How could I change up a concept of a FPS game?

Improve Game Concept

I have a game that is in development progress and I need suggestions and feedback to my concept. So I can change up how the game functions and the overall understanding of the game.

Start

What is the game about?
Pistol Clash is a First-Person Shooter with only pistols as the concept. You can upgrade, add attachments, etc, to your pistol to make it do more damage, silent killing, or have good aim-down sights. There will be Limited time: Modes, Maps, guns, etc. There will be trading on a website so you can trade pistols for another pistol! (Which is sort of pointless but haha). We will have gun skins, Auras, Perks, Attachments in the later updates. The opening ceremony of the game will be sometime in November.

What makes the game so unique?
Well, Pistol Clash isn’t your original FPS game. We switch the concept up by getting rid of all the Traditional FPS guns and only using pistols and knives, making it harder to kill people and practice pistol usage. We will change the updates up from LTM’s to having dual-wielding pistols, add attachments, and have your own gun skin! We won’t have currency buy cause that will make our game look like it’s paid-to-win. You can trade pistols on a website too!

You can expect this game to be a lot more different than your “Original” FPS game!

END

I need to add more suggestions and add more interesting ideas to the concept. Please reply below about my idea on this concept and how I could improve on it.
Improvements

  • Gamepass Idea’s
  • How could I earn more game revenue without adding a bunch of game passes?
  • How could I listen to suggestions that will make the community overall better?

Any idea you guys might have? Please list them down below as I said above.

Thanks for Reading and have a great day! :slight_smile:

2 Likes

After you get 5 kills you can call in airstrike. or call an APC

Add vr support. I havent seen any major roblox fps games have it.

2 Likes

Make every pistol have strange abilities. Like one that allows you to rapid-fire, one that shoots barf, one that makes you run really fast.

That would be funny and cool!

2 Likes

Special perks that cost robux for your gun.

An idea could be having a time limit, maybe the limit is 5 minutes and whoever gets most kills wins. The pistol add on idea is sort of similar to Phantom Force’s gun customization. (Sorry, I don’t know what it’s called cause I don’t play it) Another idea is to add game modes, like in Arsenal. The way you can make money without many game passes is a type of premium/VIP. The VIP would grant currency every round or something, and it should also grant VIP only skins. The way you could make the community better is by hiring a mod team who deals with reports and such.

Thank you for the suggestion, We will add VR support in later updates once we get experiments on VR done.

1 Like

try adding destructible walls(like unreachable heights so you use the grenade to bomb those off the way) and buildings to get more of the ongoing warzone because popular FPS games like Phantom Forces do not have those features as far as I know…

1 Like

Yup, we got all of that. Love your suggestions though!

Interesting Suggestion. Thanks for the idea!

Thank you for your suggestion! I think that’s a really good way to make a randomized battlefield zone!

@HarrowedCrobix Ideally, That’s a great way to make more revenue and give them something more of a interest. Thanks for your suggestion!

@RemadeAlternative, Strange abilities can make a battlezone more strange… Thanks for the suggestion!

Heya! Interesting idea you have, and I think it could indeed be quite fun. As to original though I’m a bit uncertain as it rings similar to a few games - innovative might be a better word to fit your project.

Potential Progression Problem
A few things popped out at me, the first is addressing the inevitable on-boarding problem your progression system will lead to. At first I thought the game might be going in a strategic direction, but while I wrote this I realized it really was just regular progression - and that’s perfectly fine. The main difference is when strategy is part of the game, every added benefit to a strategy comes with an equal added risk, and balancing both of them is where the fun comes in. However your proposed weapon customization is simply progression, as when you give yourself more damage or silent killing you don’t really lose anything (spending money would only really count as a risk if your perks and money started at 0 at the beginning of each round).

Your progression leads to player upgrades which can be quite fun, especially to players motivated by a desire to dominate opponents. However in the current state it has a flip side, unprogressed players who enter the game will be dominated. This can make getting into the game very difficult, as the new players who are motivated by your core progression (domination) are experiencing the opposite for the starting experience. This might make it difficult to grow your audience past a certain point.

So there are two major strategies for fixing this, the first is the overwatch method, the second is the fortnite method. Both of these methods are used in both games, but I feel each has gotten more of a spotlight in one due to their differing degrees of application and competitiveness.

In the overwatch method you make progression unrelated to abilities, using only skins and emotes. Dedicated players still feel superior (a core part of domination) due to their nice cosmetics - however this won’t be nearly as effective as allowing for power-ups, but it will make it easier for new users to join.

In the fortnite method you stagger your create matches with player skill levels in mind, leading to more powerful players to fight more powerful players. This has a drawback though as it kind of ruins the joy of being superior due to other players being on equal grounds as you, so if you do this you should try to force some diversity in skill levels as to make sure everyone gets a mixture of feeling superior vs inferior. This won’t ever be as fun though as the wolf among sheep experience an unregulated random sorted server has.

This is a difficult thing to balance, both methods make progression less compelling for the sake of new players.

Monetization
Monetization is the complicated world of raising your ARPU (average revenue per user), and is often at the front of the minds of many developers trying to make their game financially viable. In my own experience however I’ve found that monetization is actually quite easy to do well enough, but very difficult to perfect. And that focusing on monetization before the game succeeds might actually kill the game entirely.

Tell me, what makes more money, a game with an ARPU of $0.10, and a DAU (daily active users) of 1000? Or a game with an ARPU of $0.001 and a DAU of 10,000,000? Technically the first game earns more per player, but the second one earns almost 10x as much overall. That’s not even including the built in revenue you get from visits of premium players.

The lesson here is that a poorly monetized game that is played by many because it’s fun will outperform a more monetized game with less players. If you look at the top earning games on Roblox, all of them have thousands of players concurrently, which means a DAU count of hundreds of thousands. Between them of course, you’ll see games with less players who earn more due to superior monetization, but those games still have an audience of hundreds of thousands of players a day.

It is very difficult to make a fun game, one played by people day after day after day. That is something that requires testing and testing and testing and sometimes still walking away empty handed. I have seen many games have solid monetization schemes and nobody plays them, earning nothing. But I have yet to see a Roblox game with a DAU of 100k fail to earn any money at all.

So don’t worry about monetization, by all means add it, but do so carefully. My game Super Hero Life III (SHL3) earns about 6x as much per user than its predecessor Super Hero Life II (SHL2), but because it is played by substantially less people for the last few months it has earned less. The reason less people play it is because I foolishly monetized a core game mechanic, making it difficult to enjoy without money. When you mess up the core of a game it is difficult to go back and undo it, so don’t make that same mistake.

Monetize your game, but do so in a way which won’t hurt it. You can make riskier decisions once its successful to boost that ARPU, but due to a roblox’s premium payouts, your ARPU will be at minimum around $0.001 already, which may not sound like much but if you get your game to the front page with 50k concurrents and a DAU of 1mil users, you’re making $1000 a day off of just premium payouts.

So don’t make your game not fun due to monetization, for now you can fully focus on making it the most fun game ever and be fine.

Community Feedback
Testing a game is vitally important at every stage. And when you receive feedback by all means listen to the community, however listen to their complaints more than their ideas, because when people are happy with a game as is they come up with ideas. When they didn’t enjoy it they complain, or worse - they say nothing.

Complaints are very important because if a part of your core loop is boring or overly dissatisfying, people will be angry, because some flaw is messing up their chance at a good time. If the entire experience is uncompelling though, they’ll say nothing. You can try to fix it, shock its heart back to life, but often this situation is how a project dies. If people are complaining though, use those complaints to improve the product until the majority of feedback is fans brainstorming about where the game could go next.

You can use those brainstorms, or not - there is no one correct way to evolve a game. There are incorrect ways though, and complaints help you avoid them.

Conclusion
Based on what you’ve said so far here are my three summarized pieces of advice:

  • Figure out how to address your progression system hurting new players so your game can grow unimpeded
  • Don’t hurt the core game with monetization, as there isn’t much a reason to worry about it right now at all.
  • Listen to complaints to get your core loop running.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your game!

Wow, I am impressed. Thanks for your suggestion we may implement a few things you added!

1 Like

Maybe the game focusing heavily on environment interaction like bullet ricocheting, gas pipes etc.

Thank you for your suggestion. We will probably add that to our game later. We are not really towards environment interaction. But at some point, we will add some physics engine into the game.

I would read this: Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub
People could get sick or have seizures from a fast-paced FPS game, make sure to have a warning or it might lead to legal action

1 Like

Thank you for the heads up! We will put in the warning just to let people know.