Fundamentals of Shooter Game Design by Ernest Adams

Author:Ernest Adams [Ernest Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Game Development
Publisher: New Riders
Published: 2014-12-17T22:00:00+00:00

Observing

The player naturally needs to see where he’s going, as well as where his enemies and other threats are, and potential places of safety. Getting the camera model and camera controls right is one of the trickiest parts of designing a shooter because it is so critical to the player’s success. These can be dramatically different in first-person and third-person modes.

The amount of the game world that you display on the screen is called the field of view and is governed by two angles, the horizontal and the vertical. Because display screens are wider than they are tall, the horizontal view angle is larger. The most common ratio on modern equipment is 16:9, but computer games typically detect the capabilities of the player’s graphics card and adjust themselves accordingly. If you are using middleware, such as the Unreal Engine or Unity to display the environment, this will be handled for you.

In third-person modes the camera is normally behind the avatar at a distance that shows most or all of his body. This enables the player to see threats approaching from the sides and even, to a limited extent, from behind. He typically also may move the camera freely in a full circle around the avatar’s body, examining the whole area without moving. This is obviously a great advantage in hostile environments.

In first-person modes the player sees what the avatar sees, naturally, and the player must turn the avatar to see in another direction (few games implement the ability to turn the avatar’s head while facing forward, although this is changing with the increasing popularity of virtual reality play).

Because the display screen typically permits a narrower field of view (60 to 100 degrees) than the human eye is capable of in real life (120 degrees), players in first-person games have no peripheral vision. A few games permit the player to set up extra monitors (if their hardware supports it) to display a wider angle, or they offer a wider field of view that is somewhat distorted at the edges, so the center of the screen looks normal and the edges compressed horizontally. This gives the player a kind of artificial peripheral vision, but creates the feeling of moving through a tunnel; it is more often used in racing games than in shooters.

Some additional observing features that you may want to include are zoom (typically a fixed magnification, often shown as if looking through a sniper scope), night vision (usually a grainy green-tinted monochrome) for use in dark places, and a small mirror on the end of a stick, an option for looking around corners without exposing the avatar to enemy fire. Many games also give the player a mini-map or radar screen to help him orient himself in the landscape and (sometimes) see where enemies are as well.

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