VoodooLabs

I love anything that makes you look cool playing a game. Lets face it, a large reason to play games is to do things you can’t normally, like ninja wall running. I can’t ninja flip off a wall and jump onto roofs, but I can in a game.

The trick with these features is to make them easy to use and not to take away interaction from the player.

I believe I have already discussed some ideas for this, but it’s time for a refresher.

I like the idea of ‘adaptive behaviour’. You control your avatar with normal fps controls and the computer takes care of the special behaviours. If you push up against a wall your character will lean against it, if you crouch near a low obstacle your character will level their gun over it in a defensive stance. Your avatar will pull themselves up onto a ledge, climb over obstacles, lean out around corners and kick obstacles out of the way.

All this is preferably done as some sort of computer run over a map to identify these points dynamically.

The action key is context specific, it is used to open doors, climb ladders, pick up ammo and weapons, grap opponents and melee. What happens is dependant of your current surroundings and the way you press the key.

One problem with all this is it lends itself to a 3rd person perspective. This is a problem because this form of perspective is hard to do. If the avatar backs up against a wall the camera is often forced into annoying places. Also with this perspective it’s possibly to look around corners. Hopefully I can do this well and make it look right.

To make 3rd person prespective an enjoyable experience I’m planning to have context sensitive zooming. The camera will zoom in and position itself where it thinks is best. If you are doign a lot of running and looking around it will give you a larger view of the area. If you are taking careful shots with a accurate weapon the camera will align itself along the barrel of the weapon and zoom in to get a better view. I’m going to make sure I do this right as there is nothing more annoying that a bad camera in 3D.

Now all these would be a welcome addition to any game, but I don’t want to make any game. I’ve been toying with a few ideas and I’ve some up with something I think is quite cool. I don’t have a large budget, so anything with large amounts of artwork and content is right out. Well in fact there are a few concepts that I would like to include in a game.

• 5 minutes
• Rage
• Style
• Coop LAN
• Mythos