Since our last update we’ve made a number of changes to the game.
The old alt-fire for the sniper rifle was an orb that steadily grew in size and damage as it traveled. It was heavily inspired from an ability in Heroes Of The Storm, an old MOBA. You can see the gist of it in the below image.
Li Ming’s “arcane orb”, if you’re curious.
A slowly expanding orb, coupled with a low velocity, should theoretically place a lot of demands on the player’s positioning. Firing it willy nilly will, unless very lucky, lead to it either completely whiffing, or hitting something too early and close, thus doing very little damage. To maximize the effect, the player needs to have already cleared enemies from directly in front of them, and manipulate these enemies into bunching up. Unfortunately, the player didn’t really have any good tools for that.
The most common enemy is the trash mob archetype, which has low health, deals low damage, and mindlessly follows the player. While they do tend to bunch up, since there are so many of them and they are bee-lining it to the player, high burst damage against them is overkill since they die in just a few hits anyway. On top of that, the trash mob enemies also tend to have a few stragglers strewn throughout the arena. This is partly due to them taking partial damage, usually from the holy water grenade, or simply coming out of the teleporters placed around the edges of the battlezone.
In practice, this means is that they almost always smother the large ball of damage before it has a chance to get going, almost like a sort of net. This problem gets exponentially exacerbated when the difficulty ramps up, and there are more of these guys present. In other words, it becomes less effective when it’s needed most.
Not even that many enemies present, but it does show how impossible it is to fire the orb at the distant enemies.
Even when you could get the shots through the maze of trash mob enemies, the higher value targets which had enough health to warrant maximizing damage output don’t clump up anyway, making burst AoE damage somewhat irrelevant. I guess I could have implemented some sort of vortex like ability which sucks enemies together, or given the player some other tools for grouping enemies, but it begs the question of how much the game should be changed just to accommodate an alternate fire mode for one of the guns.
What would be useful in many different scenarios is an attack that pushes enemies out of a certain area, even if it did very little damage. It would be especially useful when using the sniper rifle, as there are plenty of occasions when the player wants to snipe a high value enemy that is behind a fleshwall of trash.
Well, to make a long story short, the orb is gone, and the new alt-fire for the sniper is the concussion grenade. The grenade stuns all enemies, regardless of poise, for a very short amount of time, and blows them away from its center with great force. It is extremely useful, and, unlike the orb, gets more useful the more enemies are present.
The first time I use this in the above video is around the thirty second mark. It’s more clear in motion, but I screencapped the moment regardless.
All the death decals are misleading. The concussion grenade does almost no damage. They died from gunfire.
Unfortunately, the second time I used the concussion grenade highlights the main issue that I have with it. The left side of the composite image below sees me about to use the concussion grenade to scatter some incoming Reddit Admins. The second image sees me having not used the concussion grenade, but instead teleporting into the middle of the damaging mob. Right after this, seen in the third image, I finally use the concussion grenade. So what happened? Bad controls happened.
The LSHIFT key controls teleportation. The LCTRL key controls the alt-fire for the gun. The TAB key switches weapons. I figured that, because these controls get used in almost all FPS games, and in the case of TAB and SHIFT for similar purposes, there’d be no issue.
I should not have assumed this. Games don’t ask players to hit tab and ctrl in brief succession, for good reason, as the pinky finger needs to travel all the way up and down the keyboard. To make matters worse, this needs to be done as quickly as possible, since before the player uses the concussion grenade they often need to switch to the sniper, which necessitates them hitting tab first, then back to ctrl to shoot them. It’s annoying, it’s physically unpleasant, and mistakes are bound to be made in the heat of the moment.
There are a number of potential solutions to this problem. I can put alt-fire on RMB, and the melee on Q/E. I can take grenades off MMB, and put them on some other key. Since the slower pace of the stasis charge is less of an issue, I could remove the sniper’s alt-fire entirely, and give the concussion grenade a dedicated button, especially since I’m not sold on forcing the player to switch to the sniper to use this tool in the first place.
I think the first solution is the most promising, since almost all FPS games for the past twenty five years have some sort of melee, but none of them (to my knowledge) put melee on the RMB, which is the setup I’ve had since the start of the game. The original justification for this was pretty logical. I didn’t want the player to take their fingers off WASD to hit a melee key, such as F, and the RMB was free since the game only had shooting, melee, and grenades. With the addition of many new options for the player this control scheme needs to be revisited.
But I could be totally wrong with both of these ideas, and go with something else entirely. In short, I have to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. In other news, the minimap is now usable.
Updated minimap. I also added outlines, and changed a few minimap pictures to be more legible.
The main issue with the old minimap was that the graphical entities that were rendered were attached to the gameobjects themselves, which meant that when the characters rotated the graphics got all messed up. This is partly because there are so few pixels to work with that rotation can destroy the legibility of the image, and also just because it’s harder to recognize an icon when it’s rotated at a random angle.
Old minimap. Left, just spawned enemies are (mostly) legible as they are pointing straight up. Right, they start moving through the gameworld and the legibility goes way down.
The new system still has a problem the old system had. It’s a challenge to clearly and accurately represent a situation where many enemies are overlapping in position. The graphics cannot be made much smaller, which means that they need to be cleverly shifted about in some way where they’re all visible, preferably while also being marked as slightly misleadingly placed. This seems like a problem that plenty of other game developers have solved, so I’ll do a bit of research and figure it out.
However, while the improved minimap is nice, it was only done as an aside to a far more pressing concern. Previously, when enemies spawned, the player had no idea what kind of enemy was spawning. This is crucially important information. If a Body Positive Bertha is spawning, you don’t want to be right next to her, since she explodes. In contrast, you do want to be on top of an IDF sniper, since they’re basically not a threat at those close ranges. For other enemies you’d like to be behind cover, melee them immediately, etcetera. After I did a pass through the minimap graphics, I repurposed them for the spawners, which will now show the minimap version of the enemy they’re spawning. Should have been done a long time ago.
I also finally fixed the godawful programmer graphics teleport indicator, by grabbing some placeholder graphic online and writing a shader to fill the inside contents with various colours depending on its current state. Hopefully I did a good enough job that you don’t need to be told this, but dark grey is just after use, filling with light grey is the percent recharged, and then it glows yellow when its active.
I’ll have another writeup in a few days.
