WHAT IS NINE TO FIVE ABOUT?
Nine to Five is a game based off of regular, every day life. Located on a fictional US island called Santa Vida, the players will find themselves on the journey to build the life they want. Whether you want to buy a yacht, build your dream house, become famous, have a farm of cats, make pies, build a UFO on wheels, start a lawn mower racing group, or any other crazy, wonderful you can think of, you can live out your wildest dreams in Santa Vida.
But to make those dreams come true, what do you need most? The resource the whole world is after. Money. Hence the name "Nine To Five". Because this game is all about the jobs you will have as you fund your dreams. But hey, sometimes the dream is all about the job anyways, right?
So what kind of jobs do we offer? You can start as a deputy and work your way up through the police department, or you can be a criminal and rob your way to the top. That all sounds pretty familiar though, doesn't it? There are tons of cops and robbers game already
...Good thing we aren't one of them! Some of the other jobs we will have include Firefighters, Coast Guard, Doctors & Nurses, Dentists, Chefs, Farmers, Vets, Pet Groomers, Zoo Keepers, Biologists, Marine Biologists, Mechanics, Hair Dressers, Fashion Designers, Mayors, Judges, US Marshals,Tattoo Artists, CSI's, and SO MANY MORE to come! Our goal is to try and bring as many possibilities as we can see in real life, into our game.
Skills
All players are not the same. This is why we are fans of the good ol' skill system, but it is much different than what you're used to! We plan to make each job equipped with unique skills that you can not obtain without climbing the ranks of that job. For example, say you are a police officer and you are investigating a murder. You know who did it, but you have no proof, so the guy is going to walk free. Unless you have evidence.
Luckily, there will be a CSI job in this game (super stoked for this). A CSI of a certain level, can effectively get finger prints off of crime scenes. (Don't worry criminals, there will be ways to get around it, but you have to level up as a criminal too or your chance of success at hiding your tracks is low!) If you were to know of a CSI who had obtained the skill to dust for prints successfully, you would most likely catch your criminal.
Every way to make money will have parts where you could do better with someones help, but it is not required. There will be no need to grind to get skills because you can have a fulfilled experience without them, they are just a fun bonus!
HOW SERVERS WILL OPERATE
We will have a few different game versions, in the same way FPS's have different game modes. For them, they have gun game, team deathmatch, capture the flag, etc. Our game modes or "sever types" will be called Classic, Open RP, and Community RP.
Classic will be like GTA Online. It will have objectives , goals, skills, and be ran automatically and by AI. It will have a larger amount of players.
Then there is Open RP. It will be an RP server, but no one is running it. It is a "hop on and play" type of thing. No rules, no admins, nothing. The difference between this type and the classic type, is that this type has no objectives or structure. People will get on needing to get food, shelter, money, etc, and will have to Role Play in order to get it. Why? Because there are some things in this game that will require special skills to achieve. Skills that take time to acquire, as referenced above. We believe this will give the relaxed, fun environment with no rules while still providing structure.
Last is community Role Play. Most of us here now, are very familiar with this as it is what we all do already! Community RP is where you join a community, and have rules, stricter and more realistic RP, admins, support, application processes, elections for leaders, special events, and all of that other good stuff. This is not the type of game where you can land a helicopter on the highway or troll the police when they arrest you. These people mean business!
We will have our own official servers but players may also host and run their own servers. Each server's combination of what is available will be up to each server owner and how they choose to customize their server.
DEFINE "ROLEPLAY" or "RP"
Roleplay is a great type of game play. If you have never heard of Role Play or are new to it, let us better explain it to you. When you Roleplay, you are almost acting or improvising. Random encounters and interactions with other people come up and people "play along" with these actions essentially.
Say you are driving down the highway and you hit a person crossing the road. In a normal online game, most of you would ignore it and keep driving. In RP, every action has a reaction. Jobs are played out as if you are doing them IRL, injuries are treated like they are painful, and criminals get caught and punished (sometimes). There is good RP and there is bad RP.
In an example of good RP, you would get out of your vehicle, see if the person was okay, and call an ambulance. They would most likely be making "oooh" and "owwww" noises as if they were hurt. They may decide to press charges on you in which case you would end up in court. This would lead to you needing to find a lawyer and make a good case for yourself. This kind of RP can be found on a Community RP server.
In an example of bad RP, you would after hitting the person, back up and hit them again. That would lead to them calling the police which would put you at the front of a huge pursuit. If you knew the person, they could identify you, resulting in a warrant for your arrest. If you ever got caught you would not stand a chance in court and would most likely do jail time for felony evasion and a hit and run. Then, most of your RP would be focused in a jail making shanks, trading favors for commissary items, and trying to make an escape. This is not necessarily "bad" RP, it is just more "troll-y" and many communities like to keep it more realistic. This is of course the server owners choice. This kind of RP can more commonly be found on an Open RP server.
RP can lead to some of the funnest gaming experiences you will ever have. If you want a lot of interaction with people, this is the way to go. If this isn't your thing? No worries! That is why we have classic mode where you play with AI's and objectives and have less heads on interaction with people, like GTA online.
WHO ARE WE AS DEVELOPERS?
Most of our experience comes from what we have learned in college or university, and developing mods for Arma 3 servers, along with several little side projects. It involves the same type of map development, programming, animations, and scripting that you see in any other game, only it is much more limited due to Arma having very outdated tools and not being made to handle as much as we want it to. That is why we decided to make a standalone game. We have great ideas and plenty of talent to back them up, but we are too big for Arma and needed an engine that could handle all we had to offer. That is why we switched to UE4 and began making something new.
Do we work with other developers? Absolutely! There are a few modelers whose content we found in the UE4 marketplace that we use, and we love their models so much, we have reached out to them for some custom work as well. We have two modelers of our own as well, but if we see something we love and we can use it - you better believe we are buying it! That saves our modelers time so they can be working on something else. All of the models we have purchased are modular items. Meaning you buy building parts, but you still have to build you items brick by brick - literally. We have made some amazing things with the modular pieces we have purchased so far. We are also looking to work with an animator to make custom animations in a motion capture studio so that they can be as realistic and unique as possible.
These are the two main reasons why we require funding to continue much longer. To hire a great animator, and to be able to pay the modelers doing custom content to create new models for us! (Those, and of course keeping the ability to do this full time.) This is what is slowing us down the most right now! We feel we have come pretty far with funding it ourselves and getting what we couldn't make from the UE4 marketplace. But to continue, we'll need your help.
We have spent the last 2 months showing you what we can do so you would not have to pledge blindly. (Project started on June 20th, 2018) Taking a look at what we have done so far, we have created a PD, hospital, zoo, aquarium, several furnished apartment buildings, a downtown shopping district, a custom morph character creator with both males and females, clothes made for each body type, made drive-able cars, made a police car with functioning lights and sirens, made all of the basic player movement abilities, animated all of our animals and fish, created dynamic materials that change with the weather, created a realistic day and night cycle, created a housing editor that allows you to change any material and the color of any material in your home, made a twitch plugin that works from any tv or pc screen, and we are still working on so much more right now. Again, two months. We did all of this in two months. We feel like this was a big accomplishment. Imagine what we will have done in two more months? Or by next summer? That is why we believe we can meet our estimated timelines. Good things take time. But they don't have to take 4 years if you work hard and love what you're doing. We don't quit when we're tired. We quit when we're done. (Screenshots of everything mentioned can be found in the progress tracker on our website as well as what we are working on right now.)
We post screenshots of completed work on our discord daily and answer every question we are asked. We know you have trust issues, but we won't hurt you. <3 You will be involved and updated every step of the way. We are so excited to show you what we have done that we couldn't keep it to ourselves even if we wanted to!
Thanks for hearing us out! If you'd like to back us, you can do so here! Thank you on behalf of all of us here at Nine to Five! Read more about us and what we are doing at out website ninetofiverpg.com and join our discord to stay up to date with what we are doing (Discord link) ! See you soon!