a load of empty 9mm cartridges around and someone owns a Baretta somethings gotta be wrong...

Also I'm thinking of a single player campaign of some sort. You control the part of an ex cop on a personal mission of vendetta and conducting his/her own *illegal* private investigation into a death of a friend, in which almost everyone he/she knows could be a suspect. And over the story things may happen such as the person who was sure to be the killer is suddenly assassinated, the cops intervene and are hunting you down believing you to be one of history's worst serial killers, and will use whatever is necessary to stop a massacre. Cops may assist you directly or indirectly, but they may also hinder your work.

basically you want holy wars but no giant halo & glow saying "this is the guy to kill!" Sounds like an interesting idea, I just don't know how you'd get clues across fast enough in an FPS. You could make it just so that everybody looks the same except the killer has a different HUD. Then the way you spot the killer is by watching them kill someone. After a few accidental friendly kills people will stop killing each other in hopes of finding the liker, works that way in holy wars all the time.

would be awesome for quake 2... those people are pretty open minded in gameplay types. After all those mods pretty much invented 1/2 of everything out there.

It is a very interesting aspect. There are a couple of games, boardgames aswell, incorporationg such an idea. The map Phantom for Starcraft, the Battlestar Galactica boardgame are two of them. But to be frank its rather hard thinking up a way to prevent the players from going havoc. In all games i know that involve a traitor you have a different goal then to just kill the traitor. Having to fight of hordes of enemys while having someone in the team just tweaking some things into a bad direction is easier to produce.

If you approach it like it said in the last sentence it could be a gameplay mode for Left for Dead.

Edited by: N0dachi

Yeah, like that TV show, "The Mole," where they have to do all that stuff, and the Mole has to do it too, but he must hinder the activities as covert as he can, and as quick as he can whilst the others must find him.

as far as killing innocents, point minus' might not be enough. hopefully killing someone and him being innocent might leave other people to believe the shooter is the killer, and get him killed,if thats not enough to stop people and they dont learn to use thier heads, then i dont really know. we would have to work through that.
we probably couldn't have big weapons,i agree, but in some places, especially in the conutry, i could imagine up to a shotgun or rifle.
we could add a single player, but i would not know what happens in it, ill let other people decide that.
if a point system was done (almost definatly) personaly i think points wouldn't be shown until you enter spectate(dead) or the end of one round
having the killer have a special icon or something on thier screen, to say they are the killer, would be good. with that note, i dont think there should be info like who killed who in the the interface either, really i think you just need health, ammo, and maybe a map.

as far as clues heres my idea
bascially when the map is made, there would be items placed in. those items, if you walked up to them and hit enter or something, would pop up a little note for a couple seconds on the players screen, then if that player wanted to view it or other clues, they would hit a button which showed them all thier collected clues. the original dead body would show signs of how he was killed, and then with that knowledge, the player would go look for items that could meet that condition, then when that or those items are found, they would be taken to a scan machine or something, where it would scan it and say whos hadprints are on it (not the players). if the item isnt the weapon used to kill the original ,there would still be a hand print on it, it would just lead to the wrong person. there could be a chains of clues like that that would eventually lead to the killer.

This idea has already mostly been done by this gamemode in Garry's mod

zombiemaster.org/smf/index.php?topic=9124.0 (can't post the full url since I just registered)

Don't ask me why it's posted on the zombie master forums though

i'm talking to a q2 counterpart about this & it looks like we may have a working Q2 mod within two months based around this idea.

@Ltrotter: thank you for the info. ill look into it

@TheHappyFraiar: wait, really! thats pretty amazing, keep me informed on how it goes if you could.

it's not exactly what you were thinking, it's more of a FFA "who-done-it" kind of thing. What we're currently designing is three game modes & possible weapon modes. The main idea being that one person is "it" @ map start. Everybody looks identical (model locked) so you can't visually tell who's who. Plus, in Q2 there isn't any pure server setup, so this sets up the game that if you use a cheater model for the killer, everybody uses the same model.

anyway... the idea of being "it" is to kill as many other players as possible w/o getting caught. We've said it's very similar to king of the hill gameplay, but there's no way to tell who's been the king the longest so it gets in to a "no, it's him" "no, it's not me, it's him". And there's more then just a "whoops" if you kill the wrong guy. We've been talking about having a melee only system too and a weapon system (everything will hopefully be cvar customizable). But we're in the early stages so at fill it will be stock everything.

pretty cool. thank you for taking intrest. i would be glad to see how it turns out.

the sheep in my profile are most likely going to be used in the mod: Moddb.com

q2 modeling is near identical to doom 3, which is easy. The thing that took me the most time to figure out was how to setup gimp to use the q2 color palette for indexed images. After that it was pretty easy.

Sounds a bit like The Ship, but with only one 'mark'.

never played "the ship" Because it required steam. From the games site (http://www.theshiponline.com ) it looks like the basic idea (kill someone) for what we're doing is the same but that's where it stops. We're closer to king-of-the-hill/holywars atm with the lack of clues, non-ability to change how you look, don't find weapons, etc.

Those would be neat things to add but we don't want to "steal" ideas from someone's retail game. Odds are we're going to go in a slightly different direction. We're also avoiding modifying the engine so we're also doing everything within the limits of Quake 2's dll code.

EDIT

a test server is up for part of the night tonight:
74.46.11.148:27910

Edited by: TheHappyFriar