Project Lethargic is a Horde First Person Shooter with a twister… The guns shoot slow bullets. This fundamental change was inspired by World of Warships, where ships are firing projectiles tens of kilometres and the time to hit can be seconds long. After being introduced to the game, my first thought was how its unique aiming could be translated into games that I more typically play and this is the result. I decided to make it a horde mode, similar to the Killing Floor games, to see how the changes to shooting effects and is affects by the number of enemies and pressure put on the player and a horde mode with its expected intensity curve fit the bill. And who doesn’t like shooting robots.
This prototype is currently undergoing testing and further development in an agile format with collecting data from testers and getting feedback on how the game feels to play. In particular, I am currently focusing on weapon feel and time to kill for enemies as the aiming makes this more of a challenge for players and thus needs to be compensated for. This also will help factor the spawning for the AI and the numbers at any given time.
The focus for this project was the shooting mechanics and the AI. First of all was making the slower shooting feel good. I found that the projectiles couldn’t be too slow, otherwise it feels like aiming doesn’t matter, which is not what I wanted. After determining the projectiles speed and the basic shooting mechanics were implemented, creating an AI was the next challenge. I determined that as the shooting was going to be pretty tough on the user, the AI had to be very predictable, more so than usual, to compensate. So I decided to make it move between two points, hold at that point and move on with a short random deviation in how long they stayed at that point. I added three edge cases, the first being if the AI wasn’t within line of sight of the player, in which case the AI would recalculate the position it was going for. The other edge cases were if the AI was too far away or too close. In both cases I made it move towards or away from the player respectively in a straight line, making those shots easier for the player to make and predict.
The next step was making the AI shooting interesting to combat. I wanted a system that encouraged agility, particularly rapid changing of direction. To do this, I made the AI particularly accurate in its predictive algorithm but doesn’t account for changing of direction. This means that the AI will hit the player if they keep moving in the same direction. This encourages the player to change direction as they can see the projectiles coming towards them so can react to the projectiles and move out the way. This should encourage the changing of directions that I am aiming for.
The game was created using a few resources from the Marketplace. The Weapon Kit by Candescent Games provided the animations, models and sounds for all the weapons as well as implementation of the animations and sounds. The AI model was part of the Sci Fi Robot by Dspazio and animations came from the Epic’s Third person animation starter pack. The Ancient Treasure collection by Dekogon Studios was used for the model of the chests and finally the arms models and their animations were provided from Epic in the UE4 FPS template.