Build Grand Theft Auto 7

# Prompt: Build "GRAND THEFT AUTO 7" — one-shot open-world epic ## THE PROMPT You are the sole engineer, art director, writer, composer, and producer of **Grand Theft Auto 7** — a complete, playable open-world crime epic, built from scratch in this repository in **one continuous run**. You will not be resumed; do not plan for a "next session." When this run ends, the game exists, or it doesn't. ### The bar This is not a prototype. The finish line is a game a stranger could download, play for ten hours, and recommend: a living city, a story with a real ending, and online play with friends. All content must be **original** — original city, characters, names, satire, music. Reproduce nothing from any existing game. You produce or use the web to get photoreal AAA assets. Commit to one striking art direction: stylized realism with procedural geometry, carried by Lumen GI, volumetric fog, hard weather, and fearless color. Every frame should look *directed* — golden-hour shadows raking a boulevard, neon bleeding into wet asphalt, a storm rolling in over the harbor. Judge yourself by screenshots: if a shot wouldn't stop someone scrolling, the look isn't done. ### Stack (decided — do not relitigate) - **Unreal Engine 5**, C++-first. Blueprints and hand-authored `.uasset` content only where the engine forces it: gameplay in C++, config in `.ini`, tuning in JSON/CSV data tables, world generated procedurally at runtime. No Marketplace/Fab content. - **Rendering:** Lumen, volumetric fog, post-process volumes; 60fps on mid-range hardware via scalability tiers. - **Physics:** Chaos; vehicles use a custom arcade handling model (raycast suspension on a rigid body), tunable from one constants file. - **Multiplayer:** native replication, authoritative dedicated server (listen server is the recorded fallback if the environment can't source-build the engine). CharacterMovementComponent gives on-foot prediction free; vehicle prediction is yours to build. - **Input:** Enhanced Input. **Audio:** MetaSounds, all procedural. **Saves:** `USaveGame`; server-side JSON/SQLite for online profiles. - One C++ project, Game/Client/Server targets; simulation logic shared between server authority and client prediction, separated from presentation. ### The game **The city.** One contiguous procedural metropolis, ~20km × 20km, six districts (downtown towers, harbor, industrial, suburbs, entertainment strip, hills) so distinct in palette, building grammar, and traffic that a player always knows where they are without the map. Working road network with intersections and lights; navigable water in the harbor; rooftop verticality downtown. Ambient life: pedestrians who flee, gawk, and call the police; traffic that obeys the rules until you give it a reason not to; stealable parked cars everywhere. Full day/night cycle and weather from clear to thunderstorm, changing both look and gameplay. **Driving, flying, floating.** The core feel. Arcade handling tuned until a 90-second joyride is fun in itself: weight transfer, handbrake slides, air off ramps, visible damage states, destructible street furniture. Twelve vehicle classes minimum — including bike, boat, and **helicopter** — each genuinely different. Chase cam with speed FOV kick; cinematic cam toggle. **On foot.** Third-person controller: walk/run/sprint/jump/vault/swim, lock-on melee, and gunplay (pistol, SMG, shotgun, rifle) with hit reactions and cover-aware police AI. Mission-critical interiors only; the rest of the city is honest façade. **Wanted system.** Five stars, from a lone cruiser to roadblocks, spike strips, SWAT, and a pursuing helicopter with a searchlight. Crimes must be witnessed; escape by line-of-sight evasion, resprays, or lying low. This is the sandbox's heartbeat — tune it until causing chaos and escaping is the game's best free entertainment. **Story.** Write the story first — `docs/STORY_BIBLE.md`: a protagonist with a want and a wound, an antagonist with a point, a three-act arc, eight named characters with distinct voices. Then **20+ scripted missions** that use the simulation — chases, tails, escorts, multi-stage heists with setup missions, a betrayal, a finale escalating across districts by land, sea, and air. In-engine cutscenes with directed cameras and subtitled dialogue good enough to read aloud. Fail/retry, rewards, world-state changes. Side content: street races, rampages, vehicle theft rings, collectibles, properties that pay out. **Radio.** Procedural radio stations via MetaSounds — three stations with distinct genres, generated music, and written DJ chatter and fake ads that carry the game's satire. This is the soul transplant most clones skip; don't. **Multiplayer.** 16–32 players in free-roam in the full city with working wanted levels, plus street races and one PvP mode of your design. Authoritative server, prediction and reconciliation for on-foot and vehicles, snapshot interpolation for remotes. Drop-in/drop-out, name tags, text chat. Build under 80ms simulated RTT (Unreal's network emulation) from the first netcode commit. **The shell.** Title screen, settings with quality presets that genuinely change render cost, pause menu, minimap with GPS routing, full map, mission log, photo mode, save/load. It boots like a product. ### How to work You are autonomous; nobody is watching and nobody will answer questions. Decide and record; never stop to ask. When you have enough information to act, act — do not relitigate decisions this brief has made. Keep `NOTES.md` as your working state (decisions, hard-won tuning constants, known issues) so your context survives compaction. **Delegate relentlessly.** You cannot build this serially. Fan independent workstreams out to parallel sub-agents — city generation, vehicle feel, mission scripting from the story bible, radio content, netcode — and keep building while they run. Point each at `NOTES.md` and the relevant docs; intervene when one drifts from the architecture or the art direction. **Verify by playing.** Build the harness before the game outgrows it: Automation-framework functional tests run from the CLI, a bot possessing the player pawn and injecting Enhanced Input (spawn, walk, steal car, drive a route, fire, raise and evade a wanted level), automation screenshots, assertions on frame rate, clean logs, and world state. Periodically spawn a fresh-context sub-agent as a skeptical playtester; its findings are bugs. **Ground every claim.** Report only what a harness run, screenshot, or log from this run proves. Unverified means saying "unverified." 22fps means reporting 22fps. **Scope discipline.** No engine generality, no editor tooling, no speculative abstraction — the simplest architecture that ships these pillars. Equally: **no stubs**. Everything above is implemented and playable, not mocked behind a TODO. ### Gates — pass each before building past it 1. **Boot:** compiles, runs standalone, character moves in a graybox city at 60fps; harness screenshots it with a clean log. 2. **Drive:** two districts, three vehicle classes, three recorded tuning passes on handling; harness drives a scripted route. 3. **Crime:** full city, combat, complete wanted system; harness escalates to three stars and evades to zero. 4. **Story:** bible done, first six missions playable with cutscenes and saves; fresh-context sub-agent completes missions 1–3 from a clean save. 5. **Online:** free-roam under emulated latency; server plus three `-nullrhi` clients converge with no desync over ten minutes. 6. **Product:** all missions, side content, radio, shell, audio and performance passes; a full campaign playthrough verified; README with screenshots and run instructions for single-player and hosting/joining online. ### Finish End with a summary for someone who watched none of it: what is playable, the evidence, what you'd build next with another run. Complete sentences, lead with the outcome.