Old School Shooter Mechanics

News & General Discussion
1

Hey everyone, long time no see.

I’ve finally have gotten to a point where I can dedicate some time to game development and would like to work on a project that I’ve been working on conceptually for some time.

I’m taking a lot of inspired from Mark Brown’s Game Maker’s Toolkit about Doom:

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In the video he talks about a “dance” that occurs due to “orthogonal unit differentiation”.

So taking that concept I’m looking to design a handful of enemies and weapons that create interesting scenarios.

And with lots of time to think on the matter I think I’m going to go for a Diablo-esq fantasy setting with the player controlling a Battle Mage.

Here are some core concepts that I am honing in on, let me know what you think.

-Player-
-The player will move at one speed and there will be no sprinting, crouching, swimming, or climbing.
-There will be no zooming or “iron sights”.
-They will have four magic types that have their own mana pools: fire, water, air, and earth.
-Drops will include mana (red, blue, yellow, green, and white. One for each magic type and white will increase all mana pools evenly), health, and temporary buffs.
-Buffs will include invisibility, invincibility, quad damage, unlimited mana for each type.

-Spells Mechanics-
-Spells will be gathered like weapons and be limited to a few spells per magic type to keep it streamlined and avoid overlapping mechanics.
-When a spell is cast it will use up 1 part of the mana permanently and 10 parts temporarily. This is to encourage variety and act as a “cooldown”.
-I am debating if there should be a spell in each type that does not permanently lower the mana so they can always be used.
-Each spell will work like a weapon and two spells can be equipped at the same time.
-Each spell can be equiped by two button presses. One button to select the type, one more to select the specific spell.

-List of Spells being considered-
-(fire) Fireball- Acts like a rocket launcher from Quake 3.
-(fire) Flames- Acts like the Pyro’s flame thrower in Team Fortress 2.
-(fire) Firebolt - Acts like Quake’s plasma rifle. Can be fire slowly at no cost if out of mana.
-(fire) Engulf- Acts like a Molotov cocktail.

-(water) Beam- Acts like Halo’s Sentinel Beam (or Quakes Lightning Gun), but stuns.
-(water) Frost- Acts like the TF2’s Pyro’s flame thrower, but stuns.
-(water) Ice Storm- Acts like Diablo 2’s Ice storm. Has a high cost and clears out most minor enemies.
-(water) Healing- Heals the player a little for a high permanent cost. It is not meant to be a staple, but rather a last resort.

-(air) Lightning bolt- Acts like Quake’s railgun.
-(air) Gust- Pushes enemies and can be used to “Rocket Jump”.
-(air) Nova- Acts like Quake’s BFG, but weaker.
-(air) Thunder Strike- Zips the player to the enemy and does a high damage strike, like Halo’s plasma sword.

-(earth) Stone Blast- Acts like Unreal’s Flack Cannon’s primary fire.
-(earth) Stone Blossom- Acts like Quake’s Grenade launcher.
-(earth) Deadly Swarm- Acts like Halo’s needler.
-(earth) Wolf Form- Transforms into a werewolf.

-Enemies-
-Each enemy will be designed with a certain sound, shape, color scheme, and animation in mind to make them unique and stand out.
-Enemies act in predictable manners, but have a good size behavior tree.
-Enemies will be broken into 3 groups: Demons, Undead, and Nature.

-(demon) Fallen (warrior, slinger, and shaman)- Fallen are small demons much like Diablo 2’s fallen demons. They work in teams and aim to surround the player and do feign attacks, retreating whenever another enemy is killed. Warriors move in cautiously and use melee attacks, slingers do raycast based attacks and put pressure on the player to act, and shamen cast slow moving fireballs and resurrect dead fallen.

-(demon) Imp- Imps fly in a flanking manner and throw fireballs at the player, while making sudden movements in all directions and always retreating from the player.

-(demon) Bull Demon- Bull demons are charging tanks similar to the tanks in Left4Dead. They sweep around the area, require the players attention, and take some time to take down.

-(boss demon) Demon Lord- Demon Lords have huge amounts of health, move slowly, and throw very heavy ranged attacks at the player.

-(undead) Skeletons (warrior, archer, and mage)- Skeletons act independently of one another and do not respond to other enemies dying like the Fallen do. They hop about the area adding a lot of verticallity. Warriors move forward with a shield covering a part of them and use melee attacks. Archers roll sideways and shoot with raycasts. The mage throws bursts of fireball spells.

-(undead) Wight- Wights move towards the player and explode upon dying or touching the player. Once exploded they may spawn more enemies.

-(undead) Wraith- Wraiths fly about the area and phase in and out. They can move in any direction and move through walls. They attempt to move up to the player and do massive melee damage.

-(boss undead) Lich- Liches move about quickly, summoning and resurrecting skeletons. Tons and tons of skeletons. When they are beaten down their bones scatter, but their skull but be destroyed before they resurrect. The longer they are active the harder it is to take them out and can quickly become unbeatable.

-(nature) Ent- Huge lumbering trees men with huge amounts of life and does heavy melee damage.

-(nature) Giant Spiders- Swarms of fast moving spiders that run on walls and leaps at you.

-(nature) Giant Wasps- Fast flying enemies that swarm you and do melee damage that increases with each hit.

-(boss nature) Fairy Queen- Inspired heavily from the Fairy Queen from Seven Soldiers of Victory. Fast moving and flying she fires spells at you and keeps her distance while summoning ents, spiders, and wasps.

Any suggestions so far?

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Not from me. It seems very well thought out, and sounds like fun to play.

In fact, as far as I’m concerned, you could drop the enemies and make a multiplayer arena game a la Quake. Given the interesting balance and variety in the spells, that could be a lot of fun.

OK, one suggestion has occurred to me, which might work better in the arena game than in the Doom-type game: let players specialize in an element, if they choose. That would give them a buff in power (and reduction in mana cost) for spells in that element, and do the reverse for spells in the opposite element. You might even add special spells which only specialists can see and use (but in that case, weaken them even further in the opposite element). That would provide for more differentiation in the players.

The other thing to consider — and again, I guess I’m thinking arena deathmatch here (sorry) — is how to handle health. A lot of modern games seem to have quick and automatic health regen, to avoid that no-fun situation where you’re low on health and just running around trying not to be noticed while you collect health packs. With the quick-regen, you either survive the encounter (and are thereafter fine) or you don’t. On the other hand, some people like the change in playstyle required by managing health. I certainly don’t have strong feelings about it — just something to think about.

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Old school FPS gameplay? Or something more Diablo-like in gameplay?

If it’s Doom style, it sounds similar to Heretic but certainly unique enough to be its own thing.

… and JoeStrout just beat me to my two points: fast, simple arena multiplayer would be a lot of fun, as would element specialization. It might be interesting to play with how this could affect mana.

If you decide to do single player against AI, you listed a lot of enemies. Doom only had 10 unique enemy types. For the sake of discussion, what if you only had one spell and two types of enemies. In this case, what would you envision as the core fun?

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Imho that’s totally missing the point the video made and @Not_Sure stressed in his post: the “orthogonal unit differentiation”. You’re asking “what’s the core fun if you take out the core fun?”. With only one spell and two enemy types you don’t have enough differentiation possibilities to create interesting and varied combat gameplay from. Even the hyper streamlined and small scoped Devil Daggers has more enemies and offensive abilities.

Don’t listen to the siren calls that want you to add multiplayer ;).

5

No, I considered doing an arena game and decided that this would be easier and more fun to make.

IF I were to do an arena game I have an entirely different GDD for that:

It would consists of players starting with four weapons with two fire modes (a rocket launcher / grenade launcher, a railgun / lightning gun, a pulse rifle / bfg, and a flack cannon). Then the game would drop 3 to 5 relics that buff your character in different ways (more damage, faster run and higher jumps, more life, vampirism, rapid fire, etc). You keep each relic until you die and drop it. Once a player has all the relics the other players stop respawning and all the other players no longer damage one another. If they kill every other player they win the game.

So if I were to break it down to two enemies and one gun I suppose I would do a medium sized enemy that runs at you and an enemy that shoots fireballs from a distance. Then the weapon could be any one of them and still be fun. Probably a rocket launcher.

Keep in mind that I do not plan on having all 12 enemies listed on one stage all at once.

I would most likely keep it to 7 enemies or less per stage (7 being the max number of items a human brain can keep in short term memory). I would just make sure to grab ones that will make for interesting circumstances.

OH, and the only influence I am going to take from Diablo is the enemy AI. No loot or Rogue like elements.

And the only thing I’m taking from Heretic/Hexen is that art style. I always thought that their inventories and classes muddied the experience.

The three big debates I’m having right now are:

1) Do I include a weapon, such as a mace?
I’d like to have a mace to sell the whole “battle mage” aspect, but it seems like it would just muddy the experience.

2) How do I juggle the spells?
I really want to have the player switch a spell at the tap of a button, but it will be difficult with multiple spells in each school AND an alt spell.

I was first thinking that 1, 2, 3, and 4 keys (d-pad for consoles) would each represent a school. Tap once to go to the last used spell. Tap while it’s already equipped and it will start cycling through the different spells. But then how do I decide if it is changing the primary fire or the secondary fire?

OR

I could use a wheel like Farcry and you select the spells and assign four separate sets (one for each key). So you can preload 8 spells and swap to them at the touch of a button. Which requires a lot more programming, but once is done will make combat easier to juggle spells. Plus that 3 more “pick ups” I can do to increase the player’s ready spells. AND I can also assign different physical weapons if I decide that that’s what I want to do (probably not).

3) Should I use UFPS or make the controller from scratch?
Lastly, I’m just not sure if UFPS is really worth messing with rather than just doing a controller from scratch.

I’m just going to do a simple grid locked cube for all collisions and no body boxes.

There’s no sprint, crouch, climb, or swim.

So the controller just needs foot steps, slopes, moving platforms, a primitive jump (just add force when grounded), pickups, inventory / spells, resources, surface materials, and that’s about it.

I’m thinking I could tweak Sebastian League’s 2d controller to get 90% of what I need:

Does that sound impractical?

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How would you describe the game feel that you’re after? Doom is a run-and-gun; it’s intense, and you feel pushed to run through it but expect a monster to pop up around every corner. A quintessential move is frantic circle-strafing. Gears of War, on the other hand, encourages tactical positioning to take advantage of cover. It’s still intense, but you’re constantly looking for the next best cover position.

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On this specifically: If you don’t have a spell that works without mana, what does the player do when they run out of mana? Shooters generally seem to all have a “pistol” type weapon with infinite ammo for when you run out of ammo for everything else. I’d say your battle mage needs some sort of generic spell for when they run out of other things to cast.

Depending on how much you want the player to focus closely on their current spell selection and mana type, one option could be that if the player runs out of mana of a particular element but keeps firing off the spell of that element, they default to that element’s freebie spell. If there is enough mana to cast the currently selected spell, it casts instead.

I might even go so far as to keep the freebie spell out of the rotation entirely, to simplify changing spells. The drawback I see to that is it would prevent a player from trying to defeat the game using only freebie spells and/or using only freebie spells on weaker monsters.

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Make sure you keep focused, if you want an old school feel, you have to understand what made those games so great and what’s changed. TonyLi said it nicely, classic shooters don’t have cover. Your cover is the fact that you can strafe at 90mph. To be good at a modern game, you’re good at shooting, but movement is so sluggish that there isn’t much you can do other than memorize the maps, where old school deathmatches required skill with movement. Because of this, level design was also very different and that has to be taken into consideration. I see a bunch of games out there that have the old feel, but have modern levels and they just don’t work.

To expand on what Socrates said, all games need an infinite ammo backup weapon. Even been stuck in a game hunting for ammo? It’s really not fun. It especially ruins pacing in games like DOOM where the focus is supposed to be running and gunning.

Some games like DOOM 2016 give you a pistol, which limits your use because it’s weak, but the original DOOM gave you the most powerful weapon as your infinite ammo but limited it to extremely close range. Personally, I liked the former. It feels good when you’re low on ammo and punch your way through a bunch of Pinkies. So maybe give your player a very powerful magic burst that is only damaging over a very short distance.

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Yeah, I think if I do the wheel I’ll have some weapons as the infinite ammo.

So start out with a mace, then give them a shield, or crossbow, or dagger, or something.

And I have zero plans to do cover based shooting in any capacity.

Along with waves of enemies, cover based shooting is one of my all time least favorite mechanics.

It’s wack-a-mole. It’s freaking wack-a-mole.

But I do think that I may slow down the player a little compared to Doom. Halo 2 was sluggish movement, but one of the greatest shooters of all time. Also, slower movement means that player choices will be more delibrate. But not TOO slow.

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Oh, and looking at the enemy list, I think I want to make 3 spider classes like with the skeletons and fallen demons.

As is it would be 3 monster types that just charge.

I’m thinking a spitting spider that leaves pools of acid, a swarm of small spiders, and a momma spider that drops hundreds of the small spider when killed.

What do you all think?

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Maybe I’ll only let the higher end of the mana pool only drop to 10%.

That way you can get a little burst out and recharge.

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You’ll probably home in on the right speed over iteration. FOV makes a huge difference too. Master Chief moves at the same speed in Halo 1 and 2 but it feels way faster in 1 because of the FOV.

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True.

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What is the purpose behind the permanent reduction of mana? What player behavior are you hoping to engender by that?

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I am wanting the player to alternate tactics.

So rather than using the same spell over and over again you lose readily available mana and need to use something else and give it time to regenerate. But the upper limit is steadily dwindling so that you have to juggle resources.

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None of that is related to permanently reducing mana. Or rather, it can be, but it’s going further in one direction than you need to to get that effect.

Think of mana like bullets. Permanently reducing mana is like giving a player a max number of bullets period. Meanwhile, mana reduction and regen would be related to clip size and reloading time. Sure, lowering the player’s maximum number of bullets to a certain number will force them to switch to different weapons. But they can also run out of bullets, which means that they may be inclined to play cautiously and defensively, only firing when they know they’ll hit, or focusing on hitting critical locations. They’re not going to be aggressive and in motion (unless you bring in some other impetus like infinite enemy waves).

Thing is though, you can also force them to mix things up by varying clip size and reload time (or mana depletion and regen). That will make them jump between weapons more (especially if you allow regen of a non-active mana type, like is typically done (or go a step further and make non-active mana regen faster than regen for the active mana)) without causing the more defensive play.

So you don’t need to reduce mana permanently. You just need to make it regen slower, and maybe make spells cost more. You can also encourage mana switching by giving different enemies different resistances (demons resistant to fire, but weak to air / nature resistant to air and earth, but weak to fire / undead resistant to earth but weak to air (not a fan of mixing “air” and “light” by the way, but that’s just me)). You can do the same thing within a single mana type (for example making a “hardened” enemy strong against a normal spell and requiring a “piercing” one (so having another set of spell categories–piercing, blunt, etc.)).

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I’m not keen on damage types, at least in this example.

But I would figure that lowering the max pool would cause the game play to shift to be more frantic until they can pick up a mana potion.

It slowly pulls them out of their comfort zone.

I’m debating doing the same thing for life, but I think “halo health” is done to death.

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For controls:

I could see something like the attached, where you switch between the two options by pressing left or right on the D-pad. You can select your level in the hierarchy by pressing up or down on the d-pad as appropriate, and move left or right in that selection by pressing Rb or Lb. Switching out D-pad use vertically and horizontally is a little awkward, but it’s not super easy to get to so you’d want to quickest movements on the shoulders there.

There’s nothing wrong with a wheel, but I can see the value in an approach where a player is simply pressing discrete buttons rather than trying to move the analog stick to the appropriate location on the wheel. You’re going to have 12 options, which will definitely require some precision when using a wheel. I’d rather simply know I press up on the d-pad once, Rb twice, then down on the d-pad, then Rb once. That sounds like a lot, but it would be done faster than moving an analog stick into place would, and it might allow you to better multitask (to move around while navigating the menu).

We could probably go even farther than direction and have it so you can still attack with the alternate spell while switching the current spell, but that would take a bit more work to pull off well.

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How does that make them frantic? it’s already been described here for health: people will play more cautiously if they’re low on resources (unless you have specific mechanics that encourage aggressive play in that situation, like DOOM 2016 with the glory kill).

Can you give an example of a game working that way?

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It depends on the game type. For a dealthmatch, I definitely slow down and hunt for resources when my health is low, but for objective games like CTF where your death count doesn’t count, I’ll kamikaze and try to take as many out with me to let my teammates have a chance. In a campaign, I will always slow down when low on resources.

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