DarkcityRp

The Vision: An Immersive Social Sandbox

Instead of reproducing classic Roleplay (RP) patterns on aging engines, DarkcityRp was designed from scratch on s&box (Garry’s Mod’s spiritual successor). The goal isn’t just to offer “jobs”, but to simulate a functional, gritty urban society.

Here, the narrative doesn’t come from pre-written scripts, but from systemic mechanics: a player-run economy, a complex legal system, and realistic physical interactions. The game is designed so that cooperation or conflict between players is the primary driver of the city’s story.

Game Design Pillars

To realize this vision, development focused on three fundamental pillars, translated into concrete gameplay systems:

1. Jobs and Economy

Jobs are the main way to earn money. With a significant amount of jobs, each player can experience what they want to do.

• Impactful experience: Built with social interaction at its core, each job offers a unique experience to the player.
• Player-Run Businesses: Shops are not static NPCs. Players order stock, set prices, and manage employees.
• Total Persistence: If you hide a bag of money in an alleyway, it will stay there after a server restart until someone finds it.

2. The Dynamic Social Contract

The law and order system is managed organically.

• Legality vs. Criminality: Instead of fixed roles (e.g., “Thief”), the game handles actions. Stealing is an act, not a profession. Anyone can attempt a burglary but will face legal consequences (Custody, Fines, Prison).
• Police Department: Officers have advanced tools: vehicle terminals, criminal record management, radar, and weaponry. Their role is defined by procedures coded into the game.

3. Identity and Evolution

• Character Customization: A complete system to customize appearance, name, and backstory.

My work on this project

Developing on s&box (based on Source 2) offers unique technical opportunities but imposes a modern architecture. Having past experience on Unity helped, but s&box is still in development, and a lot of aspects are handled differently:

• Vehicle System: Fully realistic vehicle driving system.
• Hairstyler job: Able to customize another player’s hair.
• Casino: Slots, poker, roulette.
• Doors system: Fundamental feature of a dark rp game. Fully designed door system (buy, sell, lock, unlock, share).
• Glass shatter: Glass shatters every time a player hits it.
• Admin commands: Complete set of moderation tools.
• Death screen: Custom UI and logic for player respawns.
• Medic: Heal and revive system.

The Challenges of Early Access

Developing on an engine that is itself under development (s&box) was the main challenge:

1. API Instability: Facepunch (s&box developers) regularly modifies internal systems and the C# API. This required constant monitoring and heavy code refactoring phases to adapt DarkcityRp to new engine architectures (notably during the transition to the Scene System).
2. Open World Optimization: Managing a dense urban map with complex physics on all objects, vehicles, and dozens of simultaneous players requires aggressive optimization (culling, LODs, network tick management) to maintain an acceptable framerate for both client and server.