Why didn't our game make it to the finals?
In the past six weeks, we have made a game that other groups could not even imagine —— 3D online FPS game. Most of the other teams participating in the competition chose to make simpler games. We made multiple game scenes, completed the design and modeling of Kun, produced game music, designed multiple gameplays, and achieved multiplayer online, which might be unimaginable for other teams. We were proud of ourselves that we achieved this challenge. Regrettably, although the official NetEase official account praised the development capabilities of our works, our works did not make it into the finals of the minigame.
After that, when I reviewed our game, I attributed it to the fact that when we were working on this project, we focused too much on showing our development capabilities, but in the core gameplay, there was not much innovation, and in the actual game experience, this game can not be counted as a good game.
I think our game mainly has the following problems:
Weak Feedback System
In the book "Reality is Broken", four major characteristics of the game are mentioned: Goal, Rules, Feedback System, and Voluntary Participation. The design of the feedback mechanism is very important in the game. In general FPS games, wartime feedback can be divided into the following aspects:
Sound Design
Including the sound effects of pulling the trigger to shoot, bullets flying and hitting different targets;
Visual Performance of Recoil
It is generally performed by the jitter of the muzzle and the jump of the viewing angle of the screen;
Hit Feedback
It can be performed by HP drop prompts, action feedback, and special effects that hit the target;
Kill Feedback
Including the action of the enemy falling down, UI prompts for game kills;
Tactile feedback
Mainly for the vibration feedback of the game controller;
Lens close-up
It refers to the close-up performance of the player's specific behavior.
When we experience our own games, we can also feel that our FPS games feel bad. If we had time to adjust the points above, we could also give players a refreshing experience.
Unreasonable Emotional Curve Design
The design of the emotional curve of our game has major flaws. This problem is mainly attributed to the design of our various levels and the arrangement between levels.
We did a rough job in level design because none of us had experience in level design. Game design, including level design, is actually digging into user needs and satisfying players' psychological demands. The significance of level design is to use level ideas to satisfy players' demands. In the level design of our project, we just treated each level as the environment and container of our gameplay. But we did not use methods similar to RDL, emotional curve, and difficulty curve to optimize our design. As a result of our level experience, players did not have too many emotional ups and downs, and there was no way to experience flow.
Journey is a good example of how to make a good emotional experience in a game. Journey imitates the three-stage story structure in Hollywood movies, unifies the change of the protagonist of the wind traveler and the tension of the three-stage structure, and completes this emotional experience in the dimensions of level design and background music.
Lack of Co-op
We also have problems with the design of multi-person collaboration. Since we did not assign different responsibilities to different players in terms of level design and game mechanism design, it is totally possible for the entire game to be cleared by one person. In the case of multiplayer, only the strength and number of robots are improved. Therefore, multi-person collaboration has not been well shown in our work.
Unreasonable numerical design
In order to ensure that the judges can experience all the content of our game at once, we have reduced the difficulty of the game to ensure that players can easily pass the level the first time they play. But this actually reduces the player's tension in experiencing our game.
Stupid AI
We designed our AI with a simple state machine. Players would feel that robots were stupid and had no threat to them.
Summary
It's extremely hard to produce a mature FPS game. FPS feedback adjustments, level production, AI design, the multi-person collaborative design will take a lot of time to try and adjust again and again. If I were asked to create a game in six weeks, I would never choose FPS games again...
Comments