Getting close to finishing my work on Battle Row, my first 1GAM submission of the year. Â I’ve got bunkers that can be captured by soldiers now, a win/lose state with proper game restarts. Â I also put in the ability to load up soldiers and deploy them elsewhere on the battlefield. Â There’s radar, limited bomb supplies, and resources are gained from picking up coins in the field (which wasn’t in Rescue Raiders but I wanted some more activities for the player). Â Most importantly, we have actual sound using the Master Audio plugin I picked up, which had some pretty nice features for the price. Â Some things I’ve learned lately:
Doing the 1GAM challenge to get faster at this. Â I spent a pretty solid number of nights and weekends working on Battle Row, so I need to get in a groove so I can keep up the pace. Â February should be a good test since it’s such a short month. Â I also need to carefully choose my objectives so that I don’t get overwhelmed.
Also, I found that free sound libraries are terrible. Â I found one online so that I could have SOME sound effects at least, but generally all the free sounds on various sites are from the same original source, which in the case of weapons is some grainy 1950’s movie. Â I always respected the work of audio designers, but hearing the game sound like an old Mac Plus title is pretty painful. Â I’ll see if I can get some new sounds in.
Since I’m more or less ahead of schedule this time, I think I’m going to take a stab at a helicopter AI. Â It won’t be great, but as long as it challenges the player more it should help somewhat. Â Finally I’ll need to adjust some of the costs, damages and health levels (as well as put a cooldown on the antiair turrets) in order to make the game somewhat fun to play and win. Â It has some charm but I am not as engrossed when playing than I should be.
It’s been a pretty busy week getting the first 1GAM game functional, both in feature sets and all the various times where I had to learn more of the quirks of Unity. Â Since last update I’ve added home bases for both sides and a series of bunkers with anti-aircraft guns mounted on them. Â I created the bazooka soldier who carries a homing rocket, and created a number of basic VFX and behaviors to support him. Â There is now a resource system and a way to deploy units, and I’ve dropped in an UI for static screens, in-game tutorial text, and a HUD to show what units can be bought. Â Finally, I’ve got a death and respawn system, and a camera that keeps things in view and doesn’t show things it shouldn’t.
I’ve posted the work-in-progress here: Â BATTLE ROWÂ Note that while I have second-to-second activities, I still haven’t provided quite enough structure to give the player an objective… Â You can’t win or lose yet: Â That I’ve got to implement this week.
I still have bunkers to implement so they can be captured by soldiers, and given them machineguns that mow down incoming soldiers… Â Then make it so tanks or helicopters can clear them out, requiring a two-step process to clear a bunker and giving tanks a more tactical role than a straight soldier-killer. Â I think I’ll also need to implement bombs in addition to machineguns, like the original game had.
I’m glad I took something of a known structure for my first major game experiment in Unity, but as I move forward I am starting to appreciate some of the nuances of the original Rescue Raiders. Â Given my limited time, I thought I could take parts of the whole and still make an interesting experience… but as I start to assemble everything I realize that the game relies on all these parts to create a compelling whole. Â For example, while the original game depleted fuel and ammo, I was hoping to avoid limited resources on my helicopters. Â However, without limits, players can fire constantly and hover around the enemy base. Â In the original you can pick up and drop soldiers onto the battlefield. Â Without this there can be some oversimplicity when combat only occurs on a single battle line. Â Finally, the original pitted an enemy helicopter against your own, and writing a helicopter AI is really something I was trying to avoid because there are only two weeks left. Â However, that would mean that bazooka soldiers wouldn’t mean much and player tanks wouldn’t have any kind of weakness. Â The wild-card that the enemy heli presents is one that means that the battlefront isn’t completely predictable.
This is where some creative tweaking is needed… Â If I don’t have time for an enemy helicopter, I think I’ll create a different type of flying enemy such as floating mines or drones. Â I may also add some new abilities to tanks such as arced shots and the ability to shell players. Â A few more units to buy (as upgrades to existing tanks and soldiers) could really make things more compelling.
For my first game I dug up some scraps of code I had laying around and will work to combine them into a cohesive game. Â Not long ago I was inspired by discussions I’ve had lately about the old game Rescue Raiders, which in a way was a precursor to modern MOBAs. Â It was quite an achievement on the Apple II, and I’ve always wanted to explore something akin to its unique take on action-strategy.
I may have some logic already set up but I figure in this first month I’ll have my hands full dealing with UI, audio, publishing and other aspects of Unity that I’ve never dealt with before.
During my first weekend I created some rough base art for the player’s helicopter, a tank, engineer van and a human soldier, and got them all working with some basic move and attack logic. Â I animated the vehicles and even a human character (badly)Â with Mecanim, which was a first for me. Â I wish I hadn’t spent as much time with the art as I had since I’ve got a long way to go and only three weekends left… Â But considering I’ve never created a human skeletal animation before in my life, I can’t complain much.
I’ll work to get something posted that’s playable next weekend if possible.
In the past few years I’ve started to really miss game programming. Â It used to be second nature to me but nice years after switching to pure design, I miss the control over my results and the joy of experimentation. Â I’ve tinkered in a variety of engines and codebases, but I’ve never devoted enough time to shake the rust off my coding skills and get comfortable again.
To facilitate this I’m joining the 1GAM movement…  which is simply a challenge (a dare?) for participants to complete one playable game a month, every month.  These won’t be pretty or polished, but hopefully they will be fun and regardless an opportunity for me to get my feet wet in Unity, which has grown impressively over the past several years.  Whether I can turn out something that has some long-term promise, or perhaps just explore some stray ideas I’ve been kicking around, it should be fun.
Keep an eye on my space at the onegameamonth website. Â Hope I can keep the pace up.
Recently I was looking at my old WoAP post and thinking about how the fundamentals of creating a good, solid-feeling weapon are evolving, and which basics are the same as they were 15 years ago. Developers are definitely better at these things, but experiences are still all over the board.
I gathered more footage from games released in the last year in preparation of a WoAP section on this site (which is still locked for now), but I fell behind in capturing the newest of the new. While that certainly won’t deter me, I did realize that I did have one source of state-of-the-art titles with readily-prepared footage… E3 2010! Sure the games are in-progress and the available footage varies in quality, but I thought it would be fun to see what the next year could be like in terms of nice, beefy implements of destruction.
As usual, I examined a number of elements to consider whether they contribute to a sense of power. Check out the original article if you wonder, for example, why a real-world weapon still needs to follow these rules:
Gun Visuals: The visual effect of the weapon’s muzzle flash and bullet trail, and the animation of the weapon itself firing. It’s the first thing people think of when they consider how the gun looks and feels.
Sound Effects: How’s the audio, from the firing to the impact sounds? This can be one of the hardest to get right, because the sound has to bear repetition thousands of times, and it has to compliment the rest of the arsenal.
Effect on Environment: Here we look at the visual impact of the bullet on a wall or floor, as well as environmental shifts such as lighting. We need these because the results of stray bullets give the player a sense of affecting their environment and with a potent weapon.
Effect on Opponent: This refers to the visual impact on an enemy, and how the enemy reacts to being shot, which is critical to give the player feedback that he is successfully damaging the foe.
Combat Effectiveness: I’m completely subjective here, which can be unfair when taken out of context, but it’s worth talking about. If I see a weapon limply pile bullets into an enemy with little sense of accomplishment, that weapon doesn’t get high marks. Maybe it’s designed to be a pathetic weapon, I don’t know.
Each weapon is grouped with its general type: They aren’t all identical models, weights or even technology, but each group of weapons fills a general role for players. I found as much unadulterated footage as I could… nothing from trailers or anything less than the game being played. This is obviously not final weaponry, and I had to make adjustments for the situations where the audio or visual quality wasn’t the best. Suffice it to say, they previewed their games to us and basically I’m previewing the weapons right back. Wah.
I didn’t get footage from everyone I wanted (technical issues denied me Brink and Killzone 3), but there was plenty of material (in unbiased alphabetical order of course):
The Agency, Sony Online Entertainment
Blacklight: Tango Down, Zombie
Bodycount, Codemasters
Breach, Atomic Games
Bulletstorm, People Can Fly
Call of Duty: Black Ops, Activision
Crysis 2, Crytek
Halo: Reach, Bungie
Medal of Honor, Electronic Arts
Rage, id Software
Vanquish, SEGA
(Too many one-word titles that start with “B” this year…)
And away we go. Watch the footage and check out the results:
Pistols
Almost 10 years ago Halo and Counterstrike created the first pistols that we actually wanted to use, and more recently Call of Duty cemented the concept of pistols as a quick-draw backup weapon. This trend continues, although video is hard to find because these weapons aren’t “sexy” enough to appear in E3 demos.
Call of Duty: Black Ops
This pistol is a backup weapon in the Call of Duty world. As such, this revolver is serviceable, but not flashy enough to encourage you to use it when you aren’t forced to (like this claustrophobic tunnel). It’s hard to say much from two bullets, but the muzzle flash was nearly invisible and it didn’t light up the surroundings as much as I’d might expect in a dark tunnel. The audio was also very basic, a clip we’ve heard many times in the last 10 years… I hope by ship they can get some reverb to make it as deafening as I might expect gunshots to be in a space like that.
The effect on the enemy is hard to gauge since this was really a set-piece. There was a reasonable bit of impact blood and a reasonable hit reaction, which hopefully will be true in all combat situations.
Medal of Honor
This footage is from DICE’s multiplayer mode, so it leans closer to Bad Company 2 in overall feel. Compared to COD:BO’s period-authentic revolver, it has the advantage… semi-automatic so that the player can unload quickly and go for a headshot, so its effectiveness appears pretty high. The bulk of the muzzle flash is a classic single frame but it does the job, mainly because it is coupled with a satisfyingly “crunchy” sound effect… not unlike Indy’s awesome pistol in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Stray bullets create a subtle puff of smoke with environment impact, but there was little impact on the character himself visible beyond the view-obscuring muzzle flash sprite. This is often okay with pistols, as long as they have their role.
The Agency
The Agency pistol is pretty good, although it’s hard to judge it completely fairly because it appears that the game view appears a bit stretched, making the pistol stubby and awkward-looking in the player’s hands. (I double-checked the footage to verify that this was the way it showed.)
The muzzle flash is very red, just a couple of sprites… it’s got an okay punch to it, but red doesn’t get it looking “hot”, and the sprite never reaches full opacity, giving it a “flat” feel. Perhaps it is an art style choice… this game is more colorful than most. The weapon seemed somewhat effective, but during recoil, the weapon obscured the target denying me the ability to see what happened. On the other side, the sound effect has a nice report and trail-off.
Rage
Rage‘s pistol has an okay muzzle flash, although its edges are fuzzy that looks a little “old school”. In this environment the world lights up well in response. From the audio present in this footage, sounds “crashy” and needs punch, but it’s hard to judge because it was not recorded direct-feed.
The biggest disappointment I felt was the weak sense of stopping power with this weapon. The interview toted the enemies’ ability to react to shots realistically, but I think it could still benefit from a more prominent effect on impact. In addition, the pistol just didn’t seem to be taking down that enemy effectively. Bungie was the first to more or less prove that longer-lived enemies appear more intelligent, but I hope they can use their hit-reaction tech to give you a better sense of doing something to your foe by ship-time.
Shotguns
To me, shotguns are the most satisfying weapons to use. They have a strong, easy-to-grasp tactical role (lotsa damage when close), but they also can deliver great pyrotechnics in the process. I only found a couple at E3.
Crysis 2
It’s difficult to get a true sense of the Crysis 2 shotgun in the midst of all the chaos in this demo, but I do like the strong, directional array of “hit spangs” rising off the surface from impact. That really speaks “multiple pellets” to me. The muzzle flash is nice and hot with a one-frame “punch” to it with just a wisp of smoke after. The audio was pretty boomy, but it was hard to single out in the footage.
I can’t figure out what’s going on with the shotgun against the enemies here. Perhaps that is because of the situation, but the effect of weaponry should stand out in the chaos of combat (that’s the point). I hope the weapon does more to the enemies than it appeared to there.
Medal of Honor
This shotgun is a big guy, serious business… its size might set it apart from models in other games, but I’ll say that it looked menacing in the player’s hands, and had a satisfying muzzle flash and “booming” sound to it.
It also looked like it did a number on the enemy, sprouting multiple bloody impacts, and they didn’t get lost behind the muzzle. I would have liked to see more of what happened when a surface was struck, however, it seemed fairly subtle.
Machineguns
Now we’re down to business. Just about every game has one of these, and I define them loosely: “automatic medium-damage weapons”. They may be assault rifles or heavy submachineguns… subtle variations on a theme, so hardware-heads shouldn’t get their panties in a bunch about terminology.
Halo: Reach
This one felt a little silly to preview since the beta has been available for a while, but nonetheless I wanted to compare it with other upcoming titles. I was not a fan of the original Halo assault rifle because of its anemic audio and flash, but with this new version I’m feeling it more. The “teletype” sound effect now has more rumble to it, and the muzzle flash has less of a cartoony feel to its “star shape”, and looks reasonably hot.
The weapon is still of the “hold down the trigger until the enemy soaks up enough bullets” variety, so in multiplayer it helps to have XP popping up to know that you did something. Luckily with their newest animations, the enemy reacts more satisfyingly to the impact, even though there really isn’t much of an effect. The world impacts are unfortunately subtle for this weapon, basically invisible from a distance… It’s hard to be objective because historically this rifle deliberately lacked punch as a common weapon, but as one of the first things in the player’s hands it’s pretty important to feel good. Luckily, it now seems to have evolved to no longer feeling like a second fiddle.
Medal of Honor
A typical sighted assault rifle, this weapon has a great “train chug” sound to it, and it does some nice damage, throwing dusty impacts all over the environment and struck enemies. It definitely looks like an effective weapon.
The muzzle flash is nearly invisible however (doubtless matching the real-world weapon?)… the in-view weapon’s subtle shake is the main visual cue that something is happening with it at all. More importantly, the animation result on the enemy is still poor. It can be hard to play proper hit animations while an enemy also is moving, but here it felt like they kept running until they died with a minor twitch. This is a common challenge when shooting at multiplayer opponents, since they continue to run at full speed while taking damage.
Breach
What a difference from the previous MOH footage… without the background din of combat, Breach seems silent by comparison. As for the weapon itself, it has a “tiktiktik” sound that makes me think of a biplane’s machine gun. You still hear it sometimes in WWII games, but it sounds archaic because of its low rate of fire. I believe this is supposed to be a modern assault rifle, so there are definitely options that could be used to punch it up.
There’s lots to do here, in muzzle flash, enemy and world impact… I’m even not sure how effective the weapon was against the enemy given the feedback. Also, I appreciate the trade-off offered when zooming the weapon obscures a lot of the view, but thanks to the Call of Duty series, so many people play this way that it seems ridiculously punishing. This game could just get a bit more lively in ambience.
Blacklight: Tango Down
Another lesser-known title, Blacklight has a bit more tightness to its machinegun. It’s still a light weapon, with a fairly teletype-sounding audio report, but the very high rate of fire (with a nice envelope as a burst is fired off) definitely makes me feel better about it. The environment lights up well enough when firing, but the muzzle flash (from the footage) seemed very static and soft. The tracers flying out to the target could have looked good but these are thin and hard-edged… making them look like a rendering artifact beneath the sights. The big impacts (see below) helped a bit, but the weapon could use even a little bit more of a sense of danger.
The game seems to have a fictional dressing that allows for some sci-fi-looking elements sprinkled into the realistic environs… They used it well with the strong blue hit impacts when an enemy is struck, but they are also very big and distracting… you can only tell that you hit “something”. I could an impact that big for a sniper rifle, but for a bullet-spewing weapon like that, I’d dial it down.
The Agency
Once again, the weapon appeared a bit stubby because of the odd aspect ratio, but in general it hit the Call of Duty mark pretty well. Audio-wise, they went for a strong gunshot for each individual bullet along with a lower fire rate. It makes the weapon seem heavy and mechanical (good), but over the course of a burst it grows pretty monotonous, like the old Doom minigun that just played the pistol sound over and over. I’d love to hear a more defined start and end to the bursts.
The weapon itself could use a bit of shake or something to tell me that its doing something. From first-person I can’t see the muzzle flash and it appears like the player is just holding down the weapon on its target. It does do the job functionally, as an effective weapon. Also, the environment impacts are nice and sparky… a bit random but I did get a sense of the player tracking their target with successive shots.
Rage
The muzzle flash in Rage’s assault rifle looks okay, but the old practice of fading out “star” flash sprites reduces the feeling of a “fiery” effect, and I see it here as I did in the pistol. Unfortunately, the audio from this footage is poor making the assault rifle sound “crashy”, but I’m sure it’s got the “pop” in person.
The weapon does light up the environment, but in this environment it can only be seen at a very close range, so I didn’t see it much. The weapon recoiled well with nice shells being thrown up visibly… However, I still wanted to see more feedback to where I was shooting. The video quality makes some of these effects darker than they really are, but given that this is a dark-looking place it could be a general issue. I wanted to see the results of my gunshots on the walls, and the floor. Finally, I also didn’t see a real threat to the mutant again… it’s like the pistol. No stopping power visible. Crank up the reactions with that reaction tech… make sure the impacts are visible.
Bulletstorm
These guys are obviously about showing off as much as their game is, and I feel it here. The rifle here felt dangerous, with a bright, fiery, and non-repetitive muzzle flash. The gunfire audio is has a crunchy mechanical sound to it, and that worked great (unsurprisingly similar to Gears of War‘s).
The weapon’s seems very functional and effective in taking out enemies.  It was interesting to see the cartoony projectiles, almost like a scrolling shooter’s round bullets. On issue was that there was so much going on at my muzzle and with the bullets traveling outwards (this is an unapologetically noisy game) that I wasn’t always clear on what was being hit. I also didn’t see much in the way of impacts at a distance, although there was other footage against a close-up boss that was more tangible. The game’s about chaos, and I imagine it’s a lot of work to make sure the player knows what is being done to whom, and where.
Bodycount
This footage isn’t great (to be fair, the video is wayyyy oversaturated), but I wanted to include it because of the blinding amount of feedback from the rifle. The weapon has a huge star-shaped muzzle flash, which probably looks good in screenshots, but doesn’t have a lot of variance to make it vary over a sustained burst. It also manages to cover up a ton of what is going on at the impact site.
The game shows a Crackdown level of feedback, with orbs flying out whenever an enemy dies… The world impacts are also flamboyant at times, with some crazy cascading sparks. Unfortunately the chaos meant that once again I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on when I hit an enemy. I like “cartoony” as much as I do realism, so I’d have to reserve judgment until I get to see it without blurry footage.
Vanquish
Vanquish is clearly not a traditional FPS, but I wanted to include it anyway for contrast. This machinegun has an extremely high rate of fire, with a somewhat “lighter” sound effect than blends into the background din. This is the sort of machinegun that Japanese sci-fi games have exhibited for the last 10 years or more. Whereas western games put the machinegun in a place of honor as a powerful workhorse, Japan casts them as easy-to-target weapons that chip away health slowly.
The muzzle flash and impacts flamboyantly throw around sparks, but this is still a backup weapon, like the MG on a tank or jet fighter. They leave room for the more “cinematic weapon”, which may be a large explosive or melee attack.  I love these sorts of games to death, but it’s interesting to see how very different the influences are.
Scoped Rifles
I don’t generally include sniper rifles, but this time I figured I would. The category includes bolt-action or single-shot automatic scoped rifles, so I didn’t want to get the hardware nuts mad.
Halo: Reach
This particular weapon is Halo‘s marksman or battle rifle, rather than their sniper rifle, but aside from stats they seem similar. I’m surprised at how little feedback you get when firing while zoomed… there is a tiny recoil in the view, but aide from that, the sound and the reaction of the enemy is about the only result. The sound, however, is sharp with a great decay and the hit reactions are great.
The muzzle flash isn’t too important, but I would love to see something in the world. A faint tracer, or a more clearly visible impact effect. While there are caveats to this (too much pyrotechnics will render snipers too visible), it could use a bit of punch.
Blacklight: Tango Down
Blacklight‘s modern-seeming game goes far further in the “spacey” effects sometimes than the far-future Halo… Their sniper rifle fires what appears to be a solid laser, with a large blue impact on the enemy. This is fine for their vibe, but given that capability (freedom from “realism”!), I’m surprised to not see something more “impactful” going on. The blue flash is a round cloud of sparks, and enemies more or less fall down in response to being killed. The “laser” projectile could benefit from variance over its lifetime like a “railgun”, and the impacts are crying out for some sort of directional component, ricocheting away from the surface, or piercing the enemy somehow.
The audio is fine, but has less of a punch than Halo’s seems to. A gunshot from a sniper rifle is never, ever work being subtle about.
The Agency
The sniper rifle in The Agency has gunshot audio that is slightly muffled for some reason… it has a punch, but the decay is perhaps a bit less satisfying than Halo’s “throatier” sound. The weapon itself does not move when fired, which is a disappointment, since there is no muzzle flash to see. Since the zoomed view appears sensitive to control, it is even more important to deflect or disrupt the player’s aiming since the overall vibe is that the weapon is “light” and can get jarred more easily.
I found their distinct tracer interesting, but unfortunately the effect is so solid that some rendering artifacts (resulting from rendering it as a flat polygon) appear when shooting. I like the idea of a tracer, especially for the “James Bond modern fantasy” world like this one, but work needs to be done to break up the line and make it seem less like a laser beam. In addition, I didn’t feel like I saw the result of my gunshot on the surface or person being targeted, because the tracer obscured it entirely.
Caveat!
This is E3, and anyone who has prepared something for E3 knows that someone picking it apart can be infuriating. Worse yet, the quality of E3 footage varies, so my comments may be influenced by lighting, background noise, or bad focus.
Not all the weapons or features or effects I’ve examined here may be final, but on the upside, just about everything I mention is remediable with a small amount of audio, art or balance work. You can disagree with me too, that’s what comments are for. The same goes if you are working on one of these.
It’s fun to look at these items regardless… I think I got bit by the bug again. In the coming weeks I’ll take another stab at getting that Weapons of Awesome Power section at the top going, and we’ll see where things go.
I’ve had to take a break on the article-writing to immerse myself in my work. Theory is fun, speccing can be rewarding, and hooking up is good, but sometimes I’ve found myself missing real hands-on gameplay programming.
A friend of mine has been creating a Rogue-alike as a side-project labor of love for the past few years, and recently it went from sporadic updates to a full-on development flurry. This of course made me very jealous, as tile-based engines allow for amazing freedom in creation… There are few limits and implentation is a breeze. It’s all about the gameplay.
The game is Dungeonmans, and he releases updates openly as an in-progress effort… It obviously revels in its old-school presentation… although the graphics are getting better by the day.  He’s created an overworld and NPC quest system as well as invested a great sense of humor within, so in some ways it outpaces similar indie dungeon-crawlers already. It even can gather play stats that get collected at the home base for analysis and high scores.
Recently he made the codebase available to a few of us, and we’ve all been diving in and having a blast. I’ve been working on a trap system recently, and I gotta say it’s the most fun I’ve had with development since Heretic II. It’s been a while since I’ve worked on something past midnight without even noticing.
It’s not Diablo III, but fun doesn’t have to be developed in 3D by hundreds of people…Â Â Â Check it out.
Last time I talked about co-op games and the need to tweak the difficulty in the name of a better experience. I mentioned that inflating the total number of hit points can work, but it can lead to the trap of The Numbers Game, where your existing health and damage are scaled together, resulting in a constant game challenge that only shifts when you fall outside of what the game deems “fair”. This can work for RPG’s, but is troublesome when used on shooters.
Bag o' Hit Points
This argument isn’t particularly constructive for the FPS designer, the poor soul who is scrambing for anything to keep things balanced and exciting in the wild wooly west of random online pick-up groups. We can’t really blame them for falling back on pure numbers when necessary (full disclosure: X-Men Legends was an unabashed example of the Numbers Game…). Solving this problem through other means is a tough one, but it is worthwhile to pursue avenues other than the venerable Bag of Hit Points.
Challenge Stage
When looking for ways to increase difficulty, game developers often wish the answer was as simple as adding more enemies to each encounter… “No problem! Double the players equals twice the enemies! BAM!” Sadly, very few game technologies give developers the luxury of unlimited enemies onscreen… It’s a yoke that just about all of us constantly struggle with. Back in the sprite days of Doom and Heretic it wasn’t a big deal; those games had extra enemy spawns that were triggered at higher levels or during coop. In these days of high-fidelity characters, however, most technology still keeps the population somewhere in the single digits.
There are tricks to give a feeling of greater foe count… Placing additional enemy encounters in the “dead spots” between the “standard” encounters works, if you never overlap the encounters to keep the maximum enemy count low. It can be tricky to pull off but it can give the player a sense of a relentless onslaught, requiring him to manage ammo and health more carefully even though he never sees more than a few at a time. Unfortunately, by leveraging this method you can ravage any sense of pacing, leveling out those tension peaks and valleys into a steady drone, and changing the game in perhaps unintended ways.
Another population trick is to deliver more enemies to the battlefield through respawning. This allows enemies to repopulate places that were previously cleared out, denying players a safe retreat and keeping the pressure on. This approach can be reviled by players because it denies them a sense of “completion” within a level (it was a contentious feature in Soldier of Fortune, for example), but it can be used to great effect. My first experience with respawning as a gamer was Doom’s Nightmare mode, where all enemies regenerated after 1 minute or so. (Damn that was hard!) More recently it was embraced in Left 4 Dead, where zombies can pour out of just about any opening, inaccessible fences area, rooftop, etc. Careful use of this mechanic can help a game level feel as though it is packed with hundreds of foes, even if your tech can’t handle it (although L4D did a damn good job with the population too)…
Up to 11
In contrast with developers, a majority of gamers wish that higher difficulty was just a matter of making the enemies smarter… perhaps implying the existence of a Jules Verne-era dial with “IQ” scrawled on the side that can be cranked past 10. Unfortunately game AI is never so easy that you’ve got unused slack somewhere that you’re not using. Generally it’s not decision-making that challenges the AI programmer or designer, but rather environment response and navigation. Sure, humans can walk across an obstacle-ridden field without even thinking about it, but an AI that does this naturally requires tremendous work whether the difficulty level is baby-like or insane.
Even if the leap from floor-traversing mouth-breather to devious mastermind were easy, I’ve repeated many times that “smarter enemies” don’t always pave the way to “more fun” anyway. Aside from major boss-level fights, the opponents in many games don’t last long enough for you to really experience their brilliance… showing off would require for the player to see them, which means they’re probably already busy killing them. Sure, you could make the enemies tougher so that you might see their amazing kung-fu, but then you’re back to turning them into HP bags.
Some games emulate enemy “smarts” by simply increasing their shooting accuracy or giving them uncanny perception. Let me be clear, this is not fun. Most games with gun-toting enemies need them to be inaccurate at long ranges. If an enemy pops into a play space a long distance from the player, chances are the player is not aware of their presence immediately… a bit of warning is needed before he gets a bullet in the head. If an enemy’s accuracy is simply dialed up arbitrarily, the player suddenly starts taking significantly more damage from enemies a few pixels in size… you’ve turned the game into a walk through a room full of snipers. Statistically the enemies are just doing more damage to the player each second anyway… so that’s what you want, just crank the bullet damage and be done.
There are some better models out there for bullet inaccuracy that can help remedy the fun, but they are still aren’t used enough (that would be fun to talk about in another post).
Phases of Death
While technically it is a variation on adding health to opponents, but one way of amping difficulty is giving them additional damage states, each of which has to be “killed”. Examples of this are the humans that become “tentacle heads” when headshot in Resident Evil 4, or the aliens in Blacksite: Area 51, that can sever their torso after being “killed”, crawling after the player. These imply non-realistic opponents or a heavy art burden, but it can also be done by having the foe walk with a limp in phase 2, or switching weapons each phase.
This may sound familiar because it is the way that just about every classic boss encounter works… and for good reason. Bosses are “tough” and hence can soak up a lot more damage… without small player victories and new behaviors coming into play, defeating them would be a tiresome exercise in shoveling damage until it goes down (and many action games still use this model).
Cleverly-designed damage stages also have the advantage of not always being used. A 3-stage robot can skip stage 2 and 3 in easy difficulty, last for a second stage in later levels, and die only after all three in harder difficulties. Depending on how an enemy is designed, it might even be possible to regenerate them to a previous state if not killed in time for even more challenge.
A distant relative of the staged model is a mechanic where an enemy must be in a certain state to be killed. For example, a foe may have a “stunned” state which provides you with an opening to slice off their head. By this I don’t mean “Japanese boss-style” where every 15 seconds the monster opens up his eye-dome and can be hurt, but rather a system that gives the player the tools to introduce a vulnerable state. Another example is a robot who must be immobilized with an electric shock, before you step in to disable his control chip. Or a soft-bodied creature that must be frozen first and then shattered (similar to how the freeze-wrench combo works in Bioshock). Games like modern military shooters are more limited in this respect, but if you have the luxury to play with your enemy ecology (that is, their function and response to various stimuli), a large number of additional options open up to you. As above, you can scale difficulty by sprinkling in these new mechanics more aggressively later on (say, early robots don’t have an “overdrive chip”, but all of them do at higher difficulty).
Smarty(er)-Pants
Other tricks aside, there’s still a value in delivering a smarter enemy… or at least one the gamer will recognize as “smarter”. One example of that is to add some coordinated behaviors between multiple foes. A simple trigger that makes several enemies charge at once or synchronize multiple grenade tosses can add difficulty in a hurry. Throw in an audio cue to draw attention to it and suddenly the gamer has a newfound respect for your AI mojo, baby. More complicated relationships like an enemy that lays down covering fire while the other charges can be good also, but the more complex they get, the more likely they are to fail or get lost in the shuffle. Sure, it makes things harder, but look for ways that are going to make the player feel the added pressure.
Left 4 Dead in particular leveraged this synchronization through their “AI Director”. While not technically an issue of “smarts” (the zombies are, well, zombies) when the director decided that the experience needed a massive assault for added danger, the player knew that the game was turning on the heat. The perception of challenge is perhaps as important as the actual difficulty increase.
Adding enemies with interrelated behaviors is also a method to give a feeling that they are “conspiring against you”. A prime enemy that adds challenge to any group is the buffing opponent. The Shaman in Diablo II and the Arch-Vile in Doom II could resurrect fallen opponents, making the whole group for more deadly and interesting to fight. Other, more mild examples of this type of enemy are enemies that have an aura that heals or increases the strength of their nearby friends.
A player must completely change his tactics and adjust when fighting a group that has a buffing foes added. Even one can add considerable challenge, and multiples can be devastating. Beyond just spawning extra ones, their behaviors can be tweaked for difficulty by increasing the buffing effect, casting time, or the radius of their ability.
Looking closer, any type of environmental object that enemies can utilize can add challenge and an extra feeling of intelligence, no matter how simple. Enemy buffs could be provided by emplacements rather than spawned foes. The health stations in BioShock kept you from leaving your nearly-dead foe alone, because he might return fully charged. Emplaced totems such as those in World of Warcraft are similar.
Final Thoughts
Reflecting on what I’ve written above, I see that there is no “magic bullet” for scaling difficulty (although I hoped that writing about it might shake one loose). The techniques that must be used will certainly vary from game to game… My main suggestion is to look beyond the traditional D&D numerical “crutch” when faced with systems that need to scale. I understand why we do it: it’s not just our inner fanboy screaming to get out… numbers are a necessary part of our job and getting results. However, I love designs where the player doesn’t have to be steeped in numbers in order to succeed.
You might also come out of this thinking that I turn my nose up at RPG’s. On the contrary, it’s one of my favorite genres, and Diablo II is still my favorite game of all time.
Finally, I certainly mean no disrespect for what Resistance 2 has accomplished in its multiplayer mode. Along with Call of Duty 4, I think it has laid a foundation for great semi-persistent online experiences for shooters. What others might build upon these concepts in the future makes my mind reel.
I’ve been playing Resistance 2 lately, taking in its new cooperative mode on the recommendation of a couple of friends. Co-op in shooters has a long but spotty tradition, so it was neat to see Insomniac deliver a non-competitive experience with a different feel. This one gives the player one of three classes that can be leveled up independently by matching up to play short missions. Each class has a different loadout and responsibility when played: grunt, medic, supply. In addition, there is a resource that can be gathered during matches in order to purchase upgraded abilities and weapon packages.
It was a fairly addicting experience, as I pushed to each successive level like I might grind an MMO. The matches themselves were entertaining on their own, with tangible sense of achievement every few rounds. Unfortunately, I eventually ran out of gas, not because the game itself wasn’t fun enough… but rather because each creature had 5-10 times the health of their single-player counterparts. The campaign was a well-balanced shooter with crisp control aim and a great sense of power, but coop had me holding my machinegun on what should have been “popcorn” enemies for several seconds, watching XP pile up as I waited for each bag of hit points to fall down. Quite simply, it didn’t feel at all like the shooter than I played when not online.
I cannot fault the concept of jacking up the time to kill each enemy… it’s a time-honored tradition from many classic games. In Resistance 2, it was clear that they needed to extend the experience and increase the effort required to bring each one down.  It’s probably a useful excercise to discuss why this might be.
The Numbers Game
One reason for enemies to soak up bullets in coop is to match the level of difficulty to the number of players. If 10 players entered a level that was intended for just one, they would slaughter everything with their added firepower. Some games ship this way, whether due to limited resources or to reward the effort that used to be involved to connect multiple PC’s for a coop session in the first place.  These days most do their best to notch up the challenge when new players join a session, and sometimes this is done by increasing the enemy toughness.   Diablo did this in the most overt fashion, by reporting to the player that “the enemy forces have grown stronger” when each additional player joins the game. Behind the scenes it was increasing the experience level equivalent of all the enemies in the world.
Another reason for enemies feeling more invulnerable are in games with a progression track… ones that reward the player for each hour of play with upgrades in ability and potency (like Resistance 2 does). Unfortunately it’s easy to forget that in order to build a game where the player feels more powerful over time, you must hold back some of the most potent player abilities at the start of the game. The player certainly feels a sense of achievement as he gains all the new kick-ass stuff over the course of the game, but sometimes that means he also feels anemic at the very beginning, where he has the least capability. The damage potential for his weapons are less, his health is less. His weapons aren’t as flamboyant. Even the most basic enemies might take far longer to kill than they will later on. This is a dangerous practice that must be handled with care… these are the crucial early hours where a player should be falling in love with the product rather than feeling emasculated.
Somehow this is an acceptable practice in RPG’s… Those games are almost entirely about progression and acquisition, so it is expected that the player will evolve tremendously over hundreds of play hours (or thousands in an MMO). But because of these incredible progression arcs, most RPG’s play what I call The Numbers Game. You’ve doubtless seen it… when players start off their game doing tiny amounts of damage to wimpy rats, but eventually grow to deal thousands of points while fighting giant dragons. In these situations there is a continual arms race between the damage you deal and the health of your enemies.
For example:  I’m playing an MMO and start with a character who can deal an average of 20 points of damage to an enemy who has about 100 health. About 5 hits will take him down.  After some play time, I level my character to level 20, and can now deal 100 points of damage. Good for me! …except now most of the enemies have around 500 health. I guess it’s still 5 hits to kill one. Finally, after months of investment I reach the coveted level 50, and I’m clobbering opponents with 1000 points per hit. Of course, you guessed it, my enemies have 5000 HP (or more).
This shouldn’t be a big surprise, because as you gain power, it would be anticlimactic to see a lessening difficulty… we all want to grow up to finally beat that huge, scary thing that we fled from many hours of play ago. Keep in mind what this means, however: In a combat-centric game, a player’s primary metric of power is the number of hits per kill. (This abstracts to “the ratio of time investment per reward”… but that’s fodder for a later post).  But when I play the Numbers Game, do I really feel better about taking down a Level 50 Hoary Drake with my Level 50 character than I did taking down the Level 1 Scrawny Rat with my Noob? The answer in RPG’s is often “yes”, but in shooters you can get in a lot more trouble.
The difference is in the essences of the genres… RPG’s deal with skill advancement primarily on the character itself, as he “levels up” and increases his capability through higher numerical stats.  The player himself has less pressure to hone his actual playing skill, aside from juggling the new options presented to him when new abilities are unlocked.  He makes choices about how he wishes to advance, working with figures like “strength”, “speed” and “willpower”, even though they often just present different ways of hurting an enemy. These various axes of advancement give the player something to aim for, a vast possibility space that he can explore and achieve in.
Since advancement is so tied to how the player’s capabilities are represented, the player keeps a much greater awareness of the numbers and how they affect him. He understands and accepts that an enemy that is 5 levels above him is extremely dangerous, because the numbers say so. This is totally fine, because most RPG’s are not about combat… they’re about advancement, acquisition, and a bit of exploration.  (If you really believe that you played Diablo for the click-and-kill combat, I think I have some real estate you might be interested in…)
Shooters by comparison leave skill advancement largely to the player’s mind and body. Your manual aiming ability is your primary “accuracy stat”, and timing, dodging and area management are all critical traits that don’t live in the game itself.  In most shooters the player’s character is just as effective with a pistol at the beginning of the game as he is at the end… even though the game progressively demands more of the player himself with larger groups of foes and challenging level layouts.
Shooters also are tuned for action experience, living and dying by their weapon balance and ammunition management… Killing one enemy is usually 1-3 shots, and an FPS starts to instinctively know which weapon is best for each situation.  This is the biggest reason that shooters are so seriously wounded by the Numbers Game. By increasing enemy health arbitrarily, the choice of weapon eventually becomes less important. Enemies that used to be demolished by a shotgun blast take several hits, causing players to switch from surprise or flanking maneuvers to attrition tactics. Pistols go from being the standby for taking out weak enemies with minimal ammo investment to becoming basically useless. Different skills and sometimes abhorrent tactics are adopted in order to succeed because the game becomes increasingly “unfair”. Players might even start to think in terms of DPS (Damage per Second), a major metric in MMO’s and a strong symptom of the Numbers Game.
More Than Just Digits
So this argument does nothing to help out the intrepid FPS designer, who still needs to solve these difficulty issues… He’s willing to do anything to make the game as fun for 10 players as it is for one, and to make gamers feel increasingly awesome for each hour he plays. I don’t blame folks for falling back on the numbers when they need to; Diablo II is still my favorite game of all time, and when working X-Men Legends I personally applied the Numbers Game to near-excess (more on that another day).
Solving this problem through other means is really hard, but going the Bags o’ HP route should be a last resort. I’ll see if I can scrape up some alternatives in the next post.
This pistol is a backup weapon in the 
This footage is from DICE’s multiplayer mode, so it leans closer to 
The Agency
Rage
This shotgun is a big guy, serious business… its size might set it apart from models in other games, but I’ll say that it looked menacing in the player’s hands, and had a satisfying muzzle flash and “booming” sound to it.
This one felt a little silly to preview since the beta has been available for a while, but nonetheless I wanted to compare it with other upcoming titles. I was not a fan of the original 
A typical sighted assault rifle, this weapon has a great “train chug” sound to it, and it does some nice damage, throwing dusty impacts all over the environment and struck enemies. It definitely looks like an effective weapon.
What a difference from the previous MOH footage… without the background din of combat, 
Another lesser-known title, 
Once again, the weapon appeared a bit stubby because of the odd aspect ratio, but in general it hit the 
The muzzle flash in 
These guys are obviously about showing off as much as their game is, and I feel it here. The rifle here felt dangerous, with a bright, fiery, and non-repetitive muzzle flash. The gunfire audio is has a crunchy mechanical sound to it, and that worked great (unsurprisingly similar to 
This footage isn’t great (to be fair, the video is wayyyy oversaturated), but I wanted to include it because of the blinding amount of feedback from the rifle. The weapon has a huge star-shaped muzzle flash, which probably looks good in screenshots, but doesn’t have a lot of variance to make it vary over a sustained burst. It also manages to cover up a ton of what is going on at the impact site.
This particular weapon is 
The sniper rifle in 
Adding enemies with interrelated behaviors is also a method to give a feeling that they are “conspiring against you”. A prime enemy that adds challenge to any group is the buffing opponent. The Shaman in 
Somehow this is an acceptable practice in RPG’s… Those games are almost entirely about progression and acquisition, so it is expected that the player will evolve tremendously over hundreds of play hours (or thousands in an MMO). But because of these incredible progression arcs, most RPG’s play what I call The Numbers Game. You’ve doubtless seen it… when players start off their game doing tiny amounts of damage to wimpy rats, but eventually grow to deal thousands of points while fighting giant dragons. In these situations there is a continual arms race between the damage you deal and the health of your enemies.