'Sir, You Are Being Hunted' will include 'Thief'-like visibility meter

The mechanical antagonists of Big Robot's upcoming first-person shooter Sir, You Are Being Hunted will have to worry about finding human hiding in tall grass and other foliage, the developers explained.

The mechanical antagonists of Big Robot's upcoming first-person shooter Sir, You Are Being Hunted will have to worry about finding human hiding in tall grass and other foliage, the developers explained in a recent update.

Development on the game, which has players trying to figure their way off a mysterious island while being hunted by gentleman robots and their clockwork hounds, recently added a new stealth system that will eventually play a big role in the game, according to the official site.

"People have been asking how we will handle stealth in an open landscape with lots of foliage, and the answer is basically that we are calculating the visibility of the player from his surroundings, and where he's standing," writes creative director (and Rock, Paper Shotgun contributor) Jim Rossignol. "This will be displayed on-screen with a Thief-like visibility meter, to give players a good sense of how visible they are. The system works really well in conjunction with the visual detection ranges of our bots: if you are laying still in long grass they will not see you until they get very close, but you might give yourself away by moving. You will be able to sneak quite effectively, but it will also be a skill that players will master as they play, which I am sure players will begin to perfect when they intuit the amount they are hidden by differing vegetation. This combined system (of foliage-based visibility and varied states of AI alertness) means we're starting to get some real cat-and-mouse emergent behaviours from our AI."

Grid View

The team has also been spending their time making the robots of the game a little less perfect, and a little more personality driven. That means working on the game's AI so those bots aren't inhumanly fast or simply boring when you fight and try to avoid them.

The game is slated for a 2013 release on PC, Mac and Linux. You can check out the trailer here.