As part of my enthusiasm for this project, I wanted to make the kind of gameplay that I love playing - Multiplayer Shooter! This specific game mode is being developed by me on my spare time, with the help of fellow enthusiasts. What's better is that this project is the multiplayer mode of the Bounty Squads "Universe" in a sense, and it's inspired by how Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Inquisition separated their stories between their Singleplayer and Multiplayer game modes.
I had dabbled in Multiplayer development before, and so set out to learn things that were brand new to me. It has been very rewarding to learn something so powerful and entertaining. The bulk of the development has so far been focused on these three subjects:
Shooter Design
Multiplayer & Networking Tech
Movement Mechanics
There were a few shooter designs I wanted to implement. For this blog post, I'll outline the Recoil Patterns. All weapons in the game are subclasses of a Weapon Base class, so adding and tweaking recoil patterns was made simple.
In my research, I found many different setups. This inspired me to make something different:
A mixture of predictability, but with variation in it, making the recoil just slightly different every time the weapon is used.
I did this by scaling the recoil power, still using the same patterns. This resulted in a probable direction for where the crosshairs would move to on the next shot.
The predicability of guns in shooter games is a debated subject, and I find a compromise to be to my liking. The image here depicts the recoil area probability.
I've done many prototypes and gameplay systems Unreal Engine. However, making them for Multiplayer was mostly new to me.
These are the main Multiplayer subjects that I worked on for this bout:
There are a few parts left in this subject, that I very much look forward to delving deeper into in a later post.
Nailing down fun movement is important to me in any game. I want the basic movement to feel nice in your fingertips as you play, and I have quite a few ideas of what to do next. For now, the Movement Ability I want to show you is the "Tether" ability. It's my own futuristic take on grappling.
It can be used to elevate (literally) the levels and gameplay, making the game feel more dynamic and fast paced. As the user, the Tether can be used to quickly navigate areas or for setting up a better line-up as depicted in the graphic and screenshot here.
That should be all for this dev blog post. I hope you've enjoyed reading it!
I'm looking forward to showing you more as the project progresses.
