Anarchy will be a FPS with a few RPG elements, in terms of gameplay, It'll be quite similar to the original Deus-Ex, minus the augmentations. Your character will gain experience points depending on your actions in game, this experience will allow you to upgrade your character's skills (e.g. rifle skill, lock-picking skill etc). You will also be able to earn special bonuses for particularly good performance, these bonuses will lower the amount experience needed for a related skill. For example, going through a whole level without being noticed by any enemy NPC's would lower the experience needed to upgrade your stealth skill, whereas killing every single enemy in the whole level would lower the experience needed to upgrade some sort of offensive skill.
Like Deus-Ex, you will be able to read notes, newspapers and books that are lying around, some will allow you to progress further and find secret areas, whilst others will give you insight into the events that take place between now and the time the game takes place.
When/Where's it set?
Anarchy will be set in the near future (about 40 years or so). A world-wide riot over the last dreggs of oil leaves almost all governments, along with their various police forces in tatters. As the governments fall, various syndicates and mafias start to emerge and rise to power, controlling trade, communication, and security.
I'm not yet sure where the game will be set, I expect It'll be taking place in a variety of cities around the world.
What's it all about?
The setting and story-line will revolve almost entirely around our fears of the future. These fears will include: climate change, lack of oil, terrorism, the whole "big brother" thing ... and many more.
What makes this different to all the other open source FPS's out there?
1) interactivity - your character will be able to pick up or examine many of the ojects found in-game, and will be able to talk to many of the NPC's to gather information.
2) Story-line - Anarchy will feature a "seudo non-liniar" story-line, this means that although the game is a series of liniar events, there will be several ways to go about each task. Some of the more important decision's may well effect future dialog's or events
3) Skill and reward system - As mentioned earlier, you will gain EXP for completing tasks and finding hidden aria's, the EXP can then be used to upgrade you characters skill's. You will also gain special bonuses which will lower the amount of EXP needed to upgrade certain skills.
4) Combat - You will be able to take cover in shadow's or behind object's to hide from enemies, or stay out of thier feild of view to sneak up behind them and take them out silently with a melee weapon. However, if you prefer a good ol' killing spree, thats fine too.
5) AI - NPC's will feature fairly extensive AI, they will react to certain events and triggers. some NPC's will sound alarms or call for help in the event of danger, they will either run away or fight to the death when badly hurt, some will try to stick to the shadows or pick you off at a distance whilst others will just fight you head on. The AI won't just be about combat though, friendly NPC's will react to responses you make during dialog, and will get pissed off if you enoy them.
What will it look like?
One thing I can't stress enough is that gameplay is more important that graphics, especialy when it comes to games like this. That doesn't mean it's going to look bad, it just means that gameplay has priororty over graphics. I want the game to be as atmospheric as possible, this will mostly be done through lighting, but texturing will also play a big part. Another thing I want to make clear is that atmosphere isn't all about looks, being a musician, I know that music and sound is just as important, if not more, so I will also be putting allot of time into the audio.
I'm currently undecided on the overall look of the game, one idea is the cell-shaded look, which would involve less detailed texturing but a whole lotta' light tweaking, though the main problem with that is if it isn't done really well, it'll just look tacky. I'll be researching and testing the pro's and con's of OGRE's cell-shading to see weather it'd be worth implementing.
How's it being made?
The game will be using OGRE for graphics, OIS for mouse and keyboard input, and probably OpenAL for sound and music. I will be using Maya PLE for modeling and skeletal animation, and Audacity and REAPER for audio creation/manipulation.