#game pie

Design challenge

Design a space arena first person shooter game inspired by the Battle Room in Ender’s Game movie and the movement mechanics of Overload and Hardspace: Shipbreaker where you shoot enemies with laser guns in six degrees of freedom (6DoF) in order to save humanity by using your fast-paced reaction and spatial awareness skills.

Phases & Process

Analysis

Design

Realisation

Validation

Methodology

In order to receive feedback on our FPS game, my game pie team and I made a build of our game using WebGL, created a feedback form with questions (survey) about the in-game experience and sent our playable demo to another team for testing it and filling in what they think about the game in the feedback form. I contributed to the playtest preparation by suggesting ideas about how to formulate the questions in our feedback form such as having an even number of options on rating scale questions in order to get exact results (e.g. 1 2 3 4 instead of 1 2 3 4 5 because if people choose 3 that doesn’t give us any information since it is the middle option), avoid the use of biasing words in questions (how easy is it/how difficult is it, etc.) because these words may bias the choice of the tester, making less open questions because I know from experience that people prefer to click when answering instead on writing text. Furthermore, I contributed to the writing of the test results conclusion.

DOT framework methods used:

Products

Playable build of our game

Feedback Form

Questions

Results

Conclusions based on results

Overall, the play-testers had fun while playing our game because of its concept. They thought that the movement was not easy to get used to, in part due to the preservation of momentum. They felt like it was difficult to dodge enemies while maneuvering around the map because of it. Also, they thought that the collision damage that the player receives was too aggressive, likely because of the trouble they had with momentum. They would like an instant speed booster, but we feel that this isn’t what we’re going for. Instead, we think adjusting the speed ratios in different areas would make the game also feel nicer while keeping our original views. The enemies and their placement should be adjusted. Ideally, we’d like to get them moving around with a better stat range. Some of the enemies (like the statue at the top of the sphere) could fire their weapon without being able to take damage. The intent we had was to make the player use the obstacles in the area as cover. However, the testers said it was hard to pass through, so we should consider improving it or providing a tutorial for hiding behind obstacles. Other suggestions for improvement that we received from the testers were: - Making a slightly bigger sphere with more open spaces as well as more floating covers and a more spread-out enemy placement. - Increasing the player’s health points to account for enemy and collision damage.

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Methodology

I approached the challenge by tweaking the code I already had from the tutorial about how to make a laser beam in Unity. In the example from the tutorial the laser had a Line Renderer component and it already could be blocked by an object. The laser game asset I used required a Mesh Renderer component instead. I couldn’t achieve the same results when I added a Line Renderer component and I had problems with the Collider of the laser using Raycast to check if it has hit something. I started researching about that and I looked at posts in the community in order to incorporate what they have learned. Furthermore, I tried out different things that they suggested and tried to come up with my own ideas for the implementation. I also looked at the Unity documentation in order to see how certain methods work. I implemented the findings in a prototype with Unity.

DOT framework methods used:

Resources

Videos:

Unity documentation:

Vector3.operator +

Transform.localScale

Community:

Move and Rotate LineRenderer with Transform property - Stack Overflow

Raycast but ignore yourself - Stack Overflow

Find Size of GameObject - Unity Answers

How to change scale of a GameObject in run-time? - Unity Forum

Game concepts:

Laser - Giant Bomb

Products

I wasn’t able to complete the challenge but I still explored different implementation approaches.

Overview of the challenge

My idea for the code

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