Day: August 7, 2013

Categories
7dfps games design

Make an FPS in 7 Days – Game idea: “Metamorphosis”

Next week is the 7DFPS challenge – design, code, ship a game in 7 Days, on the theme of “first person shooter”. I want to do something unique and interesting. Here’s one of my ideas.

(if you like this idea, please re-tweet this to vote for it – I’ll decide which to do based on which one(s) people like most) Other ideas: “Runners”, “Follow”)

Title: “Metamorphosis”

Premise: what makes an FPS unique/special among games is the visceral, immersive nature.

But our FPS’s today all project the same, boring, 1:1 flat rectangle as our window on the world.

What if we had eyes on the side of our head? (a la most herbivores – you can see to both sides, and halfway behind you – but have a blindspot dead-ahead. This is why some birds flick their heads left and right all the time – they physically can’t look directly ahead!)

What if you were a Beholder – with 360 simultaneous vision. Looking ahead, behind, up and down all at once?

What does the world look like when your camera is 2 inches off the ground? (a rat’s-eye-view) … or upside-down, attached to the ceiling? (a spider’s…)

Core gameplay

In Metamorphosis, you start in a lab with one way out: a small mouse-hole in the skirting-board. A theft gone wrong, a wizard about to catch you “in flagrante”. You have only one chance: a giant bubbling flask labelled “Rat”. You gobble the potion, dive through the hole, and escape.

…but now you’re a rat, loose in a dungeon full of nasties. Absolutely everything out there is bigger, meaner, and (often) uglier than you. And sadly: loot won’t be much good, since you’re too small to wear armour, and have no hands to hold a sword.

Special effects

It’s a dungeon-hack with a difference: you’re looking for magic potions that metamorphose you into new and useful creatures. When you metamorphose, everything changes:

  • the lighting (some creatures see by light, bats echo-locate and see only monochrome, other creates have infra-vision/heat-sensitive vision)
  • the viewpoint (high, low, upside-down)
  • the number of simultaneous “cameras” (one per eyeball…)
  • the “lens shape” of each eyeball (normal, fisheye, warped, 360-degrees…)
  • your strength/speed/vulnerability (heavy/light, low hitpoints / high hitpoints, regeneration…)
  • movement abilities (walk, jump (rats jump so high they almost fly…), fly, wall-walk, etc)

Practicality…

An old friend of mine wrote a real-time 360-degree FPS projection 15 years ago, and kindly dug out his original source code + demo app for me. With his permission, I’ll post it here ASAP, but suffice it to say: this stuff is doable, it may sound a bit crazy, but I’ve experimented with it (a little) before.

Upgrades and weapons

…entirely dictated by the creature you’re currently polymorphed into.

Summary

I like this idea because:

  • …polymorphing is fun.
  • …there’s historically been very little experimentation with FPS cameras – the best you can hope for is some post-processing screen effets (depth of field, over-saturation, blur, desaturation)
Categories
7dfps games design

Make an FPS in 7 Days – Game idea: “Runners”

Next week is the 7DFPS challenge – design, code, ship a game in 7 Days, on the theme of “first person shooter”. I want to do something unique and interesting. Here’s one of my ideas.

(if you like this idea, please re-tweet this to vote for it – I’ll decide which to do based on which one(s) people like most) Other ideas: “Follow”, “Metamorphosis”)

Title: “Runners”

Premise: what makes an FPS unique/special among games is the visceral, immersive nature. How many Oculus Rift games are not first-person?

One thing FPS’s should be particularly good at is wish-fulfillment. Well, something I’ve “wished” I could do ever since seeing the opening sequence of The Matrix … is superhuman jumps from rooftop to rooftop. (YouTube: the ‘jump’ program and YouTube: the opening sequence)

(I especially like the second clip – this is the point at which we first get proof that the film can’t quite be real; it’s the first leap down the rabbit-hole…)

Core gameplay

Runners is simply an excuse to do desperate, death-defying, running jumps from rooftop to rooftop, while being shot at (and shooting back).

That’s it!

Challenges to the player

Moment to moment during the game, the player has the following decisions:

  1. Big jumps require big runups; you get faster the longer you run (Super Mario Bros stylee). Better plan your run-up, and don’t chicken-out and slowdown at the last minute!
  2. It’s easy to stand-still and snipe: so we make you invulnerable while in mid-air, and create lots of obstacles on the rooftops, that prevent “easy” shots from a distance
  3. You can’t jump forever (remember the bad old days of deathmatch quake bunnyhopping? Ugh). You have a fatigue meter that forces you to periodically stop and hide while you get your breath back
  4. “Guns. Lots of guns” – long distance, wide-open spaces, enclosed target areas? This is a perfect excuse for overblow weapons of insane destruction. Remember Syndicate’s supremely over-the-top Gauss Gun? Oh yeah!

Decisions, decisions

Three conflicting tensions (no upgrades in this one! Just choice of weapons):

  1. Movement: speed, jump-distance, acceleration (run-ups) … heavy weapons = fail
  2. Accuracy: sniping and head-shots requires keeping still, keeping fatigue at a minimum (no jumping for a while!)
  3. Positioning: is it better to circle round behind an enemy and catch them unawares (lots of jumping, weak weapons) … or go straight at them, guns blazing, and try to scare them into running while tired (they fall to their death)?

Summary

I like this idea because:

  • …who doesn’t want to play in The Matrix?
  • …”Canabalt … with guns”
  • …most FPS’s give you infinite mass and infinite acceleration … this one makes things a lot more realistic and interesting
  • …level-design will be easy! (procedurally generating skyscraper-roofs = WIN)
Categories
7dfps games design GamesThatTeach

Make an FPS in 7 Days – Game idea: “Follow”

Next week is the 7DFPS challenge – design, code, ship a game in 7 Days, on the theme of “first person shooter”. I want to do something unique and interesting. Here’s one of my ideas.

(if you like this idea, please re-tweet this to vote for it – I’ll decide which to do based on which one(s) people like most) Other ideas: “Runners”, “Metamorphosis”)

Title: “Follow”

Premise: what makes an FPS unique/special among games is the visceral, immersive nature. Almost every *other* genre of game gives you 360-degree vision. This was originally to compensate for the way “a computer” fails to use most of your human “peripheral” senses (depth, perpheral vision, positional sound, etc). The most obvious difference with FPS’s: you can’t see what’s behind you.

In most FPS’s, you only have to worry about your own skin. You spin around frequently to check no-one is sneaking up on you. You strafe round corners so that a head-on enemy doesn’t get a chance to blindside you as you slowly rotate around the corner. Stealth games let you “lean” to make up for the danger of corners.

Core gameplay

Follow is different: you are invulnerable, and you’re being followed by creatures you’re trying to rescue / lead to safety. Because they’re always behind you, you cannot see when they’re being attacked – you can gun down all opposition, then turn round to find out everyone’s been eaten behind your back.

But if you walk backwards everywhere, you’re bound to fall off a cliff, or run into an enemy and only notice it when your followers go down in a hail of fire.

Challenges to the player

Moment to moment during the game, the player has to compromise between the following tensions:

  1. Avoid static obstacles/dangers (look where you run) … vs … prevent followers from wandering off (look behind you, at followers)
  2. Takedown enemies (charge forwards, run around obstacles) … vs … lead carefully (avoid leading your followers into traps / fields of fire)
  3. Hands-off (followers wander and get into danger) … vs … Hands-on (use non-lethal weapons to herd and cluster your followers, so you can keep them alive more easily)
  4. Get to level-end / safety quickly (lose lots of followers) … vs … slow, stealthy “no man left behind” (slower and painstaking but higher success rate)

Upgrades

Three interwoven upgrade paths:

  1. Player: might/damage/speed
  2. Relationship with followers: trust/obedience
  3. Followers: speed/intelligence/resilience

At end of each level, you get cash in a virtual currency based on how many followers you rescued, how quickly – and how much they like you.

(if you got them to the end by bullying … they won’t like you so much as if you gently nudged throughout)

Weapon availability

Potentially: various unique weapons only “unlocked” when you achieve difficult non-shooting things, e.g.:

  1. Complete a level with 100% survival of followers
  2. Keep followers at 90% or above happinness for 5 levels in a row
  3. Complete a level in under 50% of the “par” time

Ideally, those weapons would be complementary to the achievement. e.g. for the “complete a level fast” award, you’d get something that made it easier to complete levels stealthily (you’ve already mastered “moving fast”, so this gives you something valuable).

…also: if you don’t like playing fast, this gives you a high cost/reward incentive to do so: you want to play stealthily, you want the uber-weapon for stealth … so you need to take a break from stealth-play to go earn it.

Summary

I like this idea because:

  • …it’s an FPS about protecting people, rather than slaughtering them
  • …it emphasizes the vulnerability of “people other than myself”
  • …it demonstrates that making yourself into a super-soldier may be ultimately useless and unrewarding
  • …it makes the purely-tactical parts of an FPS a lot more strategic, as core gameplay – rather than relying upon “map design” and/or “multiplayer team tactics” to provide all the strategy