Gutter Kings VR

new art!
the map before the competition
the player before the competition

Inspiration

The inspiration for Gutter Kings VR lies somewhere between Rust, and one of Garry's Mod's biggest modes called DarkRP. Games like these have some of the best emergent gameplay due to their sandbox nature, and I'm striving to make a hit for the genre in VR.

What it does

Gutter Kings VR gives players a set of conditions to play by, and lets creative freedom take it from there. It solves the time-sink problem of Rust by making private property very attainable, and it solves the PvP problem in Garry's Mod by automatically creating NPC police for players who are too violent! It adds a new aspect to survival via a Luck Buff, where profit has a chance to be boosted by Luck while you have the Buff.

How we built it

Gutter Kings VR keeps track of all violent player actions, and scales them by their violence meter over time to produce a value called "Heat". Using Heat, the server can accurately scale PvE NPCs assigned to overly-violent players, forcing these players to respond. By doing this, everyone else in the multiplayer server can play with a reasonable level of aggression. Nobody is overly punished for PvP, but the abnormally aggressive players will have waves of challenging AI to deal with.

Challenges we ran into

The largest challenge was definitely this dynamic NPC system as a means of multiplayer moderation. It took many months of theory, calculations, prototyping, and now finally bringing it to life this month with the Meta Horizon Start Developer Competition.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I have to say that I am most proud of successfully implementing the dynamic NPC moderation system, as I have thought about it for a long time. I am so happy to see it not only work as intended, but also function as a fun gameplay mechanic.

Aside from that, Gutter Kings was a prototype prior to this event. I worked on so many aspects of the game and added so many things. It'd be extremely long to describe them, so I'll go over some key features and then list the rest. One major addition was multiplayer. Prior to this event, this prototype was never online. I implemented multiplayer and all of the cloud infrastructure to support it. Additionally the spawning of AI from the sky was a very satisfying achievement.

Other things that were built during this competition:

AI/NPC:

-Police NPCs: SWAT Assassin, SWAT Bomb Drone, SWAT Mech Boss

-NPC "Crowd" Distribution System. Evenly populates the map with reactive NPC citizens.

-NPC Event System. Sends entertainment-oriented NPC events to players.

-NPC/Turret/Loot spawn locations in NPC-Owned Property have hand-crafted spawns now. Raiding NPC Property is an important game loop, so this improves the experience.

Additions to Economy Systems:

-Item Buy/Sell Stores (Gun Shop, Black Market, General Store). Also added modeled locations for these stores in the map.

-In-Game Casino Machines (Double Or Nothing). Also added Casino Hall building.

-Lootable Physics Objects (Dumpster/Trashcan/Mailbox). Rolls loot upon opening and is affected by Lucky buff, increasing yield.

Other Additions:

-New city map. Prior map was a small blockout.

-60 new NPC/Player models.

UI Additions:

-Wrist HUD. Provides Health, Hunger, and Heat (PvP Response level).

-Main Menu. Connects players to the new Multiplayer servers.

-Accessibility Settings. Provides many essential options and some extras.

-Backpack/NameTag/Holsters. Essentials for a good sandbox experience.

I attached some screenshots of the project before this competition. Check out the YouTube trailer to see the updates!

What we learned

VR dev is hard, but Multiplayer VR dev is harder. (And Multiplayer Moderation is hardest!) This opportunity forced me to learn about game art, network replication and cloud server CICD. It helped me test my theories about moderation systems, and that is the most valuable lesson for me.