What would you expect from a third-person shooter game?

Hi there! I’ve been recently working on a third-person shooter game. I’d really want it to look good and to make players actually like it. I’ve been wondering: what should I take care of most? Graphics? UI? Controls? Please give me advice, any help is appreciated!

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If I were playing a TPS, I would want realistic gun configs and a good map. Graphics/UI aren’t as important as long as they are readable.

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What do you mean “realistic gun configs”?

Gun recoil, size, and firing speed, and clip size based off of real guns.

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I’d expect smooth gameplay and no out-of-place unjustified transitions/effects/anything. I’d expect to be able to change shoulder camera, look freely around with and w/o the character following my view, my camera not clipping through objects, my camera not being zoomed too close nor too far away from the character (maybe be able to choose this yourself as a player), 8-directional walking/running animations or something similar using footplanting which would allow the procedural animation to adapt to any direction as if you were using a joystick for example.

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Thanks for the feedback! I’m putting quite a lot of effort to make the shoulder camera as comfortable as possible. However, 8-directional animations are very hard for me to make since I’m a solo developer.

That’s not an excuse for not implementing it, though. There are two ways that I know of:

8 individual animations
You can do it “the hard way” where you make 8 individual animations for each stance your game supports and code a movement system which would change to the appropriate animation based on what keys or direction the character is walking. I did this before I learned how to make footplanting.

Footplanting
Footplanting is procedural, also based on the direction the character is moving, which is much more beneficial in the long run as you add more stances since you won’t have to make a single animation but rather adjust a few values to allow for the footplanting to function the way you want for each stance.

Heya! So this looks like a good time to introduce you to the player-motivation map!

So with most shooter games (though not all), they fall solidly in the red zone. You’ll see that players who play these games value destruction, community, competition, and of course excitement.

So going off of those, here are some quick mechanics based recommendations.

  • Competition: Have leaderboards, both on the server and game level, as well as across different time increments
  • Community: Teamwork is often quite beneficial in these games, so be sure to invest in mechanics like clan formation, as well as allowing friends to be on the same team if they like.
  • Excitement: Fast paced action is a must, that means making sure you have player/map density figured out so that players don’t have to wait long between fights. This also means speeding up the between-rounds/battles section as to get back into the action quickly.
  • Destruction: Destroyable maps are great. This could be as simple as shattering windows when they’re shot, to being able to demolish entire buildings. Typically you can’t have too much destruction, just make sure to end the round before literally nothing is left standing.

Now earlier I did say that these games are almost always fully red - and that’s mostly true. One other thing you may consider is the people who play it for immersion. This is important for you to determine because more immersion = more time spent on making nicer looking assets (not to be confused with nice-feeling mechanics, which is a must for any game).

Yellow players (in case you’re wondering, players can definitely co-exist in multiple color categories, but red-yellow combos are usually rare) love pretending to be a solider/robot/whatever you’re avatar is. They often prefer first-person modes, and they care a ton about the visuals of the game. And to be honest, they don’t mix super well with red players. They would more prefer a solo-mode, where they’re the talented super-soldier who can kill a ton of NPCs no problem, they won’t care as much for being slaughtered by a bunch of elite fighters chuckling “get gud” every 10 seconds in the chat.

Frankly, from what you’ve described, I don’t think your game fits the immersion audience. And that’s perfectly fine - games like Bad Business and Arsenal are both great examples of fun fighting games that don’t really care much about fantasy.

Hope this helps!

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@CJ_Oyer What are your thoughts on the the Octalysis game motivation framework?

Thanks in advance!

The Octalysis model is truly interesting, and I do really like how easy they make it to fill in the blanks for whatever game / concept you’re focusing on (this one appears to have been filled in for a general game designer’s aide in brainstorming relevant mechanics). However I feel it is a bit sloppy in terms of its philosophy.

We’re Brains Controlling Bodies Controlling Videogames
I think an important thing to remember is that at the end of the day, the gaming experience is a substitute for reality. Our brains release chemicals when dealing with reality. There are many different types, but they’re released as your body responds to scenarios. Games release these same chemicals. That’s because when immersed in a game your brain treats the game environment like a physical environment. The question is, what kinds of environmental triggers maximize this chemical release?

Because there are so many unique combinations of players, with infinitely complex preferences, there is no right way to do this. At the end of the day the only way to rate a tool is if it works. But how many people does it work for, and do the constraints of the artificial categorizations improve either the amount of people who can benefit with insight, or the degree of insight.

Generally speaking, this means your philosophy should follow some internal logic to best allow emergent truths - similar to any system in a game. And that’s where I have problems with Octalysis. The system isn’t valid, areas overlap in unintentional ways, and the path for mapping out a concept isn’t clear when you break down the true scope of each category.

So let’s do just that!

Meaning
Let’s start with meaning: they describe it as a general sense of purpose, feeling as though you’re part of something bigger, or have been “chosen”. As examples they list helping out with a forum, or writing articles for wikipedia. My big complaint with this is that to me, these motivations are fully social. People do this to gain social influence, to feel like they’ve helped someone - an action that will release the happy social chemicals in your brain whether you know the specific person or not. So this means that this category can fit partially into the social category.

As to feeling like they’ve been “chosen”, that’s equally flawed. Another way to describe “chosen” would be to own the unique trait of “chosen”, something which also probably gets a ton of meaning from social influence. So by the end of it, the “meaning” category is just two other categories undercover.

Empowerment
This is one is very generic, as empowerment really boils down to “is a game mechanic”. Because game mechanics at their core empower the user to influence the game, or at least provide the perception they can. Tell me, when was the last time you played any game by pressing only keyboard keys that weren’t linked to any in-game function? Sure, different games have this to different degrees, an uncharted game empowers people less than minecraft, but the whole reason videogames are different than books and movies is because they allow for meaningful player input.

For a game to be a game, it must empower player decisions. There’s a famous quote by Game Developer Sid Meier where he described gameplay as a series of “meaningful choices”. Empowerment is not just a motivation for people to play games, it is the reason people play games. Every other category in this octagon fits either under “would work in a movie / book / theater production” or “is a form of empowerment”.

Social Influence
Overall I’m fine with this category, though I do feel constraining its effects to only irl players is limiting - there are many examples of players bonding with NPCs / fictional characters almost as genuinely as a real person, especially when they haven’t had success with the more complicated real people. Ever feel sad when your favorite character died in a show? Those are the same sad feelings you get (albeit to a lesser extent most of the time) when something sad happen in real life.

So in a sense, fantasy is sometimes just artificial social influence, but since it is artificial I think it is worth keeping in separate categories. From a development perspective two people alone in a blank map can have a potentially interesting conversation, whereas a person and a poorly designed, barely scripted NPC will not have nearly as much fun.

Unpredictability
So there are two ways to take this, both aren’t really helpful. The first is true unpredictability - something so meaningless that you have no way to strategize or respond, hence removing any sense of empowerment from the game. Best case scenario is you get a bizarre movie, but a movie isn’t a game.

The second way makes sense, but is so generic it’s not worth including as a category. This is structured unpredictability, such as say getting hit by lightning in a lightning storm in Natural Disaster Survival. It’s random, but you can take meaningful actions to reduce your risk, and you are given context beforehand that a lightning storm is happening so that you know to take actions to reduce your risk. It has defined constraints (can’t hit you as easily indoors, as well as a typical reload time) that it consistently follows, allowing you to make meaningful empowered decisions.

So what unpredictable ends up being, is either meaningless nonsense that removes empowerment - something you wouldn’t want in a game, or another way of saying “put game mechanics in your game”, aka empowerment - a category we have already covered.

Avoidance
Avoidance is kind of worthless as well, as the second you have any goal, you get the anti-goal of avoiding failure. Sure it might be easier to describe some things as pain avoidance behavior, but at the end of the day you could just as easily describe the success oriented goals as failure avoidance. You just don’t really get any workable insight from this beyond recognition that failure and success are actually the same concept.

Scarcity
Scarcity is an odd one for sure. Like, if avoidance was about describing the fail/success side of things, scarcity is the period of time before success that you’ve failed, and the emotional frustration it causes a player. This seems like another fact of life thing, where in order to have progression, you will need a period of time of which to progress. So I guess the main lesson here is put progression systems in your game. By the way, this isn’t a motivation - the motivation is the motivation, scarcity just refers to the motivation taking longer to achieve.

Ownership
Ownership is a mix between the social pressures to flex on people, and the success aspect of the failure/success relationship we discussed earlier.

Accomplishment
Literally the opposite of avoidance.

Conclusion
This philosophy is a bit messy, the different categories are presented as if they’re equals, however some of them have a massive scope, relating to the core of human perception, while others are on the level of properties of common mechanics. There’s a ton of overlap, with some motivations being fully consumed by others.

The problem with the Octalysis models is not actually the individual categories, it’s the putting them all on the same level. There’s an excellent book called The Art of Game Design: A book of Lenses, something I recommend to all designers.

What it is is over 100 different unique perspectives you can view game design from. Many of the categories above provided interesting focuses on aspects of game interactions, motivations, etc. They’re great for seeding your brain with potentially unique brainstorming paths. The 8 categories of the Octalysis could have made excellent extra lenses in this book. But by narrowing down all of player motivation to these 8 lenses, they heighten the standard, and fail to live up to the scrutiny of their proposed philosophy. In fairness to them though, no philosophy is ever undeniably perfect and balanced - when they are, they’re called laws of science.

So in conclusion, if you gain something from the individual lenses provided in Octalysis that’s great! However I think that’s about all it’s good for. The book I linked above is much more useful, and frankly in my opinion provides more insight per lens.

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@CJ_Oyer I knew there was a reason why I started following you on this forum. I forgot what specific post it was that you wrote, I just remember thinking dang that’s good. And, now you’ve proven that again. Thanks so much for this reply. Ordering the book!

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No prob! Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoy the book as much as I have, it has helped me out on every project since I first read through it - especially in the initial pre-production phase

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I highly recommend you start with quality of the controls and movements, art style and more can always come later. From experience, I’ve seen more people like a more clean and less buggy game than a buggy game with multiple issues. At least in my opinion you should always focus on the quality of the game.

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