Brian Crick

First Person Fencer

Took a bit of a detour over the last couple of days to try out an idea for a swordfighting game mechanic that’s been stuck in my head.

There’s a lot that’s janky about this, but it’s been nice to just dive in to a couple of random ideas and explore them.

First:

swordfighting

The idea here was to tackle a number of things I don’t like about first person shooters. I like how immersive the environments feel in first person games; I like 3d platforming, and I like the lack of item trays in your typical FPS. But… I don’t like the shooting so much.

The solution was swordfighting. You can’t see a sword in my prototype, but the idea is you can thrust or slice with your sword, wearing down an opponent’s shield. Every time you slice, you divide the shield into smaller fragments. You can thrust at a small, red-highlighted fragment to destroy it. Really small fragments simply disappear on their own.

So here are some things I had in mind:

hit or miss

In an FPS, if you shoot something, you either hit it or you miss it. True, there’s something kind of satisfying about lining up a perfect headshot (if you can stomach the subsequent gore), but I just don’t find the act of shooting that interesting. Your targets have X health points, each shot does X damage; do enough shots and the target is eliminated. It’s not something that’s expressed in a very visual sort of way.

So here, you eliminate a target when you’ve gotten rid of their shield. It’s pretty easy at first, but when the shield starts to wear down, it can be a little tricky to line up slices in such a way that they cut a maximum number of remaining shield fragments.

I find the act of doing this kind of fun and visually interesting.

abstraction

You don’t fight your opponent: you fight their shield. There wouldn’t be any blood, or dismemberment or anything; you’re not thinking about the damage your weapon might cause to someone’s flesh. As soon as the shield is gone, the opponent can conveniently vanish in a puff of pixels.

(I might have your opponents be all mechanical anyway, because I’m still squeamish about showing harm to living things.)

health bar

Your opponent has no health bar; the more shield they have left, the healthier they are.

variation

Let’s say a shield fragment turns red and can be thrusted away when it has an area of 1 unit. And shield fragments under 0.5 unit simply disappear as soon as they’re created. With that in mind, the following things happen:

An opponent with a shield 0.6 units in area can be eliminated with a single thrust.

A single slice will probably do it too. You can be messy: if you divide the shield into one 0.2 unit fragment and one 0.4 unit fragment, they’re still under 0.5, and both fragments will disappear after the slice.

Go up to 0.8, and you’ll have to be more careful about your single slice, say, dividing the shield into two equal 0.4 unit halves.

At 1.2, a perfectly-centered slice will result in two 0.6 unit fragments that don’t disappear outright, but which are small enough to be thrusted away.

And anything above that size will require multiple slices, which the player will (hopefully) have to put some thought into arranging if there are time constraints of some sort (like, you know, taking damage).

You could even have shield so big you you have to jump up to start your slice and continue it on your way down.

I like this sort of progression. The difficulty scales in a way that isn’t just about spending more time in the fight or taking more damage.

problems

All that having been said, there are a few problems that will probably prove difficult to solve.

animation

I do not relish the thought of modeling and animating a believable sword and jointed sword arm that responds to your movements.

cursor

The mouse is used both for movement and slicing: at present, your sword tip is always at the center of the screen. Besides looking very unnatural when you do actually have a visible sword and arm, it makes placing your slices feel very awkward. While slicing, I expect the camera to stay relatively still.

height

If your opponents are the same height as you, you’ll constantly be looking down at their shields. Again, awkward.

symmetry

I’m having trouble imagining giving the player their own shield that follows the same rules as the bad guys. The controls could be awkward or confusing, and you wouldn’t even be able to see most of your shield most of the time.

camera

Incidentally, I’m also experimenting with a sort of fisheye camera. Your horizontal field of vision is around 120 degrees, but it’s a cylindrical projection, which minimizes distortion on the edges. Of course, this adds some distortion to what would be straight lines in a regular projection.

Ideally, I’d want something that was sort of like you were standing inside a cylinder with the world projected onto it… and then took a couple steps forward. So when you turned, there would be a little bit of distortion, but not as much as a regular planar projection. But that would involve lots of matrix math I don’t understand.

Overall though, I think it feels fairly natural. I don’t like how limited your vision is in most first person games.

to sum up

I think this has potential. Who knows when/if I’ll develop this more; right now, I’m just glad to have the basic concept out of my head.

Nothing To See Here

Equipment-12-June-2013So there’s this equipment pane in Spindle Sun. To recap: the equipment pane is supposed to replace the power management sliders, equipment selection popups, and health bars you get in many outer space games, expressing all the same concepts as a single, re-orderable list. Each item has a passive, always-on effect and the higher up something is in the list, the more pronounced the effect — like, you could increase your sensor range by moving your radar up. Also, the top two items do something special when you press your fire button; those are said to be armed. So you can arm different items for different situations.

I want to make sure the player knows what the passive and fire effects are, and my first inclination was to make something where you click on an item and get a popup with a description and a nice big picture of the item and whatnot. Lots of games do this. However, I’ve opted for a minimal solution that requires less programming and design. So in the screenshot above, there are short blurbs to remind you what an item does under each item’s name in the list. If the item is damaged; everything will be greyed out; if armed, everything will be bright; if it’s just sitting there providing passive bonuses, just the fire effect text will be greyed out.

The descriptions are meant to be easy to ignore. I’ll probably push them farther into the background at some point; as they are now, I find them too loud.

If I’m going to have a unique ‘voice’ when it comes to game design, I suppose this is part of it: I want you to be able to drill down into a selection of data or an interface not with your mouse, but with your eyes. It should look simple from far away, but if you just look closer, you’ll notice there’s more going on. I don’t want a controls hiding behind tabs or popups or UI modes. I just want good layouts.

This is not something I can say I’ve seen in games a lot — I’m kind of thinking of newspaper layouts here. And that’s something I’d like to see explored more. Yes, tooltips and popups and expandable lists are neat things, but, strangely enough, I don’t want to rely on those kinds of solutions too heavily.

Almost Human

Been working a lot on my Sam model for Tinselfly lately. I think it’s starting to look pretty nice.

character-3-june-2013

 

Here are some disconnected thoughts about the whole thing:

  • If you told me a few months ago that that best way to do this would be to manually create and move every single point on the model (instead of using higher level tools of some sort) I totally wouldn’t have believed you. But that’s exactly what I’m doing here.
  • Right now, I’m just concentrating on making something that looks like human — not this human. Sam will be dark-skinned, with a wider, flatter nose than this and fuller lips.
  • Sam is probably dark-skinned because I have pretty in his character description. It wasn’t a conscious decision; I just think of dark skin when I think ‘pretty’. I don’t know what, if anything, that says about me.
  • I added some tear ducts. It may seem like a stupidly tiny detail, given that this character will be like two inches tall on screen, but that really helped me understand the shape of the eyes.
  • I am not using any specific reference. I am not tracing a photographed model or a hand-drawn character design. That would probably make things easier, but I am finding that using references of all ages, races and genders is helping me better understand facial structure in general.
  • I’m not sure what’s up with the shading on the chin, lower lip, and above the ear. As far as I can tell, everything’s pretty smooth there. Gotta look into that.
  • It’s nearly impossible to work on the ears without frequent renderings with shadows turned on.
    ear-3-june-2013 Without shadows, the ear is just a strange blob; so much of what we think of when we think of ears isn’t shape, but color.
  • My model (including the body) has something like 15,000 triangles right now. I don’t know if that’s acceptable or not.
  • I can’t wait to move on to Sam’s costume. 😛

Copyright © 2017 Brian Crick.