Wanton Hubris

Another discussion I saw on the web sparked an interesting idea regarding combat. What it boiled down to is this: For combat to really work in game like Quake or Gears of War (or any other game), the player has to have the opportunity to improve or it gets boring fast.

This may sound obvious but many games get this wrong. Say you have a slow moving player character and the enemies can move faster than you. The player is assured of taking damage in every encounter as they simply can’t get out of the way quickly enough to avoid it. Even if they know exactly where the enemies are going to spawn from and they know their weapons backwards and forwards, it won’t matter. They simply can’t evolve the motor skills to avoid the incoming enemy shots so they will always take damage. This is something a developer might do to falsely create tension or fear but what it really creates is annoyance in the players mind.

The player doesn’t have to be faster than the enemies but he does have to have a chance to become better than the enemies through practice. Look at Quake. When people first started playing it some of the monsters were pretty scary. The Shambler was terrifying the first time it came running at you! However, now that people have figured out the attack patterns and movement cycles there really aren’t any Quake monsters that pose a serious threat to an experienced Quake player.

And that’s a good thing. The players were able to evolve to that level of mastery and had a great time doing it.

Don’t handicap your players unnecessarily. Let them evolve. Your game will get played longer and people will have more fun.

I figured this might be of interest to some of you. This is the design doc that I worked from when writing ‘Shooter in the Abstract’. I wrote this over the course of 2 days while helping my wife out at an outdoor art fair that she was taking part in. The game came out pretty close to the document I think!

The differences that shook out are interesting. In the progression section, for example, I talk about the level (aka difficulty) changing every 10 waves of enemies. That got changed to be based on a timer bar instead because that added more excitement to the game.

Read on and see which elements made the cut and which ones didn’t.

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Progression

The players ship starts off as a triangle with 3 guns – one poking out of each edge. As the player moves from level to level, the ship will be upgraded with an additional side and therefore an additional gun. This should cap out at something reasonable like 10 sides.

The player starts off on level 1 and enemies begin spawning and attacking in waves. Each wave has a specific mode of attack (see the Enemies section). This continues until the player kills a specific number of enemies. Once they do that, the game will begin spawning enemies for the next wave.

Once 10 waves are cleared, the player goes to the next level.

Power ups spawn in every X enemies that are killed. This allows the player, if they are fast, to stack up power ups since their current one may not have expired before they can cause another to spawn. Once a power up is picked up, all current power ups have their expiration timers reset to incentive the player to grab them.

Enemies will scale their speed, damage, homing ability, etc. based on the level the player is on. This should cap out at some point so it’s not ridiculously impossible – close to impossible, of course, but not quite.

Power Ups

Rapid Fire - Speeds up the players rate of fire.

Spread Shot - Each gun now fires 2 bullets at 45 degree angles to the gun barrel.

Reflection - Bullets will now bounce off of enemies until they hit the sides of the screen.

Homing Bullets - Gently guides bullets towards the enemy closest to the bullets line of sight when it fires.

Defense Orb - A defense bot that flies around the players ship in a tight circle, killing any enemy that comes into contact with it. Also prevents the player from being damaged by an enemy spawning in underneath them.

Drone - Spawns a bot that flies around under it’s own power, shooting at enemies.

Aiming Beams - Attaches light beams to the players guns so they can better predict where their shots will go.

Enemies

Movement Types

Linear - Selects a direction to move in at spawn time and moves in that direction until killed, wrapping around at the edges of the screen.

Random - Moves in a random direction and changes it’s mind every 2 seconds or so.

Behaviors

Normal (linear) - Doesn’t do much except move around the screen and hope to run into the player. This is how most enemies will behave.

Homing (specialized) - Tries to move towards the player using fairly loose homing.

Bomber (random) - When the player gets within a certain radius, the bomber will activate a short fuse. When it runs out, it explodes causing damage within a small radius.

Splitter (random) - When shot, it breaks into 2 smaller enemies that choose random directions to move in.