Motown

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Posts posted by Motown

  1. Posted

    The next video we put out will reveal apartment/housing customization, and we're absolutely sure you'll love it! There has been some delay to this however because our project lead, John, wanted to include a few extra features to really demonstrate the potential there. We're just waiting on him to finish that up, and hopefully soon, you'll finally get to see what we're offering with Identity.

    Nobody wants you to see and play Identity more than we do!

    • Like 9

  3. Posted

    Identity's vehicle damage model will be more comparable to a GTA game than BeamNG. It would take someone with more knowledge than I to explain the technical reasons for this. I'm not a programmer, but from my understanding, we can't send such complicated network packets across the server to other clients without sacrificing server performance. Ideally, the damage would mostly be clientside, but the vehicle damage would appear different for each client viewing the vehicle.

    • Like 4

  5. Posted

    Players will be able to form custom organizations that are separate from gangs/guilds and corporations, and are viewable to other via the players profile on social media sites in the in-game intranet (should they choose to display them). These organizations can represent almost anything, including political, and religious groups!

    We're really excited to see what people will make of this feature!

    • Like 7

  7. Posted

    The way we plan to handle something like this, is to offer a park ranger spawn location for police officers in Identity, somewhere remote, and out in the woods. When they spawn, they will by default, be wearing park ranger clothing, and have access to park ranger vehicles. If they really wanted too, they could take this gear and drive all the way to the city and do their normal patrol in park ranger assets, but the important thing to note is that the two roles are merged into the law enforcement career for easier access.

    • Like 6

  8. Posted

    Our concern with backpacks relates back to our Altis Life mod in ArmA 3, where a backpack is an essential piece of equipment necessary for being able to hold anything in the characters inventory. We hate that you have to have a backpack in that game to be able to carry anything, and we hate that every person you encounter is wearing a bulky, ugly backpack. For us, it's immersion breaking.

    In Identity, we don't want players to have to wear something that affects the appearance of their character at all times. We want you to be in control of the appearance of YOUR character, and to look exactly how you want people to perceive you.

    You may still see backpacks being worn in Identity to indicate to other players that you are carrying illegal items. We haven't quite settled on this yet.

    • Like 1

  9. Posted

    We've had a lot of questions about sex in Identity, and we don't really have many reservations against it, other than the possibility that Identity could be banned from sites like Twitch, Youtube, and potentially from Steam. Sex in Identity could add an intimate element to the game, but it just isn't worth the risk of losing exposure over this single feature.

    • Like 26

  10. Posted

    Good idea! We'll keep an eye on this thread to try to get an idea of what you guys are looking for. It's important to us that our players be able to fully express their personalities through character customization. Please try to keep ideas grounded in reality though! A lot of our design decisions are based on whether we feel a certain style will break immersion for others.

    • Like 8

  12. Posted

    We want to provide a wide variety of options to cover all fashion interests that our players might have. This process for us starts on paper by separating styles into categories based on social interests and cliques including,"gothic, jock, biker, rocker, hipster, geek, business, casual, etc" and try to determine which designs can be a mix of both, and which may not fit directly into any category.

    Identity is a social game, so it's extremely important to us that we hit all the right stops and really hone in on the social aspect of the game. That means, anything that would tie a player to their character and encourage them to socialize or roleplay with others is a priority. Allowing people to express their personalities through their clothing is a big part of that.

    I really do think there will be something for everyone when it comes to character customization.

    • Like 4

  13. Posted

    DEV BLOG #001

    Greetings Citizens,

    It has been just over a year since you helped successfully kick start Identity into existence! We want to thank you all for your continued support by providing you all with regular updates following the development process for Identity. Engaging with our community is one of the best ways we can show our thanks, and a development blog is a perfect opportunity for us to bring you along for the ride. As you’ve seen throughout the past year, there is no game out there that is quite like Identity, and through your support, you have proven to us that Identity is a vision worth turning into a reality!

    Feedback has shown us that you all really appreciate our attempts to respond to virtually every question we receive on social media. Twitter and Facebook have been a huge boost in exposure for Identity, and so it is time we begin to explore other avenues of exposure to help our community understand a bit more about the game.

    In the coming months, our fans will see their first glimpse of gameplay for Identity! We are all extremely excited to show off our first gameplay video, which will fully explore the mechanics of apartment and housing customization. With this video, you will see that we have stayed true to our original art direction from the original Kickstarter trailer, while maintaining high standards in realistic lighting and graphics. We can safely say that we have improved many of the areas of our design that needed attention since February last year.

    Apartment & Housing Customization

    Apartments and houses within Identity will have a fully customizable interior. You will be able to change the wall paper on every wall in every room, place furniture anywhere there is space on the ground, swap out doors, windows, baseboards, crown moulding, and even wainscoting! We have made no compromise to the level of detail in which you can customize your apartments or homes, in order to truly express your sense of home decor. With this level of control, there is virtually no chance that the interior of two homes will ever look alike.

    There will be hundreds of furniture items available to purchase in-game in every style and design, from traditional to contemporary. Furniture in Identity can even be crafted, sold, or traded to other players, and those who wish to try their hand at crafting hand-made furniture from a variety of materials can place a crafting table anywhere they wish inside their homes!

    And if you wish to share your space with a partner, friend, or even a group of friends, homes and apartments will be available for sale throughout the world that support multiple roommates depending the size of the space and how many bedrooms are available. The home-owner may even grant build permissions to any number of roommates, even visitors, to help them decorate their living space.

    When you are finished, invite your friends over to compliment you on your interior decorating skills! If you’re anything like us, we know you will spend more time cleaning up this virtual home than you do your real one!

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    Radio

    This week, our team has also placed a lot of our development efforts into building a functioning radio system that will allow you to listen to your favorite real-world radio stations through placed radio objects inside your virtual home, or car! Yes, you can flip through the channels in your car radio, which will also broadcast to the immediate area outside your car. Imagine driving down the street and having everyone you pass know you listen to NSYNC!

    One other major part of this feature that we are excited to tell you about is player operated talk-shows which you can personally host, or tune-in and listen to, from your car radio or home. The way we currently have this planned out for hosts, is to have actual physical broadcast stations on the map that you can enter as a player and begin hosting your own radio talk-show. Player’s listening from their car or home can browse a list of channels currently being hosted at that very moment, and listen to you live, talking about government conspiracies and UFO’s!

    We are really hoping that this feature will have a major social impact for Identity. Like you, we see a lot of potential in something like this for budding stars within the community. We would absolutely love to see many of you sprout a career that started in a game we developed, and ended with us listening to your lovely voice on our actual car radio! 

    The Town Square (Social Module)

    Many of you already know of, and are eagerly anticipating the release of the planned “Town Square” module that is currently still in production. While we can’t give you an exact date on when that will be ready, progress is steady, and we are as excited as you are to meet you all for the first time in a virtual environment.

    You may already be aware that Identity is largely influenced by a landmass in the south-eastern portion of the United States. The Town Square itself is only a small portion of a larger city built into the final version of Identity called Ash Hill, a reference to Asheville, North Carolina where we had originally planned to move Asylum’s office. We picked this area of the world particularly because it offered a wide range of geographical variance. The transition between Identity’s mix of biomes needed to feel natural, and this area offered most of what we had been looking for. As for the other cities in Identity, their influences may become more clear to you now. Myrtle Beach is obviously Turtle Beach in Identity, and Roseport is less subtle, but a mix between Atlanta and New York City.

    When we first started, we kept everything, including the structures and world props level to the ground, a mistake we have since corrected. We quickly realized that cities are rarely ever flat, and knew that setting that precedent now would benefit Identity in the future. The next time you see The Town Square module, we are confident that you will notice the difference compared to earlier screenshots, what such a small transformation makes for immersion in a game environment.

    Moving Forward

    We want to thank our community for being so patient with us. Over the course of the past year, we’ve seen many work-in-progress screenshots of assets destined for Identity, and while we believe they serve as a sample of the work we have already put into the game, we know that many of you are still anxious to see video. Our current priority is to get things ready to show off, or more specifically, the housing/apartment customization first. We are convinced that many of you will appreciate the time and effort we have put into this feature, so that you will be able to fully express yourself through your character and virtual home.

    We know we’ve been pretty quiet this past year, and the criticism we’ve heard from our fans on that through social media and the forums have not fallen on deaf ears! We will start to release regular updates through development blogs and continue to find new ways to interact with our community, to show you our gratitude for your support.

    You yourself can become more involved by contributing to the discussion with your ideas at www.identityrpg.com/community. We’ll see you there, and thank you again! 

    Always remember that we are gamers too and we are as excited as you are to play Identity at launch!

    • Like 125

  14. Posted

    You will be able to receive, even deliver, both email and postal mail! Every house and apartment in Identity has a mailbox, which means anything you receive, from newspapers, to items mailed to you by a friend can be found there. We have even devised a neat system where mail actually has to be delivered by a player before you receive it, and if you aren't interested in waiting, you can actually go deliver your own mail to your house.

    • Like 3

  17. Posted

    20 minutes ago, Shimozukachi said:

    you mean something like the character transfer in gta online?

    We probably won't be able to do a full character transfer for the technical reasons mentioned above. But we would want to reward our players with some visual indicator that you took part in the social lobby module before launch, that you can show off to other players after launch. Even during beta testing, it's entirely possible that bugs or exploits may be discovered where players earn an unimaginable amount of money, or hoard items that could damage the economy in the full release. We can't say for certain how this will be handled yet. We'll have to see what happens when we reach that point.

    • Like 3

  18. Posted

    Not every city in Identity will have accessible sewers, and not every area in the cities that do will be accessible, but there will be underground travel in some locations! We imagine wanted criminals will want to make use of these secret passageways in order to avoid police detection! There may even be a social hangout location for daring criminals to meet other criminal scum in the sewers!

    • Like 1

  19. Posted

    You will more than likely have to recreate your character when Identity launches as a full game. We expect that there will be a lot more to character customization in the full version than in The Town Square social module that you will want to take advantage of. Options will be added, some changed, or several potentially removed from now until then.

    We will however discuss transferring some of what you achieve during the social lobby module to your new character during release. We of course want your experience in the social lobby to be meaningful, and we would want to reward you for taking part in this experience with us!

    • Like 4

  20. Posted

    On 3/1/2016 at 9:57 PM, John-Doe said:

    Hello there.

    Im thinking how are you going to prevent players from not joining the police force and then just walk about in the middle of the public and kill whatever they see?     Or how are you going to prevent that police not just randomly search every player that they meet or just random raid every property?                                            

    How are you going to prevent police from not being abuse assholes?

    I've watch every video that you have made but... 

    How are you going to prevent that players are not just sitting on top of a building snipping every guy running aroud in a pvp zone?                                                      

    How are going to prevent players from mugging everyone everywhere?                                                                                                                                                

    How are you going to prevent that players are not just starting a fire in every house/apartment that they dont like?                                                                                

    How are you going to prevent players from joning a job to earn easy money with out doing what they are supposed to do?                                                                  

    How are you going to prevent Corupt Police officers and politicians?

    -John Doe

    Great questions! In Identity, or at least on official servers (private servers can change or disable certain features), there are gameplay restrictions for how police officers can interact with players or the environment, which are subject to change based on testing. In some cases, a player must first be reported for a crime before a police officer can arrest them. You won't see random arrests, and trolling behavior will be punishable via an officer reporting function, even potentially leading to a long-term ban from joining the police force for certain abuses. The goal here is to ensure that only people who take this role seriously will play as police officers.

    As it stands currently regarding property raids, players, even cops, won't be able to access another players property without permission from the owner. We view housing in Identity as an important, almost sacred, social feature and most players wouldn't want to see disturbed. It's treated as a location of tranquility, peace, and privacy to many who have put a lot of passion and love into customizing their personal space. Have you seen those funny Second Life videos of trolls entering another players property, and the owner gets very upset to see a person there that they didn't invite? It's kind of like that. Think of it as that one place you can go to roleplay with friends knowing nobody can break your immersion. We are however still exploring different ways players may be able to interact with each other and property. John has expressed interest in using homes as meth labs and allowing cops to raid them, but we haven't settled on a solution for that yet.

    Regarding sniping and PVP, we expect that there will be some camping in areas of high criminal activity, but there won't be any sniper rifles beyond a hunting rifle with a short 2x zoom scope, even for the police! In a early concept piece floating around this thread, there are some rooftop snipers sitting above the town square, but our concept art really shouldn't be seen as a confirmation, as much as it should be seen as an expression of potential. For instance, in the actual in-game scene, most of those rooftops are inaccessible. Gameplay still needs to be designed with balance in mind, and we have to be very careful with what we make accessible within the environment.

    As far as mugging goes, official servers have a unique stress system in place that we are very excited to test out. Outside of cities and low crime areas, your stress meter is naturally higher, making you more vulnerable to attack. Even in low stress areas, certain actions, some as simple as having a gun pointed at you, or crashing your car, will gradually increase your stress meter. Cities themselves aren't exactly safe zones, and the only truly safe place you can go is, inside a sub-HUB, or your own home.

    While there is a fire department in Identity with plenty to do within that role, players will not be able to set a fire intentionally. Fires occur randomly, or based on various factors, throughout the world. Your car can even catch on fire after an accident, but it's not going to spread to anything around it.

    We suspect that there will be certain jobs that players prefer for earning money easier, but this depends entirely on how well we balance things. If we make mistakes, people will exploit our mistakes, so we have to be extremely cautious with money and the economy in Identity. It's on us to design jobs and systems that our players can't easily exploit for an unfair advantage.

    Lastly, regarding corrupt politicians, while there really isn't anything a politician can do that will burn the economy to the ground per-se, we anticipate that some crafty people will secretly campaign with ill-intentions, and we encourage this! If they turn out to be a dud after becoming elected, band together and make sure they don't become governor again in the future! They had their chance!

    Thank you for all of your questions, and I hope that I've provided an adequate response!

    • Like 5

  21. Posted

    On 1/13/2016 at 5:09 PM, Vix said:

    No answer to that tbh, don't think there's a tweet about it. ^u^

    In a situation where a player is running from a criminal chasing them, but has not yet been engaged in combat, as it is now, they still have access to their homes, or safe areas. It isn't easy for us to detect when someone is involved in a combat situation unless they are first injured by a bullet, or are perhaps within close proximity of a criminal player.  When bullets are fired within close proximity to you, your player has a heightened level of stress that will continue to increase unless you move away from the area. In environments like cities on official servers where stress factors into how vulnerable you are, that data can be used to determine if you are able to access a safe area. We can add to this system to prevent people from exploiting this mechanic (taunting a player and then running in and out of a safe zone repeatedly to avoid combat) as we gather feedback from future testing! There are a lot of simple little solutions that can be implemented in such cases.

    3 hours ago, Vix said:

    Metal detectors have a little deceiving name- they're more like metal removers, meaning that upon entering a safe zone your weapons are unaccessible or just removed from your inventory for the time of your stay. Either way, you can't use them in safe zones.

    Not sure how shooting from "danger zone" into a safe zone will work (as in you're in a danger zone and you shot someone who's on the edge of the safe zone), but we also don't really know how zones will look like (are they OW, buildings?).

    While I haven't discussed this with @Paratus yet, it is probable that we will not allow players to take damage from outside of the safe zone after they walk through the metal detector. Safe zones usually are placed within certain key buildings, some of which are even instanced. These safe areas act as social gathering locations where you can safely meet other players and chat, or places where we want players to be able to explore content undisturbed, like the movie theater, or a court room, for example!

     

    • Like 2

  22. Posted

    There is quite a few features built into Identity for the criminal lifestyle. You'll see people robbing banks, taking hostages, mugging, growing illegal narcotics, fighting over gang turf, etc. We kind of see the criminal gameplay as a lifestyle in Identity, rather than a career. Committing certain crimes sets you down a temporary road of law evading, at least until you're caught and arrested. This will limit your access to vendors and shops around the map, forcing you to visit special black market dealers for all of your supplies. And there are exclusive clubs specifically for the criminal underground to meet and socialize with like-minded shady individuals!

    • Like 1