Controlling chaos designing compelling combat in action games adam bormann
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In real life, combat is unpredictable and chaotic. If games tried to realistically model combat, it would create random-feeling combat, and wouldn’t be very much fun, and far too difficult. In action games, we use systems and design principles to create scenarios were we can control the chaos, and teach the player to predict what may happen. Once they feel comfortable, the player can start playing the game intentionally; understanding the choices they are making, and anticipating what challenges the designers might throw at them next. Once the player understands how to make meaningful choices in a combat experience, your game can become an engaging and compelling experience. We will look at decisions designers often make about weapons, player abilities, cameras, combat intensity and difficulty, enemy design and patterns and see how these choices affect a player’s experience and enjoyment. By examining how designers can clearly communicate the options the player has and whether or not they chose the right option, we can learn about how the player and the designers have a dialogue through the game. Players who understand the choices that they are making in combat, can predict probable outcomes, and aren’t overwhelmed by the chaos of the game will be more engaged and will have more fun, even when the game is challenging.
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Controlling chaos designing compelling combat in action games adam bormann
- 1. Controlling Chaos Designing Compelling Combat in Action Games
- 2. Introduction • Adam D. Bormann • Lead Gameplay Designer • 2K Games, Novato, California
- 5. What is compelling combat? • The player can – Learn the tools – Recognize and learn the patterns – Prioritize and optimize • The player needs the right level of intensity • The player needs the right level of challenge
- 6. Learning the tools The Controls
- 11. Learning the tools The Controls
- 12. Learning the tools Camera
- 13. Camera Feel
- 14. Camera View
- 17. Learning the tools Character
- 18. Learning the tools Weapons
- 30. Recognizing and Learning the Patterns • Signs • Feedback • Enemy Archetypes
- 31. Signs
- 39. Feedback
- 44. Enemy Archetypes
- 68. Enemy Optimization “Checkpoint Test”
- 80. Combat Pacing • The Art and Science of Pacing and Sequencing Combat Encounters – Travis Hoffstetter http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TravisHoffste tter
Editor's Notes
- Hello! I’m Adam Bormann, I’m a lead gameplay designer for 2K Games in Novato California. As the lead gameplay designer I set the direction for moment-to-moment gameplay for a new game we have in development. This includes character, controls, camera, weapons, enemies, vehicles and anything else of this nature.
- I have been working as a game designer for 18 years now, and have shipped about 10 games and been involved in development of 5 or 6 more.
- I’ve brought a short clip of some of the games I’ve worked on in the last few years as a combat and AI designer. It’s about a minute long, but hopefully will give you a quick overview of my work.
- That last clip of Tomb Raider was very exciting to me. I found it on youtube, and it’s just a fan playing through the game, but he’s doing something I really like. He’s playing the game exactly how I hoped people would play the game. He changes weapons 4 times in a minute, picking the right tool for the situation. He also predicts where the enemies will be and uses the environment to his advantage. He is in control. There is no chaos here, even though a lot is going on. He is in control, but it’s still challenging. To me this is compelling combat. So what are the elements that are required for compelling combat? Compelling combat starts and ends with the player. The player must be able to learn the tools and be able to trust them. The first set of tools are the controls and camera and character. We call these the 3Cs, and they are the foundation of a solid action game. the player needs to be able to learn the other tools that the game has given them. What tool is the best for long range, or short range, or when enemies are bunched together, or when an enemy is charging, or armored? The player needs to be able recognize, learn patterns; both in enemy behavior as well as affordances in the levels and encounters. With this knowledge, the player can start to attempt to predict what will happen next and prioritize and make plans based on those predictions. They also need to be given the right level of challenge and intensity, which will give them the breathing room they need to learn and practice the patterns your game is teaching them, and then can turn up the pressure when it is time to test how well the player has learned.
- There are a lot of conventions for controls in action games, so that’s always a good place to start. But for your game you need to think about what works best for the kind of game is it that you’re trying to make? For example, what actions do you want the player to simultaneous? What are the actions that the player needs to be able to do while running?
- If you have a special player action like Gears of Wars “roadie run”, what won’t the player be able to do? In this example, the player can’t move the camera anymore, because they have to hold down the A button with their right thumb. So Epic was really clever with this and made you feel like you didn’t want to control the camera. You didn’t even miss not being able to move the camera because the camera they gave you was cinematic and felt special. On Tomb Raider on a console, you couldn’t switch weapons while running, because weapon swap was on the D-Pad. So the player had to stop moving and move their thumb to the D-Pad and then start moving again. If you look at shooters like Call of Duty, they usually have weapon swap on a face button, which allows the player to run and switch weapons at the same time. Call of Duty also makes this into a meaning moment-to-moment gameplay choice by saying that it’s faster to switch weapons to your pistol than reload your rifle you’re using. So do you switch weapons fast for a less effective weapon that you’ll get to fire sooner, or do you wait for the reload of a your more effective weapon? If the enemies are far away or haven’t seen you, or you have good cover, reloading makes the most sense. If the enemies are right up on you, or you’re low on health, then swapping to your pistol makes the most sense. Part of what can create a chaotic feeling in your game is if you are asking the player to do a lot of complicated things with the controller in quick succession while also managing things that are happening on screen. The best way to detect these problems is through playtesting, and watching what trips players up.
- In Tomb Raider, you couldn’t switch weapons while running, because weapon swap was on the D-Pad.
- The player had to stop moving and move their thumb to the D-Pad and then start moving again. Most players didn’t have a problem with this, but it did seem like having a very active character who was running and moving a lot who had to stand still or slow down to switch weapons definitely changes the way people play, and encourages them to stick with whatever weapon they have in their hands. Ultimately it worked out okay, but I think this could be made more smooth.
- If you look at shooters like Call of Duty, they usually have weapon swap on a face button, which allows the player to run and switch weapons at the same time. Similar the roadie run, Call of Duty’s controls make this into a meaning moment-to-moment gameplay choice by saying that it’s faster to switch weapons to your pistol than reload your rifle you’re using. So do you switch weapons fast for a less effective weapon that you’ll get to fire sooner, or do you wait for the reload of a your more effective weapon? If the enemies are far away or haven’t seen you, or you have good cover, reloading makes the most sense. If the enemies are right up on you, or you’re low on health, then swapping to your pistol makes the most sense.
- Part of what can create a chaotic feeling in your game is if you are asking the player to do a lot of complicated things with the controller in quick succession while also managing things that are happening on screen. The best way to detect these problems is through playtesting, and watching what trips players up.
- There are a number of important decisions surrounding the camera that can help combat feel less chaotic, and let the player have a better combat experience with your game.
- The first is how the camera feels when you are moving it. It should be smooth when moving, and not get caught up on walls or edges as the player swings the camera or moves the player. The acceleration and how you translate the stick deflection into a camera speed are super important and detailed, but I’ll give you a few things to consider when you are looking at your camera speeds. Can the player track enemies? Do you expect the player to track enemies over long distances while aiming, or is aiming only for fine aiming control? I’ll give you an example. In Uncharted the aiming cameras are much slower than the non-aiming or exploration cameras. So what players tend to do without even noticing is leaving aim to find their next target. This works well with the mechanics of a cover shooter because the slower aiming camera gives the player more precise control and it drops the player back into cover when they stop aiming. In Tomb Raider the player is much more mobile and not locked to cover, so allowing the camera speeds to stay fast while aiming to support that style of gameplay.
- The important thing about your camera view to think about is what sort of gameplay are you trying to support. Here in my image from Asteroids, they want you to be able to threats coming at you from all angles.
- But fighting games like the Batman Arkham series employ a very similar camera, because they want you to be able to see attacks coming from all angles and to be able to attack in every direction.
- In shooters, trying to locate the targets is part of the core gameplay, so we have a more limited view. This does mean that we have to be careful when attacking the player from off-camera, but we’ll talk about that in a little bit. Another thing we can do with the aiming cameras in shooters is reinforce the weapon feel. So we can be more zoomed in on more precise weapons, and move a bit slower. With less precise or lighter weapons we can see more of the room and have the cameras move faster, which makes them slightly harder to aim, which reinforces the less precise feel of the weapon.
- I’m not going to talk about this C today, but the biggest thing you need to remember is consistency and trust. You need to build trust with the player. They need to be able to quickly understand how your character behaves and can trust things like that they can take cover where they expect to, or when they will fall into a crevice or when they will stop at an edge. Otherwise they will be nervous, frustrated and angry.
- All of the weapons in your game should fill a role. There shouldn't be a whole lot of overlap between the different weapons even if that means kind of pushing away from the realism and focusing on the things that really make each type of weapon different
- The classic way to differentiate weapons is rate of fire rated attack versus damage versus accuracy. It really depends on the type of game you're doing. Rate-of-fire really means the time between shots, as well as the time it takes to reload. Accuracy can be broken down into how straight does each bullet fly, and how easy is it to control?
- You doing a more Melee-based game it's usually weapon reach
- And instead of rate of fire we could do rate of attack. We can use these trade-offs to map our game’s weapons to and make sure that we’re giving each weapon a unique and understandable role and identity in combat.
- Pistols are often fairly accurate close up and have a decent rate of fire but often require the player to squeeze the trigger for each shot.
- Shotguns have a wider spread so they're easier to hit with but usually they're effective range is lower and it takes longer to reload. Sniper rifles often have a lower rate of fire although their accuracy is really good and their damage is the best good at range
- Sniper rifles often have a lower rate of fire although their accuracy is really good and their damage is the best good at range.
- Sub machine guns often have high rate of fire, but low accuracy and damage.
- Assault rifles often fit in the space between the submachine gun and the sniper rifle.
- So bringing these all together you see that they all fill different roles, but maybe not quite different enough. These are all archetypes based on the real world counterparts but the focus should be on what makes them fun and differentiated because that is what makes it an interesting and meaningful choice for the player when they are choosing which weapon to keep which weapon to leave and which weapon to use in any specific encounter.
- These differences in these weapons become an important part of combat when you ask the player what weapons they want to use at any given time? What ammo do they want to stock up on? What weapons do they carry with them and which ones do they drop. They are most interesting in games where you only have a few weapons you can carry at once like Uncharted, Gears of War or Halo. These really make you making meaningful and interesting decisions about how you like to play, what ammo you have, what ammo you expect to get and the different situations you expect to find yourself in.
- Another approach that a lot of games use such as Ratchet and Clank or the Grand Theft Auto games is more about focused on the player preference. What kind of experience do I want is a player? What kind of weapon do I think that I want to use right now? You always have access to these weapons and ammo is pretty easy to get so it’s less that the player is being asked to make and more of a choice the player can optionally make. It's really more about going to be using a shotgun right now or do I want to be using some other weapon. There are a few games such as dead space that kind of live in between these two options. In dead space you have a lot of different weapons and the different weapons are good against different kinds of enemies but they give you ammo based on what you are currently using which makes you want to keep using that same weapon.
- The player needs to be able recognize and learn patterns; both in enemy behavior as well as affordances in the levels and encounters. With this knowledge, the player can start to attempt to predict what will happen next and will begin to play intentionally, making plans of what they think and hope will happen from their actions. So how do we train the player to learn see the patterns? We have a number of tools that game designers use to train the player to see patterns in the game.
- Signs are signals to the player that a specific affordance is available, or that an enemy is special or different. This includes specific visual language, sometimes UI or other mechanics to let the player know that they can or need to perform as specific action.
- Some signs are obvious, like the UI telling Batman it’s time to block.
- Some of the signs are contextualized with real world knowledge. For example, a lot of games use “wood” to mean you can break down the enemy defenses , and then “metal” to mean unbreakable defenses. So if you see a character with a wooden shield, you act in one way. But if you see a character with a metal shield, you have to act in another way. Other games use more abstract concepts that the player needs to learn in the course of the game.
- An example of this from Tomb Raider, is that every time you saw wrapped white ropes on an object, you could use your .rope arrow on that object
- In combat, if you saw that an enemy’s weapon or shield was wrapped with white ropes, you would be able to use the rope arrow against it. To be consistent with signs means that every time you see white rope, it needs to be something you can interact with using the rope arrow. If you break this rule, you are making the player mistrust your systems.
- Another good example of this is the ever-present exploding barrel. The player knows that any time they see a barrel of a certain type, they can shoot it and get an explosion that will take a few enemies out with them. But you always want to be consistent with this.
- If you have barrels that explode and barrels that don’t, they need to be clearly different and it’s better if you can make the exploding barrels pop out of the background and make the non-exploding barrels blend in. You want to let the player be able to quickly scan the environment during combat and see all of the signs; understand all of the tools they have at their disposal.
- Another great source of Signs is enemy barks. The clearest signs are things like “I see him!” or “Throwing a grenade!” but you can be more subtle than that as well as well.
- Feedback is the game letting the player know if their actions here successful or unsuccessful. Feedback can be hit react animations, visual effects, audio cues, or the lack of anything of these. The simplest version of back is in more overt games that will put text on screen that will say things like “successful!” “blocked!” or show a damage amount in text
- An example of game that does this a lot in combat is the Borderlands series.
- Borderlands gives you a lot of feedback. They show you attack damage amounts and let you know if you are using the right type of weapon or not.
- More realistic games use multiple levels of hit reacts, or pain grunts. If you see a big pain reaction from an enemy or hear them yelp in pain you have feedback that you did the right thing. If you get a light reaction or no reaction, or the enemy laughs off your action, you get Feedback that you need to try something else.
- This shot from Tomb Raider you see multiple elements of feedback. The hit react the enemy is playing, the blood visual effects, on the left side of the screen you are getting XP and bonus xp for getting a headshot. The feedback you can’t see in the screenshot is the death grunt the enemy is playing, which is distinct from any other sounds the enemy makes, and the control rumbling from firing the bow. This clear and consistent feedback to the player is essential for be able to read what is happening in combat and be in control.
- Notes: Some of the most important patterns action games ask the player to learn are the enemy archetypes. What I call an enemy archetype is a package of everything that makes up an enemy including what they look like, what equipment or weapons they are carrying, how they move and sound, how much damage they can take, and what behaviors they have.
- Each archetype should be visually distinct from each other archetype. the characters in the same archetype but in different groups are factions or whatever your game as need to be need to share key visuals so that it's easy for the player to understand when they look across the room, to determine character belongs in each archetype.
- A good example of this is that the Batman Arkham games. You can easily pick out the enemy type and faction in each group. Whether it’s the Joker’s gang
- Harley Quinn’s gang
- Or Two-Face’s men, they have consistent visuals for each type of character each type of enemy has these key elements that make them the same you know which guys are going are going to be the melee attackers, which ones are snipers, which ones are going to have knives, which ones are that the martial artists. They understand clearly that the player needs to be able quickly assess the enemy types and respond with the correct tactics. especially in a game like Batman where they can see 10 enemies at once. The key is to be able to instantly be able to recognize an Archetype and then be able to predict their behavior.
- A good example of this is that the Batman Arkham games we have the with the Joker faction the black mask faction we have the Penguins man Mr. freezes man and if you look at each of these you can tell that they are different factions they have the trappings of the Joker ordered the penguin but at the same time they have consistent visuals for each type of character each type of enemy has these key elements that make them the same you know which guys are going are going to be the melee attackers which ones are snipers, which ones are going to have knives which ones are that the martial artists. They understand clearly that the player needs to be able to see your space especially in a game like Batman where they can see 10 enemies it want to know which ones they need to attack and know which ones I need to block you know which ones they need to do a special move to defeat. The key is to be able to instantly be able to recognize an Archetype and then be able to predict their behavior.
- Characters with minor differences or just color differences or things like that you won't be able to see from far away you won't be able to see these differences these details when the enemy is in a dark or foggy environment or when the enemy is at a distance.
- Characters with minor differences or just color differences or things like that you won't be able to see from far away you won't be able to see these differences these details when the enemy is in a dark or foggy environment or when the enemy is at a distance. So if color and other detailed differences don’t work, what does?
- The things that are easiest for the player to learn and perceive is the character’s silhouette. What I mean by silhouette is not just their outline, but a combination of the silhouette of the character, any large equipment that they're carrying and the pose that they're in or the way that they stand. This is a great example from Assassin’s Creed IV.
- If you look at these examples you can see from a distance that they are different very clearly. These differences are often more important than things like size, because we don’t really get the feeling of depth in 3D games, so a smaller character close up and a larger character far away often look exactly the same. You see that the body size varies from thin to bulky. The shapes of the clothing and hats is unique and that the equipment has a distinct shape. They also have very distinct poses and ways of standing or carrying themselves.
- If you look at these examples you can see from a distance that they are different very clearly. These differences are often more important than things like size, because we don’t really get the feeling of depth in 3D games, so a smaller character close up and a larger character far away often look exactly the same.
- The second most important visual element is how the archetype moves. The player can see and perceive the speed and style of movement, how pop out of cover, do they run from place to place quickly and hunched over or do they move more upright and lumbering. These are really easy things for player to learn, and might be more important than silhouette in games that are less realistic. But in games that are more realistic, characters often end up moving similarly, so we a combination of silhouette and movement style to give us our clear differences.
- The next thing is the more detail the details of the character. The style of and color of clothing they are wearing, whether they are they armored and things like this. These kind of details are usually best for making distinctions between slight variations of the same archetype or the same archetype in different factions. Things like this are important for the design of the character, but they are less important for a compelling combat experience. This example from Assassin’s Creed does a great job of showing how the same archetype stays consistent and keeps its silhouette across factions but the clothing and coloration differences give them style and separates the different factions cleanly.
- The next thing that is important for an archetype is the enemy behavior. It's important that each enemy in an archetype always behaves generally consistently you don't want to have chaotic or unpredictable behavior because it makes it impossible for the player to learn and it makes it impossible for the player to then play intentionally and make choices based on what happening in a combat encounter. If you have predictable behaviors the player can be given to become and I'll start focusing on what you want to be the challenges and not on any of the chaotic elements that come out of the random behaviors.
- Watch these 3 apples. There are no patterns. It’s chaos. There is no way for the player to learn what an apple is going to do when they see it.
- These 3 apples all follow the same pattern. We are training the player to be able to predict what to expect when they see an apple.
- Then after we let the player learn the apple, we can introduce something new. Like a banana, which has a different pattern. But bananas also need to follow their patterns.
- Then we can add more patterns. But since we have given the player the space to learn these patterns, they can predict and anticipate what each fruit is going to do. They can make decisions about how to prioritize between the fruits based on what behavior they can expect.
- One important thing you can do in archetype design is think about what is the playerskill or ability that you are trying to test with each archetype? Archetypes are not there to be smart or to be doing things that are unpredictable. Archetypes should be there to challenge specific player skills. For example snipers are challenging the player’s ability to stay hidden and find enemies at range. Then they often are also challenging the player’s ability to hit the range enemy before they can hit you.
- In a shooter, a charging melee enemy is there to challenge your ability to aim under time pressure. That is a recipe that lets you know their purpose in the game and it will tell you what what kinds of things should they do and shouldn't do and how much health should they have and things like that you can get that from just did the their role in combat. For example take this charging character. It is challenging in shooter to hit a fast moving target that is charging you so generally it's better for them to have less health so when the player succeeds they only have to succeed once or twice one or two shots and be done with them. opposed to a lumbering hulking character that is a slower time pressure you want to have them be able to get shot a number of times I have the player have The player prioritize that slowburn character against faster characters are a character who's throwing grenades or something along those lines you can keep coming back to the slowburn character because you have to put a lot of bullets into them where is some of the other characters like a manly guy maybe you only have to hit a few times.
- A lumbering hulking character that is a slower time pressure you want to have them be able to get shot a number of times. The player can prioritize that slowburn character against faster characters are a character who's throwing grenades or something along those lines you can keep coming back to the slower armored character because you have to put a lot of bullets into them. This gives the player super interesting moment to moment choices in combat with consequences.
- Consistency in an archetype is very important for the players ability to make meaningful choices and play your game intentionally. Giving your player the space to learn the patterns is key to controlling chaos.
- One of the things that makes combat compelling is the player being able make choices about who is the best target to attack right now. If you create interesting and differentiated archetypes, it shouldn’t always be easy to decide who the best person to attack, which gives the player interesting choices to make at all times. All of the enemies should be dangerous and challenging to the player in slightly different ways.
- I’ll use an example from Tomb Raider to illustrate this point. There were the archers, who steadily fired at you from cover. There were the grenadiers who were throwing Molotov cocktails which briefly took away areas from the player. There were the armored shotgunners who moved in steadily and did huge amounts of damage if they got close. And there were the melee enemies, who would charge in and demand your focus when they go in close. With those 4 archetypes, the player had interesting and meaning choices about which enemy to prioritize throughout an encounter. Do I try to whittle down the shotgunners armor? Do I shoot the melee guy at range, even though he’s not dangerous to me now? Or do I focus on the archers who are damaging me? Or the grenadiers who are taking away area and forcing me to move? This only works if you give the player the “space” to make choices though.
- One way to test whether or not you have created compelling combat is to watch people play in playtests. We talk about something at 2K we call the “Checkpoint Test.” Does the player die and then approach the encounter in the same way? Or can they try a different approach and get different results? Can they optimize their play through by using different abilities or approaching the encounter in a different way? This is a great way to know whether you are giving the player that they feel like their choices affect the outcome of an encounter, that they have meaningful choices and agency in the game. It also can show how reactive your enemies are to the player’s actions. The failure case here is the player throwing up their arms and saying “Nothing I do matters!” What we are after, is the player feeling like everything they do matters, even in cases where things are scripted to play out a specific way, the player feels like they are affecting the outcome through their choices.
- I want to talk quickly about what I mean by Intensity and what mean by Difficulty. They are related, but in the context I am talking about them, they are slightly different. Difficulty is the amount of challenge you are putting into the Skill test. How hard is it to complete the test? What are the penalties for failing the test? How many simultaneous tests are you asking the player to complete? Or how much time is there between tests? This is the difficulty.
- What I mean by Intensity is how much pressure is the player feeling? How many distracting elements are present and how overwhelmed is the player feeling? Increasing difficulty definitely increases the Intensity , but you can also increase the Intensity without increasing the actual difficulty. I’ll use Star Wars: The Force Unleashed as an example here. You can have 20 stormtroopers on screen, all firing E11 Blasters at you, which is super high intensity. A starting player is going to feel overwhelmed by this, because they are going to feel like they need to track all of these elements. It’s not actually difficult, because the game is restricting how many of these stormtroopers can actually hit the player at once, and the player automatically blocks some of the hits that come in anyway. In this circumstance, the high intensity is actually good, because it makes you feel like you are overcoming overwhelming odds.
- Another example of this from a game is the helicopter gunship in Uncharted 2. It takes almost a minute for this gunship to kill the player if they stand still so the difficulty of that element is very low. But as you are being chased over the rooftops with its minigun pounding the buildings all around you, it feels very intense. What you realize when dissect this is that it’s not a combat encounter at all, it’s a super intense navigation puzzle. The gunship is just there to provide this intensity and encourage the player to keep moving forward.
- We had a gunship in Force Unleashed II as well, but it didn’t work as well. Especially during development. And it was because both the navigation and the gunship were difficulty elements. We had the gunship forcing you to move as well as a fairly difficult navigation challenge where it was relatively easy to fall off a moving train. We would have been better off focusing the difficulty on one or the other of the elements and then using the other element to increase the intensity. What I found from watching people on Youtube though is that most people didn’t move in this sequence at all, and just played it as a timing puzzle and it ended up having very little challenge at all.
- The end fight against the gunship in TFU2 did a better job of this, because it was a static screen and the player could just focus on the gunship and not navigation. This should help you understand a little more about what I mean by difficulty and intensity, and how they are related, but not the same thing.
- Difficulty can be broken down into a few elements. The first would be the challenge of each individual skill test. For example, “how hard is it to track an enemy and shoot them?” The next is the penalty for failing the test. An example of this would be “if I don’t shoot them enemy before they reach me, how much health am I going to lose?” A third element of difficulty is how many different skill tests am I being asked to do at once? How many things do I need to track at once?
- How you manage this difficulty is really up to the type of game and types of skill tests you are employing. For example, in Asteroids or Arkham Asylum, the play can manage being surrounded fairly easily, because the camera angle lets you see who is on all sides of you. In a first or 3rd person game, being surrounded can be extremely frustrating because you can only see what’s in front of you. So let’s just talk for a minute about how we would manage difficulty in a 3rd person action game like Tomb Raider or Uncharted.
- First, what kinds of skill tests are we looking at? Taking cover and aiming and shooting are the big skill tests. There are minor ones about tracking ammo and picking up new weapons, and strategically using the play space. So the skill test for taking cover is pretty easy, just move close and enter cover. It’s a little tricky to know if the enemies can see you from cover, so you have to keep track of whether or not you’re being damaged. Aiming and shooting is a lot trickier, and this is the main combat skill test. You need to not only find the enemies, but also track them as they move and hit them when they are out of cover and try to avoid being hit yourself. But if you’re aiming and trying to track them, that also means you are exposed to being hit. It’s a great mechanic. To do damage, you have to expose yourself to taking damage.
- There is always risk involved. This another way the player is forced to make an meaningful choice. Am I covered enough to take a shot and hit that enemy before someone else can hit me? What’s the penalty for missing the shot? Well, you’ve lost some ammo, there’s one. You are a little bit closer to needing to reload, so there is a small one. Reloading is important because it leaves you vulnerable, so managing reloads is another skill test in this game. You have also exposed yourself to getting hit, and depending on who can see you and hit you, this could be a big penalty.
- Okay, so now we put multiple archetypes in the level together, and ask the player to understand and track their patterns. This is a very important thing to pay attention to. You need to understand how you as a designer are making combat difficult by putting these elements together, and manage the number of things you are throwing at the player at once. You can do this through level design, and pace the fight by only spawning specific types of archetypes, or through a dynamic attack token system that only allows a certain number of attackers or a certain number of each archetype to attack simultaneously. You can also limit the number of people who can start attacking at the same time to limit the number of simultaneous actions the player is tracking as well as limit the penalty for failing this skill test. In many of the games I have worked on, we have created system to control how many attackers at melee and attackers at range that were allowed to target the player at once. Other characters would wait their turn or attack but not be able hit. What you have to be careful with these systems is that if they are attacking they are increasing Intensity, even if they can’t actually hit.
- Also, you need to think about pacing out the new patterns you are introducing. You have to pay attention to what the player should know, what they are still learning and what you are testing them on. If you are introducing a new pattern you want the player to learn, you need to give them space to learn it. So don’t overwhelm them, introduce new archetypes by themselves if you can, or at least in a controlled environment where they can pay attention and learn the new pattern without needing to worry too much about the other archetypes. I can’t stress the importance of playtesting. What we discover playtesting is that people love to play challenging games if they feel like they can learn to overcome the difficulty. If they are overwhelmed by the number of elements causing difficulty, they feel like the game is cheating and will stop having fun. If they feel like the game is difficult, but gives them the space to try to overcome the challenges, they will have fun even if they are failing over and over.
- If you want to know more about how we managed intensity and difficulty in Tomb Raider through sequencing combat encounters, you can read a great article written by one of our combat level designers, Travis Hoffstetter. His blog is on gamasutra.com under slash blogs slash travishoffstetter.
- Remember what we said earlier. Intensity is the level of pressure that the player is feeling at any point. Intensity can come from a number of sources, including sound, environment, number of enemies or perceived threats. Managing intensity allows the player to feel in control, and not overwhelmed.
- The best way to gauge intensity is to playtest and watch how people react. If they are moving their cameras around wildly and getting lost and killed when you don’t expect them to in combat, it might be too Intense. You can also ask them how each combat felt, and watch to see if they feel like they are in control.
- There are also things that you can do to lower intensity but keep the same damage-per-second. If you lower the rate of fire, or put in more pauses between bursts of shots at the same time increasing the damage of each shot, you will give the player more breathing room while keeping the enemies at around the same damage output. Control how many people can shoot or attack at once. If melee characters get close, have your ranged characters stop attacking. These are details, but if you look at elements that causing your combat to be too Intense, you will find ways to lower the intensity.
- So we have talked a bit about a lot of elements of combat today: the controls and camera the player has and how different settings can encourage the player to play in different ways.
- We talked about the weapons and tools that the player can use and how giving each of them a distinct role gives the player interesting choices to make
- With Signs and Feedback we looked at different patterns that in a game, and how consistency will train the player to trust your game and allow them to relax and play more intentionally and instinctually.
- We talked about enemy archetypes, and how they are complex patterns that should test the player’s skills
- And we explored difficulty and intensity, and make sure that the player is feeling the level of challenge and pressure that you are expecting.
- All of these elements contribute to the player being able to feel in control of the game, and stop combat from feeling chaotic and overwhelming. When the player understands the game, and can relax and make educated choices, your combat has become compelling, and you have controlled the chaos.