Due to popular demand: You can now try out the controls for yourself at the link below! simulacrum-games.itch.io/weapons-manual Explanation of the control scheme: itch.io/t/3319798/control-scheme-v0 Disclaimer: Extremely early, everything subject to change at any time! Feedback welcome!
As someone also developing a game that... doesn't really fit into a conventional genre, I respect the ingenuity and drive to innovate and experiment with unexplored territory!
@@simulacrumgames Using Godot, I'm making a 2D game where you make mobile factories in a procedurally-generated world, and those factories can have weapons n stuff mounted on them, allowing vehicular combat mad-max style!
4:20 Finger pointing breaks immersion for me. Instead have the hand assume the orientation it would be while interacting. Instead of pointing at the mag release, the thumb hovers over it waiting for you to click, Instead of pointing at the mag, the hand cups itself preparing to catch it. Instead of pointing at the trigger, the index finger hovers right above it waiting for you to squeeze 💥💥🔫
Yeah, this is the sort of thing I meant when I was talking about "switching animations when hovering over different pieces". The visuals weren't very representative, but hey, there's only so much you can do with random stock photos of hands. 😅 It's definitely going to be interesting to figure out how to set things up so that things are "sensible" for the insane designs I'm sure people will come up with.
game physics is >>>>> game graphics. graphics is not everything, sad reality nowadays is games are sold just based on graphcs. make 2 modes, if you can similar to war thunder arcade and realist. in realist mode, make the loading times of guns high like in real world. you can even avoid water and its related interactions, by making character die if they swim, cause soldiers do not actually swim with their gear. keep the game size small (under 10 GB), but make it memorable and legendary like some csgo etc
Solid gameplay (core mechanics, whether that be "physics" or not) comes first. *Animation* is very close behind. But graphics is a *VERY* distant spot long behind those first 2 priorities. In past eras, having great graphics could be important, because most promotional material for games which was widely spread was in physical printed media, or early internet before gifs were an efficient enough tool for consistent use on gaming websites or storefronts. Video was rare and expensive to get large enough hosting sites to support even in quite low resolutions. One of the biggest selling points of the original Prince of Persia (which showed up before the 90s did) was its animation quality, but those didn't get showcased in any advertising because there wasn't any practical way to do so through any media where games were advertised. It was amazing, but gaming wasn't huge so it didn't get a big following until much later. Simlarly, with the PS2 games using the same name and IP (Sands of Time trilogy), the devs heavily focused on doing a better job than any previous 3D games had done with animation quality, but promoting those animations wasn't easy when TV advertising for videogames was barely ever a thing that happened and gaming ads were almost exclusively in physical magazines with screenshots. Assassin's Creed was developed by the same studio, and had more animation frames for a single character than the PS2-era PoP trilogy had for every character combined across all 3 games. And these were still not the major selling points anyone paid attention to even for Assassin's Creed - what people focused on more was just the raw graphical quality (which was also pretty good for the time) shown off in screenshots. We had gaming websites as a prominent source for information, but even a gif was a big investment in server space by the standards of the time, let alone videos. There were videos made to advertise games, and some trailers even made it to TV (though rarely and not in many parts of the world), but those weren't as widely focused on by gamers as an audience yet. These animations were something which made the games feel amazing though, and are significant contributing reasons why they became classics. Funnily enough, as the Assassin's Creed series has progressed, animations have become more important to promotional material, since video and gif-based marketing have become much more accessible and widely not just used, but *expected* for games, but they've allowed their fluidity to decrease instead of continuing to try and maintain the quality they used to have. They've reached a point where the tools exist to showcase what used to be their biggest strength, and abandoned what could have become a more effective selling point than it's ever been. Very few games sell themselves on animation quality still, but it's a *HUGE* factor in how well games do in a practical sense.
man... its really interesting, as always MP helps any game but this one.. can you just imagine two people panicking to reload the gun, if there were something at stake... so interesting, good luck mate, subbed!
Haha, thanks! Maybe once the game sells 1 million copies and there are 10 other devs working on the game, the MP rework can start 😂 I'm trying to keep myself in check with what I can realistically get done on my own for now, so multiplayer is off the table for the moment...
A fantastic model for this sort of game and it’s control scheme is a game called Receiver 2. I recommend giving it a look as it has shockingly intuitive controls for its complexity, and has the same simulation-esq weapon mechanics.
This video showed up in my feed so u decided to watch it, when I saw how the reload worked I was in complete awe, that’s not impressive, THAT’S UNBELIEVABLY IMPRESSIVE
Yo wait I have the same sort of idea of using the mouse and doing manual movement too! I'm currently working on a game called SkewerDolls which is about *kebabs.* Examples being you use a skewer to stack food or weapon heads like a sledgehammer head and you fight & feast at the same time. To control using a skewer you would of course use the mouse to swing & stab. For now, both lmb and rmb are your hands so holding both buttons makes you fully swing the skewer. Also about pre-made movement. I also thought of a concept which are just called habits/reflexes where you plan pre-made moves so you can instantly swing back at opponents without needing to put your full mind & muscle memory into it. Another thing though that i've been thinking of for the game is the use of bullet time where time slows down in your perspective & you draw out your next moves until you release the key to stop (for some reason I'm thinking [shift]), so you execute your moves quickly like an anime character. The catch is I've had this whole game idea for over a year and never got to actually develop a lot of it. I hope to make this game before the end of high school. Also I might need suggestions on the controls for this game idea. Are they ok? Could I use any other keys?
Firstly: I recommend looking into a very cool game called Die By The Sword. It has physics-based freeform arm control with both hands, and physics-based damage modelling with various weapons and characters with weaponised body parts (claws/spikes/etc.) which can be manipulated dynamically with mouse and keyboard inputs in various combinations. In addition to the "live" freeform actions you can perform, you can pre-program more complex sequences which your character can peform on a single buttonpress, which allows you to save cooler-looking and more effective actions than you can reliably perform using the freeform system. Second: On the topic of your hand orientation problem, have you tried connecting the hand to an arm? Like you could do a simple version where it's just an extendo-stick that attaches from the camera to wherever the hand is placed, and isn't actually rendered as an object, just used to define the hand's position and the available orientations of the hand when gripping things. NOTE: I've never done this, so I can't affirm its practicality with any kind of experience, but it's something that seems like a logical means ot attempting what you're trying to do, based on what I know from working with game devs (usually as either a beta tester or editor, no coding or other hands-on development experience).
Thanks! I'd never heard of that game before, I'll have to check it out sounds really similar to what I want to accomplish with my hands! The hand orientation stuff was solved thanks to some discord members, check out video #2 if you want to see the results!
@@simulacrumgames I look forward to it (I'm working my way - slowly - through your vids. I think slower than you're making them though xD ) and yeah, DbtS wasn't a huge hit, but still has a niche fanbase. Well worth a look for inspiration on the kind of gameplay you're designing. Not quite the same as your plan but some notable overlap in core ideas.
This looks amazing... but it will be a lot of work for you and making sure that everything works will be nightmare. Some of my personal thoughts: Just maybe dont throw away the idea with VR completely. It could be really cool but i see what is your point. My first thought was that it could be really annoying to do everything all the time like reloading and other. And you asked if we want more animations. Dont do them just focus on the functionality. Love your idea and i hope everything will go well for you
Thank you! That's a good point about VR, especially if I'm not doing any fancy graphics, I suppose I can leave the door open for having a VR port... someday. About reloading, I agree. I feel like there should maybe be a "hardcore mode" where you are forced to do all the things all the time. But otherwise, there should be options like recording a reload sequence and being able to play it back by holding R or something like that.
first devlog and i'm already in love with this game! the idea is super ambitious but if u can pull it off, it'll be awesome! can't wait to see what kind of progress you can make later down the line, def gonna stick around to see where this goes.
this has to be the most badass idea i have ever seen. looks absolutely AMAZING!!!! when i dream of a game this is usually what comes to mind- an fps with fully custom guns. please keep going, this has the potential of any triple A game EASY!
6:43 - Random suggestion, I don't know if it's helpful. Stiff movement sounds like the mouse isn't moving parallel to the vector you want it. Maybe you took a dot product somewhere in order to project the movement vector onto the right direction instead of rotating the input. No idea if that helps lol, best of luck!
Thanks! That's a good point, I'm not doing anything too fancy. I'll read up on how to project vectors and the dreaded dot product. Few things break my brain as fast as 3D vectors and "screen space". 😵
Thanks for checking out my project! I only heard about Loadout recently, but when I looked into it seemed to be much more of a.... jigsaw/build customization style of game. I'm more interested in creating a game that gives the player the freedom to design game pieces from the ground up. I think the "lego" style of building games (while fun) is well-explored and its time to try to reach the next level!
I like the idea of a squad fps but I also think a cob zombies like wave gamemode could be so cool. You could start with a basic gun and buy upgrades like scopes, mags and ammo types to continue to evolve the gun
7:27 for your hands: Make a rotation from your camera forward vector as x and your floor normal as y. Experiment with different axial combos until your desired result. You may have to dot product your camera right and surface normal vectors and check if the dot result is positive or negative to handle edge cases. Again experiment with these combos as that will be key and you’ll surely have to compromise at some point in the rabbit hole. Best wishes!
The two mice idea could work one mouse control movement by moving the mouse around and the other controls the up, down, left and right turn. Also the movement mouse could control reload and interacting like right click reloads and left open doors.
Unfortunately, I don't think Unreal Engine tracks mouse events separately for different mouse inputs. Maybe if I modified the engine to pass a "mouse id" with the events?
I think this system would be great for horror, being a person on rehabilitation, let's say someone lost the ability to move etc and now they are recovering. This could portray how difficult it is to move for them as nothing is unconscious but everything is a conscious decision. Could lead to some terrifying moments.
Loved the devlog! Though I can't give you any recommendations, I find your "2D VR" Hand controller very similar to the one in "Hand Simulator" on Steam. Not sure if you've used it as a reference already, but it might be of use if you haven't. Good luck with development, this sounds like a lot of fun as long as the controls match the feeling you want the player to feel when playing :)
Thanks for the support! A few other people have mentioned Hand Simulator but I hadn't heard of it before. I also haven't looked much into it yet, but my first impression is that its in the family of "quirky" games like Surgeon Simulator, so kind of a different direction than what I'm going for. But I do need to check it out more to see if there's anything I can learn from it for sure.
When I saw your previous video I thought, "Oh, another dream game devlog". After watching this video I went "OH A DREAM GAME DEVLOG". I'm so pleasantly surprised that wgat you're making is actually unique and interesting, a ton of dream game devlogs tens to be simple games, which I don't really blame them for
That seems like a massive project. I guess for something with a cool environment and weapons, I wouldn't mind taking more time to deal with actions that are typically automated.
Hey, just stumbled across your channel and the concept looks great. People have probably already mentioned this before but this reminds me a lot of a game called receiver from wolffire games and I know they like to release a lot of their technical breakdowns on their youtube channel. Best of luck. I hope to see you on steam's coming soon page in a few years. As for design, you might have looked into something resembling a CAD approach before. It'd be sweet to have something like CAD lite for the weapons creation.
Thanks! And yes, trying to do more immersive game controls was inspired by Receiver! I would say it might end up more like Kerbal Space Program with "dynamic components" like being able to select how many rounds a revolver cylinder should hold (and how many rings of ammo, etc). For (probable) legal reasons, I think there needs to be a definite separation from reality or limitations such that it isn't feasible that the game could be used to prototype a real world functional weapon. 😅
For your hand orientation problem, I would suggest it simply being a rule that the hand always points away from you but flattened to the normal of the surface. This will organically result in the outcomes you want.
As a control suggestion, maybe allow the player to bind certain "fast-actions" to keys, so they can do it in aiming mode? I would limit it to something like 1-3 keys, so that a full reload sequence can't be done while aiming, but it might help to not break the immersion.
@@simulacrumgames I was so sad when I realized this devlog came out 4 days ago 😂 I sincerely wish you the best and will definitely be following your masterpiece of a project!
This is a cool idea, but as far as gameplay goes you should decid on what the main focus will be and if it will be fun. You said you wanted to make a fps squad game, but most people get frustrated quickly when things arent quick and juicy. I made a little game where the revolver was more realistic like yours and required single reloads, hammer drawback before fire, etc. People really didnt like it, and i think if its slow and frustrating it really needs to work with the gameplay. My other thought is you talked about customizing your own weapons, which is cool but also a big feature. I can see how these controls could work really well in a sort of work table/ crafting cool guns and test firing them. Maybe focus on the game play being based around that? Anywho, im very curious what you will make in the end! Good luck ❤
Thanks for your support! While I don't plan to *stop* people from trying to play the game like Call of Duty, since (while aiming) the controls will essentially be "generic FPS" controls, maybe I shouldn't describe my game in terms of other games, but oh well. When I said "squad based FPS" I envision that there will be an AI squad going with you on objective-based missions. The primary goal is to make weapon design and choice important in regards to your squadmates' capabilities and mission parameters. I hesitate to say this, but I'm imagining something clos*er* to MGS or Ghost Recon rather than high-speed CoD. I do NOT mean there will be stealth mechanics like those games have (wait 90 seconds, then AI resets, AI can't see more than 15 m away etc), but don't expect missions to be designed as frantic Doom maps either. That said, I don't disagree with you or anything. I saw the reviews of your game and it was more like people didn't like the pairing of slow reloads with randomly appearing/difficult to fight enemies. So, yeah, making gameplay consistent with the control scheme is important as you said. I would like to clarify that I don't mean customizing weapons, I mean literally designing new weapons. A 18-shot shotgun revolver, plasma pistol, a revolving revolver (check out the Enouy revolver!) etc. I won't add these weapons to the game for players to customize, players will design them on their own. Though, I'll probably have to do a lot of "bad designs" for players to improve on to give them ideas of what is possible though. To improve new player experience though, I'm gravitating towards the idea of a "hardcore" (normal) mode that requires manual reloads but the "normal" (easy) mode would let players playback pre-recorded reloads during combat.
I'm not sure if its what what you have in mind for controls as its pretty different from what is in the video but I would recommend looking at receiver (and receiver 2) as it has in depth but intuitive gun controls with a focus on realism, again not sure if its what your looking for but it might be worth checking out! I feel like the current controls might feel abit clunky while trying to do in the middle of a fight (though recording actions for a reload animation could fix some of the issues)
Receiver was actually an inspiration for the "more immersive" controls I'm going for! I'm hoping I can take that immersion to the next level by doing things a little different than Receiver did, but we'll find out with more playtesting...
after watching the devlog #0, i feel like you could learn a lot with warframe and mother gunship. warframe has an impresive modding system, i'm not asking you to simulate it but you can have a gun that deals negative damage and it still be functional if not meta, tons of wacky guns or ways to play. recently they added guns that evolve if you acomplish some challenges, and you can choose between 3 options each time the gun evolves. warframe also has level based procedurally generated tile sets, and a mission type atached to it, so i'd like to know if you've though of what kind of world generation will your game have. a borderlans type world i believe would be best, let me know of your opinion. for graphics maybe some stylized ps1 type graphics would be cool as to not burden yourself too much trying to make the weapons look magestic. the gameplay must be fun, from what i gather from this video i concluded that you want a more slow paced game, compared to warframe where you kill hordes of enemies, a reload speed that slow would get you killed, but we could look at something like shadow of the colossus, erase the cannon fodder and focus on a single target special unit you gotta take care of, or maybe that's the final boss in a 1v1 and on the way to the boss you gotta recruit allies, you could give your guns to said allies and make way to a dungeon, heading for the boss and cleaning the minions and if the allies die and you don't recover the guns quicly they're gone, or a goblin steals the weapon from you if not careful. also. maybe the weapons you lost can be found as loot latter in the game. alternative keybinds sound fun if they don't affect the flow of the game, as of now i can't decipher how it'll turn out. you also said that you want the player to desing their own weapons, but how customizable will the guns be? like, can i change the gun from a revolver to a shotgun if i wanted to? and add a sniper scope while we're at it? the other video mentioned that there'll be character rols (or at least you want to implement them) so... will the characters have abilities? or your rol depends on the buffs the gun gives you? but this questions are for latter i imagine. from what i've seen in this video the reload part of the weapons will consume a huge amount of time and resources, idk if maybe it'll be better to focus on developing on a base you can work on rather thant doing things bit by bit since i'm no developer. and lastly, sorry if the ideas appear kind of not well interconnected or hard to understand since my grammar is not the best. wish you luck with your game.
Thanks for the feedback! I haven't played warframe for years and hadn't heard of mother gunship before. Definitely interesting examples! In my dreams, I think I would love to have expansive levels like the original ghost recon along with re-visitable proc gen stuff. But when I balance that out with my current team's capacity (the team being: me, myself, and I)... we'll have to come back down to earth. I think my goal is to get this game concept all the way to beta status, and if there is a big enough interest/following I'd start looking into crowd funding to get it fully polished and up on steam or something. If there isn't too much interest in it, then I'll take the lessons I've learned from making this game and figure out how to apply them to the next small step towards my ultimate goal of a "fully integrated immersive sim". That said, to answer your actual question about level design (for the unpolished version): I think there will be small hand-crafted levels that can each support multiple objectives, if not fully bespoke missions. I want the game loop to be rather jump in and play, quick iterations and quick progress. So that even if you just played for 30 minutes or so you'd feel like you got something done in that session. The levels should have different themes that directly tie in to mission objectives and weapon design i.e.: close quarters urban with civilians present vs parachute drop near enemy outpost vs trench warfare. You make an interesting point about gameplay, because I want the player to design weapons to tackle many different situations I think the gameplay feel will vary highly for each mission. For example, it might be that designing a minigun-like weapon in one mission might be the best because you are fighting off hordes of enemies and you can't afford to spend much time reloading. Or it might be a lot easier to smuggle small weapons passed guards to your target's location in another mission (or extreme range/accuracy instead). My goal at this stage is to always be mindful of "how does this gameplay support the weapon designing subsystem in a new way?" before adding new gameplay elements. I want new guns to be literally designed by the players, so not *just* turning a revolver into a shotgun, but things like: deciding how many rounds are in the cylinder so you need a bigger cylinder, having a bigger cylinder means you can put multiple rings of ammo... if you have multiple barrels/hammers/triggers as well (look up the Lefaucheux 20 round revolver). I want players to be able to create monstrosities and masterpieces from the ground up. 😁 Roles aren't fully spec'd out yet, but again, I want to avoid adding complexity that doesn't directly support the other mechanics. So I don't think they will have much to do with things like RPG levels or skills, but rather things like: Suppression, Flanking, Marksman, etc that tell the AI how they should be trying to use the weapons you give them. This might not work out in the long run, but I also like the idea of characters having "traits" like: Near-sighted, One-armed, Trigger-happy, etc. So that you have to design guns around your squad's limitations as well. Yeah, reloads will probably be entirely manual/janky for NPCs for a looong time, figuring out a good system is going to take some effort for sure. Thanks again for all the detailed questions! There is a discord link in the description if you're interested in that sort of thing, still early days so not much activity in it though. 😅
@@zukukato5100 I wouldn't say a core mechanic as in MGS or Splinter Cell where everyone forgets who you are after 3 seconds of not seeing you so that you're allowed to go back to the stealth loop. But you should be able to sneak around and misdirect enemy attention. So no invisible triggers where all enemies on the map suddenly aggro to you for no reason.
This game looks amazing. The ideas look great, I would really like to see what it turns into. I do have one thing to say, though you should experiment with an integrated keyboard vr. As the hand system looks quite crammy and infuriating in intense situations for the average joe.
I may also have some ideas for the problems you're encountering. I have mostly practical knowledge. However, I can read code and suggest things to change. And if you would like some more personal input I can always provide contact info, though like I had said this project has many possibilities that I can't wait to see which direction it will go.
@@quarry1030 Thanks! If you don't mind joining the discord (link in the video description), then you can join in the discussions about various aspects of the game we have from time time. 👍 I've even had some internal ballistics enthusiasts stop by to help with getting decent results.
Just found this project and you’ve done a great job so far but I want to give one piece of feedback, Make the cap locks aim toggle or at least an option for it in the future
Thank you! Yeah, I've been thinking about that too, there's sort of the idea of 'if you're aiming your weapon you're holding it up, so you hold caps lock to emulate that same... constant strain?' But I'm guessing it won't be able to survive that way after the playtesting phase. Thanks for the feedback!
I'm no expert, but I know the performance budget for VR is pretty tight. So I won't commit to supporting VR for this project on my own and this early, but maybe further down the line and/or a team and/or a kickstarter? 😅
Super cool stuff. Best of luck with it! Just some constructive feedback here (well hopefully constructive) With the current setup you are going for with direct interaction using hand controls, I personally believe it would be better to re-think the "immersive" perspective you have, as this would be a near impossible task to make this not feel janky. (my opinion of course) Looks neat though and I like some of the ideas. Maybe it is worth to draw more inspiration from something like Hand Simulator or alike in terms of the level of immersion they have, since a tactical shooter and these kinds of controls are very contradicting in terms of gameplay style (fast paced and precise vs time consuming and fiddly) Best of luck!
Thanks for the feedback! I appreciate your concerns because they are things I have also been thinking about. For now, I'm considering the core FPS controls to be: Moving Aiming Sprinting Shooting Reloading* Anything else (like alternate fire, underbarrel, etc.) I think is fine to be a little 'janky' in order to push players to design better weapons to mitigate that jank. Or if they want to make things with max jank, I think that's fun too! 😄 I think I've managed to keep all those basic FPS controls open so you can easily switch into that mode at a moment's notice, with the exception of reloading. I think a "hardcore mode" might be cool for some players that forces you to reload manually each time, but I think the "normal mode" in the game should put reload on R and playback a player-generated sequence. Let me know if you think I'm overlooking anything!
@@simulacrumgames I think janky can be fine if you want this to be a more goofy and non-competitive game, if it isn't it might get frustrating for the player
@@stormyRust Yeah, definitely not leaning towards a competitive/ultra-tight style (something I would call a 'twitch shooter'), rather I want the focus to be the "feel" like you mentioned in your other comment. So the core principles shouldn't be frustrating, but I could see adding "frustrating" to use guns that the design can be easily improved upon.... Though that could backfire if there aren't any non-frustrating default options to be found. 😅
I grew up with tank controls in games, but this feels more like mech controls to me. I like the idea of a fully manual control scheme and one more refined than the standard Foddy games like QWOP. It would definitely be a a lot though. I think people wouldn't mind if the game was explicitly silly like TABS or Octodad, but if you're going for immersion and realism - it might be better to go for true VR controls.
Yeah, figuring out the sweet spot for the game is going to take a lot of playtesting. If you feel like it, you can check out video #2 in the series for a slightly deeper discussion on the control scheme. I will say though, realism and fun are kind of poisonous words. Simulation games are "realistic" and they are a sort of "fun", but they aren't necessarily 15 minutes of fun/progress here or there, they are experiences that require investment. I'd like to see if I can straddle that line and make games that have "consistent systems" but those systems are primarily designed to add more fun, not necessarily add more realism. So not a simulation game, but maybe a *simulacrum* game😉
So when it comes to the dand placement. You could get the camera vector, and rotate along the surface until the dot product between it and the hands finger vector is at its minimum. There's another operation name you can do that will do that bur I'm forgetting its name
Thanks for the help! I did try some stuff like this and had minor success that should be visible in the next video. My biggest problem is figuring out which axis I'm supposed to dot product with since it changes depending on the surface orientation?
I always thought about how you would implement more user actions in the complex action of manipulating a gun like VR but on PC, what you have here shows the complexity and shows how deep the system is but won't work for the fast paced shooter enviorment. I think you should go for the more hardcore shooter environment as your reload system already slows the gameplay and go for more slower firerate like with muskets and hand cannons / or weapons of the first world war. The slower fire rate and long reload times make teamwork more valuable and thus could encourage it. (Would be great if you added multiplayer) The extraction genre would also be an interesting thing to implement as you want to have resource scavenging. A nit picky thing as well I think you should bind weapon rotation and manipulation to alt, like alternate interact which might make more sense for some people. I think the concept is intresting but believe it is more of a niche, and I think some people like me a willing to give it a try but the complex control scheme will put some people off. I could have probably written more here but I think it is up to you to decide what you want to create and if you feel burnt out, feedback from the community can motivate you to continue the development.
i´m really intrigued by the concept of pre-programming a reload cycle. It seems to me like that would make it easier to accommodate really weird reloads and designs. Maybe if you go that route you could look at vehicle building games and puzzle games for inspiration? i´m thinking maybe a similar sequenced system to the ones in zachtronics games like opus magnum or even scrap mechanics rotation controller. That way you could in theory spend hours fine tuning the cycle to achieve perfection. I think the manual reloading looks cool and certainly fun but i think there is a big risk of it being to slow and or clunky no matter the level of polish especially in the heat of battle. also even tho i´m not a game dev at all it feels like it would be easier to implement in a system whit this level of customization and as you mentioned could help with npc interacting with your design Also a note on the gun building itself i think it would be cool if you had like a 3 stage cycle for weapon production. step 1 is design the weapon in a designer of sorts so it can be tested etc. The next step which i think could be fun is actually separating the gun into parts for actual production so that it kind of generate a instruction manual for the player to construct. Then there is 2 approaches i find interesting, either you could have machines like 3d printer etc and use them in a factorio style processing line in the home base which would please automation players. the other i´m thinking could be something similar to a sword smiting game i found. where you manually heat up steel and forge the thing from scratch. the downside of the automation factory approach is if you only need to build a small amount of weapons the process of rebuilding your factory could become tedious. and the downside of the more hands on sim building approach is that it could be to complicated and tedious. maybe a combination of the 2? a ammunition factory since you are going to continuously need ammo and a gun forge for when you design a new weapon oh wow that was a wall of text, i´m just very excited and intrigued by your idea. i hope it goes well :)
Thanks! Some of what you mentioned is part of the plan, but (being solo) I do always have to be mindful of scope creep and trying to take on too much, especially for the first go at this type of game. 🤯
Yeah, I've been thinking about this (you'll see I made the hands go smaller when interacting in the next video) and I wonder if a system that simply shows a cursor object and then moves the hands once a decision to interact has been made might be better. Though the time lag between interaction and animation finishing might be more frustrating...
Seeing as you can only use one hand at a time it feels more optimal to have a "dominant hand" that cannot manipulate the environment, but automatically holds and aims weapons, and the non dominant hand used for environmental manipulation and the reloading video game. Reloading also seems super clunky to do in an actual combat situation, so maybe streamlining it a little would be useful, either with mouse prompts you need to click on or a qte style system.
Solution for Chapter 3: Hand Orientation I use this concept to move my character depending on the orientation of the third person camera. Assume the hit_normal relates to the direction the back of the hand faces. You take the cross product of the hit_normal and the camera's right vector. This will return the forward vector of the hand - the direction the fingers should point. You then take the cross product of the new forward vector and the hit_normal. You now have the 3 vectors needed to "Make Rotation from Axes". Let me know if you need a more in depth explanation or examples.
@@simulacrumgames No problem! And I totally get it. Just wait until you need to find the rotation based on a child. For example modular building - like Rust.
Yeah, it's pretty much either shooters or Zelda-Souls, but we've all got to start somewhere. Or an MMO for some reason... 🤦 I would love to make a turn-based tactical RPG, or an over-the-shoulder action stealth game, but I have to be honest with where I'm at time, skill, and team-wise in my game dev journey right now. Making a simple point-and-click game is leagues easier than many other genres. But I hope you'll be able to see that this isn't *just* a point-and-click game or yet another CoD clone. I'm starting out with exploring for more immersive control schemes, but I intend for the game to ask you to think more often than it asks you to perform trick shots.
Currently working on a proper VR game, still getting core concepts done, but I can say petting random objects in the world is portrayed right in this game.
Thanks! I did have fun with Receiver's "hotkey" controls but I thought I'd try a different take since I can't predict what players might make. A lot more testing is needed on what ultimately feels better though!
I definitely want to go for more thoughtful, strategic play overall! I'm not opposed to adding some simpler missions like "defend the bunker for 3 rounds" or whatever. As long as the missions serve the goal of making the player design more weapons!
very much my opinion: you don't really need to have a control scheme that works for both arms all the time. most people are used to have their weapon on the right side, and games that have an option to use the left hand leave it to a toggle. unless you are planning to have dual wielding be a very important part of the gameplay, i'd suggest having more conventional controls. yeah, putting ads on caps lock does not sit well with me
I suppose it depends on how you build your weapon, it might be easier to reload from the left or right hand, or design it so it doesn't matter. The fun thing is going to be figuring out how pump shotguns and other two handed weapons (and dual wielding!) are going to work!
@simulacrumgames Maybe an alternative control scheme built around the idea of a main hand and an off hand could help winning some people over. Oh yeah, on reloads and what not, make sure you are a little forgiving with the player's hand positions. There will be gunfights in your game, and people will reload during them. It would be very annoying if a player lost because during the intensity, he couldn't place his mouse on a relatively small area
@@blikthepro972 Actually it would be a good thing if that happened because the player would realize they need to fix their weapon design. One of the design pillars of this game is to focus on "weapon feel" to make the player understand the importance of operating the weapon.
@simulacrumgames I see your vision. However, how will you keep newer players from being discouraged? Newer players will die to older ones and instead of going "hmm I should make my gun better", they might just quit. Now I'm not suggesting changing your entire vision to deal with noobs, I'm just asking what you have in mind for that
@@simulacrumgames it's very useful, it's like "perpendicular" but in 3 dimensions I've used it to calculate forces for a raycast wheeled car so whenever you need a vector that is perpendicular to a normal, you use a cross product
You'll be the one developing those more modern weapons, so feel free to develop a breach load revolver or none at all! Just remember: an automatic pistol chamber isn't ever going to be able to hold up to as powerful of a round as a revolver can. (Check out video #2 in the series for a more detailed response to comments like this.)
seems kinda tedious, maybe try simplyfying iy a bit? you could make the reload require a mouse motion that way you can easily show it during reload and it can be practiced and it would feel like a single step instead of multiple
Thanks for the feedback! The primary focus is "feel" so things should feel tedious when they are. Reloading a revolver is much more involved than reloading a modern pistol. The challenge is to figure out how to not make things too annoying. Half of that is on me and I'm going to leave the other half on the player when they're making their own designs. That's why I think recording player reloads and being able to play them back (or some other solution) for more "casual" play is important. I think you typically won't *want* to manually reload (unless you're hardcore), but if, for example, the gun jams you'll definitely always have the ability to manually operate all the components and clear the issue.
Seems like pretty uncomfortable to play since FPS need to be kinda fast. You can check out hand simulator game, it's pretty slow when you need to do something and i think it's not that great for FPS games
Thanks for the feedback and the info about that game! Yeah, I've definitely noticed that it isn't easy to do things super quickly and have been thinking about ways to address that. One of the things you'll need to do most often is reload and that's why I was talking about maybe being able to record the player's reload process and have the option to play it back on button press/hold would be a good feature. Basically, it should mostly feel like a typical FPS whenever you're aiming and shooting. But overall the goal is to make it somewhat "feel" like you're actually operating different things... differently. So not everything should feel awkward and frustrating like surgeon simulator or whatever, but you also won't have all the conveniences and "cheating" of an FPS made to be as accessible as possible to everyone.
Let's be honest, I see a gun, and I immediately am like yay a new genre, oh another gun, Nvm.It's another shooter, Why can't we have more magic based pvp games, I know it be hard and complex, but what if everyone can make their own spells and compete in ranking, and do a rock paper scissor balancing
I said this under your other comment as well, but we've all got to start somewhere. I think if you watch the video all the way through you'll see that the shooting portion of the game is there to provide the "application" half of "research". The reason this is a shooting game and not magic is because it is much, much easier (but not easy) to begin conceptualizing this type of mechanics with real world limitations instead of arbitrary magical ones. I also think if you read the description you'll see that this project is intended as a stepping stone to what I would consider my real "dream game" which would have these same types of research/application/global-system-integration as a true RPG experience. For an extremely basic example of how I first began to tease out player-based-research-feeding-back-into-gameplay, watch this terrible video: ua-cam.com/video/5BrLNYfaPPo/v-deo.html The ideal being: menus to change parameters of a spell is too limiting and straightforward. Each type of magic should have its own method of study/creation closely tied to the philosophy behind their magic as well. A priest studies and believes different things about magic than a shaman or a wizard does. I would love to start making my dream game right now, but I know I'm not ready to do it justice yet.
At least make it possible to change projectile pathing types and have actual projectiles (basic striaght, genade, but then have trajectory types like curve, homing, aerial striking, maybe even combination of the types, hell make landmine grenades that turn to scatter homing projectiles on triggering) literally magic is no deforent then a gun, its just the creativity of the explosion and projectile pathing, along with player altering effects, vfx is flashy but hell you can make the vfx be bullets, this type of comment is what I stress to every youtube dev, think outside the box and dont get sucked into the trends, There are far more gun related multiplayer shooter games out there, make yourself shine deforently, And I challenge everyone I ask, knowing Im not going to be heard, to attempt a good magic based pvp game that requires player inherent skill, not systematic skill differences, magic is inherently difficult to balance if you think damage and effect but it gets easier if just design "counterplay, R,P,S, and power deforentce" both fire and water can be equal depending on the output of both, water is 1, fire is 2, fire equals out, water is 1, fire is 3, fire over comes water Water is equal or greater than fire, fire looses, Cant design balance if you're not also designing strength of power deference. Sure, on rock paper scissors, water beats fire, but if fire is stronger, it just turns to steam or continues to burn Anyways im a nobody, but I do hope someday someone sees my ranting comments and understands
Thanks for commenting! I'm not at the stage yet where such variations are necessary to open up the gameplay, but I'll keep the idea in mind as I get further along. Just to clarify this isn't a pvp game. It's intended to be a design-and-use game for creating new weapons from the ground up.
@@simulacrumgames You should for sure play Receiver 2. One of my favorite games of all time. Similar to the first game but highly polished. Your ideas on controlling the gun manually reminds me of it.
Due to popular demand: You can now try out the controls for yourself at the link below!
simulacrum-games.itch.io/weapons-manual
Explanation of the control scheme:
itch.io/t/3319798/control-scheme-v0
Disclaimer: Extremely early, everything subject to change at any time! Feedback welcome!
Awesome!
it says "there was an error with your request, did you take it down?
@@cosmikittehNo it should be available, I was able to download it.
im not sure about the control scheme
i would add two control schemes, one that most shooters have and then yours, as in you can choose in settings
As someone also developing a game that... doesn't really fit into a conventional genre, I respect the ingenuity and drive to innovate and experiment with unexplored territory!
Oooh, what kind of game are you working on?
@@simulacrumgames Using Godot, I'm making a 2D game where you make mobile factories in a procedurally-generated world, and those factories can have weapons n stuff mounted on them, allowing vehicular combat mad-max style!
@@AG-cd2it Sounds fun!
@@AG-cd2itkinda sounds like from the depths.
4:20 Finger pointing breaks immersion for me. Instead have the hand assume the orientation it would be while interacting.
Instead of pointing at the mag release, the thumb hovers over it waiting for you to click,
Instead of pointing at the mag, the hand cups itself preparing to catch it.
Instead of pointing at the trigger, the index finger hovers right above it waiting for you to squeeze 💥💥🔫
Yeah, this is the sort of thing I meant when I was talking about "switching animations when hovering over different pieces". The visuals weren't very representative, but hey, there's only so much you can do with random stock photos of hands. 😅
It's definitely going to be interesting to figure out how to set things up so that things are "sensible" for the insane designs I'm sure people will come up with.
game physics is >>>>> game graphics. graphics is not everything, sad reality nowadays is games are sold just based on graphcs. make 2 modes, if you can similar to war thunder arcade and realist. in realist mode, make the loading times of guns high like in real world. you can even avoid water and its related interactions, by making character die if they swim, cause soldiers do not actually swim with their gear. keep the game size small (under 10 GB), but make it memorable and legendary like some csgo etc
Battlebit is great example. Great gameplay animations and development but it's polygame.
Easy for big company, but eh, lazy seems to be a trope of greed
Solid gameplay (core mechanics, whether that be "physics" or not) comes first. *Animation* is very close behind. But graphics is a *VERY* distant spot long behind those first 2 priorities. In past eras, having great graphics could be important, because most promotional material for games which was widely spread was in physical printed media, or early internet before gifs were an efficient enough tool for consistent use on gaming websites or storefronts. Video was rare and expensive to get large enough hosting sites to support even in quite low resolutions.
One of the biggest selling points of the original Prince of Persia (which showed up before the 90s did) was its animation quality, but those didn't get showcased in any advertising because there wasn't any practical way to do so through any media where games were advertised. It was amazing, but gaming wasn't huge so it didn't get a big following until much later. Simlarly, with the PS2 games using the same name and IP (Sands of Time trilogy), the devs heavily focused on doing a better job than any previous 3D games had done with animation quality, but promoting those animations wasn't easy when TV advertising for videogames was barely ever a thing that happened and gaming ads were almost exclusively in physical magazines with screenshots. Assassin's Creed was developed by the same studio, and had more animation frames for a single character than the PS2-era PoP trilogy had for every character combined across all 3 games. And these were still not the major selling points anyone paid attention to even for Assassin's Creed - what people focused on more was just the raw graphical quality (which was also pretty good for the time) shown off in screenshots. We had gaming websites as a prominent source for information, but even a gif was a big investment in server space by the standards of the time, let alone videos. There were videos made to advertise games, and some trailers even made it to TV (though rarely and not in many parts of the world), but those weren't as widely focused on by gamers as an audience yet. These animations were something which made the games feel amazing though, and are significant contributing reasons why they became classics. Funnily enough, as the Assassin's Creed series has progressed, animations have become more important to promotional material, since video and gif-based marketing have become much more accessible and widely not just used, but *expected* for games, but they've allowed their fluidity to decrease instead of continuing to try and maintain the quality they used to have. They've reached a point where the tools exist to showcase what used to be their biggest strength, and abandoned what could have become a more effective selling point than it's ever been. Very few games sell themselves on animation quality still, but it's a *HUGE* factor in how well games do in a practical sense.
I'm not surprised, most people that don't play a lot of games see it this way
Those hands adpating to dynamically grasp objects feels like from the company illusion games.
🤣
man... its really interesting, as always MP helps any game but this one.. can you just imagine two people panicking to reload the gun, if there were something at stake... so interesting, good luck mate, subbed!
Haha, thanks! Maybe once the game sells 1 million copies and there are 10 other devs working on the game, the MP rework can start 😂
I'm trying to keep myself in check with what I can realistically get done on my own for now, so multiplayer is off the table for the moment...
A fantastic model for this sort of game and it’s control scheme is a game called Receiver 2. I recommend giving it a look as it has shockingly intuitive controls for its complexity, and has the same simulation-esq weapon mechanics.
Receiver was actually one of the reasons I wanted to try going for a more immersive control scheme.
This video showed up in my feed so u decided to watch it, when I saw how the reload worked I was in complete awe, that’s not impressive, THAT’S UNBELIEVABLY IMPRESSIVE
Thank you so much!! Even just getting this far took me quite a bit of time, so I'm always glad when people find it interesting!
Yo wait I have the same sort of idea of using the mouse and doing manual movement too! I'm currently working on a game called SkewerDolls which is about *kebabs.* Examples being you use a skewer to stack food or weapon heads like a sledgehammer head and you fight & feast at the same time. To control using a skewer you would of course use the mouse to swing & stab. For now, both lmb and rmb are your hands so holding both buttons makes you fully swing the skewer. Also about pre-made movement. I also thought of a concept which are just called habits/reflexes where you plan pre-made moves so you can instantly swing back at opponents without needing to put your full mind & muscle memory into it. Another thing though that i've been thinking of for the game is the use of bullet time where time slows down in your perspective & you draw out your next moves until you release the key to stop (for some reason I'm thinking [shift]), so you execute your moves quickly like an anime character.
The catch is I've had this whole game idea for over a year and never got to actually develop a lot of it. I hope to make this game before the end of high school. Also I might need suggestions on the controls for this game idea. Are they ok? Could I use any other keys?
They say: "Great minds think alike!" 😉
I think you really have to implement it and play around until you feel like its working, good luck!
looks like receiver + gun design mechanics: I'm extremely here for it
Thanks!
Firstly: I recommend looking into a very cool game called Die By The Sword. It has physics-based freeform arm control with both hands, and physics-based damage modelling with various weapons and characters with weaponised body parts (claws/spikes/etc.) which can be manipulated dynamically with mouse and keyboard inputs in various combinations. In addition to the "live" freeform actions you can perform, you can pre-program more complex sequences which your character can peform on a single buttonpress, which allows you to save cooler-looking and more effective actions than you can reliably perform using the freeform system.
Second: On the topic of your hand orientation problem, have you tried connecting the hand to an arm? Like you could do a simple version where it's just an extendo-stick that attaches from the camera to wherever the hand is placed, and isn't actually rendered as an object, just used to define the hand's position and the available orientations of the hand when gripping things. NOTE: I've never done this, so I can't affirm its practicality with any kind of experience, but it's something that seems like a logical means ot attempting what you're trying to do, based on what I know from working with game devs (usually as either a beta tester or editor, no coding or other hands-on development experience).
Thanks! I'd never heard of that game before, I'll have to check it out sounds really similar to what I want to accomplish with my hands!
The hand orientation stuff was solved thanks to some discord members, check out video #2 if you want to see the results!
@@simulacrumgames I look forward to it (I'm working my way - slowly - through your vids. I think slower than you're making them though xD ) and yeah, DbtS wasn't a huge hit, but still has a niche fanbase. Well worth a look for inspiration on the kind of gameplay you're designing. Not quite the same as your plan but some notable overlap in core ideas.
This looks amazing... but it will be a lot of work for you and making sure that everything works will be nightmare.
Some of my personal thoughts:
Just maybe dont throw away the idea with VR completely. It could be really cool but i see what is your point. My first thought was that it could be really annoying to do everything all the time like reloading and other.
And you asked if we want more animations. Dont do them just focus on the functionality.
Love your idea and i hope everything will go well for you
Thank you!
That's a good point about VR, especially if I'm not doing any fancy graphics, I suppose I can leave the door open for having a VR port... someday.
About reloading, I agree. I feel like there should maybe be a "hardcore mode" where you are forced to do all the things all the time. But otherwise, there should be options like recording a reload sequence and being able to play it back by holding R or something like that.
first devlog and i'm already in love with this game! the idea is super ambitious but if u can pull it off, it'll be awesome! can't wait to see what kind of progress you can make later down the line, def gonna stick around to see where this goes.
Thank you!!!
this has to be the most badass idea i have ever seen. looks absolutely AMAZING!!!! when i dream of a game this is usually what comes to mind- an fps with fully custom guns. please keep going, this has the potential of any triple A game EASY!
Thank you!!!
ngl that gun in the intro looks like a fallout laser rifle
6:43 - Random suggestion, I don't know if it's helpful. Stiff movement sounds like the mouse isn't moving parallel to the vector you want it. Maybe you took a dot product somewhere in order to project the movement vector onto the right direction instead of rotating the input. No idea if that helps lol, best of luck!
Thanks! That's a good point, I'm not doing anything too fancy. I'll read up on how to project vectors and the dreaded dot product. Few things break my brain as fast as 3D vectors and "screen space". 😵
This looks so cool! I like the two mouse idea. I'm so interested in alternate input methods
SO like Loadout that damn game where you could fully customize your weapon :D
Thanks for checking out my project! I only heard about Loadout recently, but when I looked into it seemed to be much more of a.... jigsaw/build customization style of game.
I'm more interested in creating a game that gives the player the freedom to design game pieces from the ground up. I think the "lego" style of building games (while fun) is well-explored and its time to try to reach the next level!
Seems like a much more complex version of the game receiver, and that sounds like a really cool idea! I really like this idea so far.
Thanks, that was one of the inspirations behind the controls scheme!
I like the idea of a squad fps but I also think a cob zombies like wave gamemode could be so cool. You could start with a basic gun and buy upgrades like scopes, mags and ammo types to continue to evolve the gun
Thanks! To clarify, this won't be a game about *customizing* weapons it will be about *creating* and upgrading your own designs!
This sounds awesome.
Thank you!
Here at the start.
Can't wait to see where this goes. Keep it up.👍🏾
Thank you!!
7:27 for your hands: Make a rotation from your camera forward vector as x and your floor normal as y. Experiment with different axial combos until your desired result. You may have to dot product your camera right and surface normal vectors and check if the dot result is positive or negative to handle edge cases. Again experiment with these combos as that will be key and you’ll surely have to compromise at some point in the rabbit hole. Best wishes!
Thank you! You can check out video #2 in the series to see the results I've settled on for now.
pretty good stuff! Reminds me of Reciever by wolfire games
The two mice idea could work one mouse control movement by moving the mouse around and the other controls the up, down, left and right turn. Also the movement mouse could control reload and interacting like right click reloads and left open doors.
Unfortunately, I don't think Unreal Engine tracks mouse events separately for different mouse inputs. Maybe if I modified the engine to pass a "mouse id" with the events?
@@simulacrumgames Ah ok, I didn't know that. I'm been trying to learn unreal to start making games. My problem is no coding skills.
Man wow thats cool my idea coming alive! ❤❤
I think this system would be great for horror, being a person on rehabilitation, let's say someone lost the ability to move etc and now they are recovering. This could portray how difficult it is to move for them as nothing is unconscious but everything is a conscious decision. Could lead to some terrifying moments.
Horror does seem to be the "easy" way to fame for a lot of projects.
Loved the devlog! Though I can't give you any recommendations, I find your "2D VR" Hand controller very similar to the one in "Hand Simulator" on Steam. Not sure if you've used it as a reference already, but it might be of use if you haven't. Good luck with development, this sounds like a lot of fun as long as the controls match the feeling you want the player to feel when playing :)
Thanks for the support! A few other people have mentioned Hand Simulator but I hadn't heard of it before. I also haven't looked much into it yet, but my first impression is that its in the family of "quirky" games like Surgeon Simulator, so kind of a different direction than what I'm going for. But I do need to check it out more to see if there's anything I can learn from it for sure.
When I saw your previous video I thought, "Oh, another dream game devlog". After watching this video I went "OH A DREAM GAME DEVLOG". I'm so pleasantly surprised that wgat you're making is actually unique and interesting, a ton of dream game devlogs tens to be simple games, which I don't really blame them for
Wow thanks!
Maybe make use of the mouse wheel a bunch for rotating things. Regular wheel for one axis, shit and control for other axis.
I do actually have the mouse wheel rotating objects, I guess I kind of forgot about it since clicking and dragging feels more visceral. 😅
I really recomend to check out reciever 2 and the dev talks at GDC about it, i am CERTAIN you will find many interesting ideas there!
I wasn't aware they did a GDC talk about it. Thanks! I'll have to give it a look.
Might want to look into the game 'Receiver', it's all about guns that you have to manually operate every component of
It was actually one of the inspirations behind a more immersive control scheme.
That seems like a massive project. I guess for something with a cool environment and weapons, I wouldn't mind taking more time to deal with actions that are typically automated.
Thanks! 🤞
Its kinda like guncrafter, where you build guns, and then use them, wanna see where this goes :)
Huh, hadn't heard of that before. Definitely planning on being a bit more in depth I think though. 😁
Awesome video man ❤🔥
Hey, just stumbled across your channel and the concept looks great. People have probably already mentioned this before but this reminds me a lot of a game called receiver from wolffire games and I know they like to release a lot of their technical breakdowns on their youtube channel. Best of luck. I hope to see you on steam's coming soon page in a few years.
As for design, you might have looked into something resembling a CAD approach before. It'd be sweet to have something like CAD lite for the weapons creation.
Thanks! And yes, trying to do more immersive game controls was inspired by Receiver!
I would say it might end up more like Kerbal Space Program with "dynamic components" like being able to select how many rounds a revolver cylinder should hold (and how many rings of ammo, etc).
For (probable) legal reasons, I think there needs to be a definite separation from reality or limitations such that it isn't feasible that the game could be used to prototype a real world functional weapon. 😅
I truly belive this could have the potential to be an amazing game keep up the good work
Thank you!
glad to be both your 990'th like, and your 170'th comment.
I'm just glad you watched 😉
@@simulacrumgames i’m really glad i did too, it’s a really awesome video, so good job!!
For your hand orientation problem, I would suggest it simply being a rule that the hand always points away from you but flattened to the normal of the surface. This will organically result in the outcomes you want.
Thanks! You can check out my latest video and I think I've achieved a pretty good effect.
As a control suggestion, maybe allow the player to bind certain "fast-actions" to keys, so they can do it in aiming mode? I would limit it to something like 1-3 keys, so that a full reload sequence can't be done while aiming, but it might help to not break the immersion.
I think you might enjoy what I've added in the next (#3) devlog 😉
@@simulacrumgames Oh thanks, I’ll check that out for sure!
This is so good! Gonna be a good game when it comes out 💯
Thanks! It's going to be a long road until then, but I'm sticking with it!
@@simulacrumgames I was so sad when I realized this devlog came out 4 days ago 😂 I sincerely wish you the best and will definitely be following your masterpiece of a project!
@@simulacrumgames please do can’t wait to play
Reminds me of Reciever and Reciever 2 by Wolfire games. I assume this was inspired by those games, but if not I'd suggest checking them out!
You got it right! I really like Receiver, haven't played 2 yet though.
the laser musket from fo4 lmao
This is a cool idea, but as far as gameplay goes you should decid on what the main focus will be and if it will be fun. You said you wanted to make a fps squad game, but most people get frustrated quickly when things arent quick and juicy. I made a little game where the revolver was more realistic like yours and required single reloads, hammer drawback before fire, etc. People really didnt like it, and i think if its slow and frustrating it really needs to work with the gameplay. My other thought is you talked about customizing your own weapons, which is cool but also a big feature. I can see how these controls could work really well in a sort of work table/ crafting cool guns and test firing them. Maybe focus on the game play being based around that? Anywho, im very curious what you will make in the end! Good luck ❤
Thanks for your support! While I don't plan to *stop* people from trying to play the game like Call of Duty, since (while aiming) the controls will essentially be "generic FPS" controls, maybe I shouldn't describe my game in terms of other games, but oh well. When I said "squad based FPS" I envision that there will be an AI squad going with you on objective-based missions. The primary goal is to make weapon design and choice important in regards to your squadmates' capabilities and mission parameters. I hesitate to say this, but I'm imagining something clos*er* to MGS or Ghost Recon rather than high-speed CoD. I do NOT mean there will be stealth mechanics like those games have (wait 90 seconds, then AI resets, AI can't see more than 15 m away etc), but don't expect missions to be designed as frantic Doom maps either.
That said, I don't disagree with you or anything. I saw the reviews of your game and it was more like people didn't like the pairing of slow reloads with randomly appearing/difficult to fight enemies. So, yeah, making gameplay consistent with the control scheme is important as you said.
I would like to clarify that I don't mean customizing weapons, I mean literally designing new weapons. A 18-shot shotgun revolver, plasma pistol, a revolving revolver (check out the Enouy revolver!) etc. I won't add these weapons to the game for players to customize, players will design them on their own. Though, I'll probably have to do a lot of "bad designs" for players to improve on to give them ideas of what is possible though.
To improve new player experience though, I'm gravitating towards the idea of a "hardcore" (normal) mode that requires manual reloads but the "normal" (easy) mode would let players playback pre-recorded reloads during combat.
I'm not sure if its what what you have in mind for controls as its pretty different from what is in the video but I would recommend looking at receiver (and receiver 2) as it has in depth but intuitive gun controls with a focus on realism, again not sure if its what your looking for but it might be worth checking out! I feel like the current controls might feel abit clunky while trying to do in the middle of a fight (though recording actions for a reload animation could fix some of the issues)
Receiver was actually an inspiration for the "more immersive" controls I'm going for! I'm hoping I can take that immersion to the next level by doing things a little different than Receiver did, but we'll find out with more playtesting...
after watching the devlog #0, i feel like you could learn a lot with warframe and mother gunship. warframe has an impresive modding system, i'm not asking you to simulate it but you can have a gun that deals negative damage and it still be functional if not meta, tons of wacky guns or ways to play. recently they added guns that evolve if you acomplish some challenges, and you can choose between 3 options each time the gun evolves.
warframe also has level based procedurally generated tile sets, and a mission type atached to it, so i'd like to know if you've though of what kind of world generation will your game have. a borderlans type world i believe would be best, let me know of your opinion.
for graphics maybe some stylized ps1 type graphics would be cool as to not burden yourself too much trying to make the weapons look magestic.
the gameplay must be fun, from what i gather from this video i concluded that you want a more slow paced game, compared to warframe where you kill hordes of enemies, a reload speed that slow would get you killed, but we could look at something like shadow of the colossus, erase the cannon fodder and focus on a single target special unit you gotta take care of, or maybe that's the final boss in a 1v1 and on the way to the boss you gotta recruit allies, you could give your guns to said allies and make way to a dungeon, heading for the boss and cleaning the minions and if the allies die and you don't recover the guns quicly they're gone, or a goblin steals the weapon from you if not careful. also. maybe the weapons you lost can be found as loot latter in the game.
alternative keybinds sound fun if they don't affect the flow of the game, as of now i can't decipher how it'll turn out.
you also said that you want the player to desing their own weapons, but how customizable will the guns be? like, can i change the gun from a revolver to a shotgun if i wanted to? and add a sniper scope while we're at it?
the other video mentioned that there'll be character rols (or at least you want to implement them) so... will the characters have abilities? or your rol depends on the buffs the gun gives you? but this questions are for latter i imagine.
from what i've seen in this video the reload part of the weapons will consume a huge amount of time and resources, idk if maybe it'll be better to focus on developing on a base you can work on rather thant doing things bit by bit since i'm no developer.
and lastly, sorry if the ideas appear kind of not well interconnected or hard to understand since my grammar is not the best.
wish you luck with your game.
Thanks for the feedback!
I haven't played warframe for years and hadn't heard of mother gunship before. Definitely interesting examples!
In my dreams, I think I would love to have expansive levels like the original ghost recon along with re-visitable proc gen stuff.
But when I balance that out with my current team's capacity (the team being: me, myself, and I)... we'll have to come back down to earth.
I think my goal is to get this game concept all the way to beta status, and if there is a big enough interest/following I'd start looking into crowd funding to get it fully polished and up on steam or something.
If there isn't too much interest in it, then I'll take the lessons I've learned from making this game and figure out how to apply them to the next small step towards my ultimate goal of a "fully integrated immersive sim".
That said, to answer your actual question about level design (for the unpolished version): I think there will be small hand-crafted levels that can each support multiple objectives, if not fully bespoke missions. I want the game loop to be rather jump in and play, quick iterations and quick progress. So that even if you just played for 30 minutes or so you'd feel like you got something done in that session. The levels should have different themes that directly tie in to mission objectives and weapon design i.e.: close quarters urban with civilians present vs parachute drop near enemy outpost vs trench warfare.
You make an interesting point about gameplay, because I want the player to design weapons to tackle many different situations I think the gameplay feel will vary highly for each mission. For example, it might be that designing a minigun-like weapon in one mission might be the best because you are fighting off hordes of enemies and you can't afford to spend much time reloading. Or it might be a lot easier to smuggle small weapons passed guards to your target's location in another mission (or extreme range/accuracy instead). My goal at this stage is to always be mindful of "how does this gameplay support the weapon designing subsystem in a new way?" before adding new gameplay elements.
I want new guns to be literally designed by the players, so not *just* turning a revolver into a shotgun, but things like: deciding how many rounds are in the cylinder so you need a bigger cylinder, having a bigger cylinder means you can put multiple rings of ammo... if you have multiple barrels/hammers/triggers as well (look up the Lefaucheux 20 round revolver). I want players to be able to create monstrosities and masterpieces from the ground up. 😁
Roles aren't fully spec'd out yet, but again, I want to avoid adding complexity that doesn't directly support the other mechanics. So I don't think they will have much to do with things like RPG levels or skills, but rather things like: Suppression, Flanking, Marksman, etc that tell the AI how they should be trying to use the weapons you give them. This might not work out in the long run, but I also like the idea of characters having "traits" like: Near-sighted, One-armed, Trigger-happy, etc. So that you have to design guns around your squad's limitations as well.
Yeah, reloads will probably be entirely manual/janky for NPCs for a looong time, figuring out a good system is going to take some effort for sure.
Thanks again for all the detailed questions! There is a discord link in the description if you're interested in that sort of thing, still early days so not much activity in it though. 😅
@@simulacrumgames in order to answer i'll just ask one question, will stealth be a core mechanic of the gameplay?
@@zukukato5100 I wouldn't say a core mechanic as in MGS or Splinter Cell where everyone forgets who you are after 3 seconds of not seeing you so that you're allowed to go back to the stealth loop. But you should be able to sneak around and misdirect enemy attention. So no invisible triggers where all enemies on the map suddenly aggro to you for no reason.
This game looks amazing. The ideas look great, I would really like to see what it turns into.
I do have one thing to say, though you should experiment with an integrated keyboard vr. As the hand system looks quite crammy and infuriating in intense situations for the average joe.
Thanks for the feedback and thanks for stopping by!
I may also have some ideas for the problems you're encountering. I have mostly practical knowledge. However, I can read code and suggest things to change. And if you would like some more personal input I can always provide contact info, though like I had said this project has many possibilities that I can't wait to see which direction it will go.
@@quarry1030 Thanks! If you don't mind joining the discord (link in the video description), then you can join in the discussions about various aspects of the game we have from time time. 👍
I've even had some internal ballistics enthusiasts stop by to help with getting decent results.
Great I would love to be of help.
Just found this project and you’ve done a great job so far but I want to give one piece of feedback,
Make the cap locks aim toggle or at least an option for it in the future
Thank you! Yeah, I've been thinking about that too, there's sort of the idea of 'if you're aiming your weapon you're holding it up, so you hold caps lock to emulate that same... constant strain?'
But I'm guessing it won't be able to survive that way after the playtesting phase. Thanks for the feedback!
@@simulacrumgames true you could maybe make it like a weight based thing where the heavier the gun the less time it’s toggled on for
This really needs to be a vr game
I'm no expert, but I know the performance budget for VR is pretty tight.
So I won't commit to supporting VR for this project on my own and this early, but maybe further down the line and/or a team and/or a kickstarter? 😅
Super cool stuff. Best of luck with it!
Just some constructive feedback here (well hopefully constructive)
With the current setup you are going for with direct interaction using hand controls, I personally believe it would be better to re-think the "immersive" perspective you have, as this would be a near impossible task to make this not feel janky. (my opinion of course)
Looks neat though and I like some of the ideas. Maybe it is worth to draw more inspiration from something like Hand Simulator or alike in terms of the level of immersion they have, since a tactical shooter and these kinds of controls are very contradicting in terms of gameplay style (fast paced and precise vs time consuming and fiddly)
Best of luck!
Thanks for the feedback!
I appreciate your concerns because they are things I have also been thinking about. For now, I'm considering the core FPS controls to be:
Moving
Aiming
Sprinting
Shooting
Reloading*
Anything else (like alternate fire, underbarrel, etc.) I think is fine to be a little 'janky' in order to push players to design better weapons to mitigate that jank. Or if they want to make things with max jank, I think that's fun too! 😄
I think I've managed to keep all those basic FPS controls open so you can easily switch into that mode at a moment's notice, with the exception of reloading. I think a "hardcore mode" might be cool for some players that forces you to reload manually each time, but I think the "normal mode" in the game should put reload on R and playback a player-generated sequence.
Let me know if you think I'm overlooking anything!
@@simulacrumgames I think janky can be fine if you want this to be a more goofy and non-competitive game, if it isn't it might get frustrating for the player
@@stormyRust Yeah, definitely not leaning towards a competitive/ultra-tight style (something I would call a 'twitch shooter'), rather I want the focus to be the "feel" like you mentioned in your other comment. So the core principles shouldn't be frustrating, but I could see adding "frustrating" to use guns that the design can be easily improved upon.... Though that could backfire if there aren't any non-frustrating default options to be found. 😅
I grew up with tank controls in games, but this feels more like mech controls to me. I like the idea of a fully manual control scheme and one more refined than the standard Foddy games like QWOP. It would definitely be a a lot though.
I think people wouldn't mind if the game was explicitly silly like TABS or Octodad, but if you're going for immersion and realism - it might be better to go for true VR controls.
Yeah, figuring out the sweet spot for the game is going to take a lot of playtesting. If you feel like it, you can check out video #2 in the series for a slightly deeper discussion on the control scheme.
I will say though, realism and fun are kind of poisonous words. Simulation games are "realistic" and they are a sort of "fun", but they aren't necessarily 15 minutes of fun/progress here or there, they are experiences that require investment. I'd like to see if I can straddle that line and make games that have "consistent systems" but those systems are primarily designed to add more fun, not necessarily add more realism. So not a simulation game, but maybe a *simulacrum* game😉
So when it comes to the dand placement. You could get the camera vector, and rotate along the surface until the dot product between it and the hands finger vector is at its minimum. There's another operation name you can do that will do that bur I'm forgetting its name
Thanks for the help! I did try some stuff like this and had minor success that should be visible in the next video. My biggest problem is figuring out which axis I'm supposed to dot product with since it changes depending on the surface orientation?
btw i am advertising this in a game development discord
(eddit) hope this goes well
Thanks!
Reminds me alot of Receiver, just with weapon building. Might be a good ref
Thanks! That was actually one of the games that inspired me to try an alternate control scheme.
I always thought about how you would implement more user actions in the complex action of manipulating a gun like VR but on PC, what you have here shows the complexity and shows how deep the system is but won't work for the fast paced shooter enviorment. I think you should go for the more hardcore shooter environment as your reload system already slows the gameplay and go for more slower firerate like with muskets and hand cannons / or weapons of the first world war.
The slower fire rate and long reload times make teamwork more valuable and thus could encourage it. (Would be great if you added multiplayer)
The extraction genre would also be an interesting thing to implement as you want to have resource scavenging.
A nit picky thing as well I think you should bind weapon rotation and manipulation to alt, like alternate interact which might make more sense for some people.
I think the concept is intresting but believe it is more of a niche, and I think some people like me a willing to give it a try but the complex control scheme will put some people off.
I could have probably written more here but I think it is up to you to decide what you want to create and if you feel burnt out, feedback from the community can motivate you to continue the development.
Great feedback! I think we are almost exactly on the same page, and I hope I've earned you checking back in on my progress every once in a while!
@@simulacrumgames Yes you have!
the very first gun showed look exactly like the recharger rifle from fallout 4 so thats kinda fun
It actually IS the laser musket from FO4, that a fan made 👍
i´m really intrigued by the concept of pre-programming a reload cycle. It seems to me like that would make it easier to accommodate really weird reloads and designs. Maybe if you go that route you could look at vehicle building games and puzzle games for inspiration? i´m thinking maybe a similar sequenced system to the ones in zachtronics games like opus magnum or even scrap mechanics rotation controller. That way you could in theory spend hours fine tuning the cycle to achieve perfection. I think the manual reloading looks cool and certainly fun but i think there is a big risk of it being to slow and or clunky no matter the level of polish especially in the heat of battle. also even tho i´m not a game dev at all it feels like it would be easier to implement in a system whit this level of customization and as you mentioned could help with npc interacting with your design
Also a note on the gun building itself i think it would be cool if you had like a 3 stage cycle for weapon production. step 1 is design the weapon in a designer of sorts so it can be tested etc. The next step which i think could be fun is actually separating the gun into parts for actual production so that it kind of generate a instruction manual for the player to construct. Then there is 2 approaches i find interesting, either you could have machines like 3d printer etc and use them in a factorio style processing line in the home base which would please automation players. the other i´m thinking could be something similar to a sword smiting game i found. where you manually heat up steel and forge the thing from scratch.
the downside of the automation factory approach is if you only need to build a small amount of weapons the process of rebuilding your factory could become tedious. and the downside of the more hands on sim building approach is that it could be to complicated and tedious. maybe a combination of the 2? a ammunition factory since you are going to continuously need ammo and a gun forge for when you design a new weapon
oh wow that was a wall of text, i´m just very excited and intrigued by your idea. i hope it goes well :)
Thanks! Some of what you mentioned is part of the plan, but (being solo) I do always have to be mindful of scope creep and trying to take on too much, especially for the first go at this type of game. 🤯
i think replacing the 'hands' with small, slightly transparent spheres could help with visibility, and make it more immersive.
Yeah, I've been thinking about this (you'll see I made the hands go smaller when interacting in the next video) and I wonder if a system that simply shows a cursor object and then moves the hands once a decision to interact has been made might be better. Though the time lag between interaction and animation finishing might be more frustrating...
Seeing as you can only use one hand at a time it feels more optimal to have a "dominant hand" that cannot manipulate the environment, but automatically holds and aims weapons, and the non dominant hand used for environmental manipulation and the reloading video game. Reloading also seems super clunky to do in an actual combat situation, so maybe streamlining it a little would be useful, either with mouse prompts you need to click on or a qte style system.
TINAFC ThisIsNotAFalloutClone
😂
having reloads be completely manual means that aiming isn't the most important skill
Solution for Chapter 3: Hand Orientation
I use this concept to move my character depending on the orientation of the third person camera.
Assume the hit_normal relates to the direction the back of the hand faces.
You take the cross product of the hit_normal and the camera's right vector. This will return the forward vector of the hand - the direction the fingers should point. You then take the cross product of the new forward vector and the hit_normal. You now have the 3 vectors needed to "Make Rotation from Axes".
Let me know if you need a more in depth explanation or examples.
Here's the Blueprint I use for the camera as an example. Which you could probably just plug and play. i.gyazo.com/03e29a202a8d014d1ce0fe4067d94d63.png
Thanks! This really helps as nothing makes my brain curl up quite like 3D rotations 😵
@@simulacrumgames No problem! And I totally get it. Just wait until you need to find the rotation based on a child. For example modular building - like Rust.
i think this game would work amazingly with the quest 3s hand tracking
Literally every game dev for 3d games on UA-cam loves shooter games Aka, basic projectile games
Yeah, it's pretty much either shooters or Zelda-Souls, but we've all got to start somewhere. Or an MMO for some reason... 🤦
I would love to make a turn-based tactical RPG, or an over-the-shoulder action stealth game, but I have to be honest with where I'm at time, skill, and team-wise in my game dev journey right now.
Making a simple point-and-click game is leagues easier than many other genres. But I hope you'll be able to see that this isn't *just* a point-and-click game or yet another CoD clone.
I'm starting out with exploring for more immersive control schemes, but I intend for the game to ask you to think more often than it asks you to perform trick shots.
i think an interesting idea would be customizable armor too? idk maybe this will detract from the main focus though
Good idea and good counter point! 😅
Definitely something to think about, I hadn't considered it before
it looks great
middle mouse button should be the replacement for caps lock
I'm actually already using it for other things that I'll show off in the next video 👍
Tarkov gunna be sweating at this level of detail
a vr port is a must
If you've got the money to make it happen, then I'll get right on it! 👍 😉
this going to be such a cool game in the future
@@BLUEBLY487 Thank you!
Currently working on a proper VR game, still getting core concepts done, but I can say petting random objects in the world is portrayed right in this game.
🤣
THESE ARE FUCKING THE LONG DRIVE CONTROL LMAO
oh my god this is my dream game
Thank you! Welcome to the club!
Two games that might be worth looking at for inspiration are Metal Gear Solid 3 and Resident Evil 4. Both games have you stop to aim.
Ecchi hand sequence starts @ 4:12.
What the fuck I was just thinking about this
looks cool! Gunplay reminds me a lot of Receiver.
Thanks! I did have fun with Receiver's "hotkey" controls but I thought I'd try a different take since I can't predict what players might make.
A lot more testing is needed on what ultimately feels better though!
this looks like it would be really cool maybe you could do something like the long drives gun system it would work well with your hand stuff
I've never heard of it, I'll have to check it out, thanks!
If I were you I would try to make the fights feel more puzzle like and focused on conserving resources and finding cover
I definitely want to go for more thoughtful, strategic play overall! I'm not opposed to adding some simpler missions like "defend the bunker for 3 rounds" or whatever. As long as the missions serve the goal of making the player design more weapons!
Wrt controls, have you ever played Reciever?
I really like those controls
Yes! That was one of the inspirations behind trying to do a more immersive control scheme.
very much my opinion: you don't really need to have a control scheme that works for both arms all the time. most people are used to have their weapon on the right side, and games that have an option to use the left hand leave it to a toggle. unless you are planning to have dual wielding be a very important part of the gameplay, i'd suggest having more conventional controls. yeah, putting ads on caps lock does not sit well with me
I suppose it depends on how you build your weapon, it might be easier to reload from the left or right hand, or design it so it doesn't matter.
The fun thing is going to be figuring out how pump shotguns and other two handed weapons (and dual wielding!) are going to work!
@simulacrumgames Maybe an alternative control scheme built around the idea of a main hand and an off hand could help winning some people over.
Oh yeah, on reloads and what not, make sure you are a little forgiving with the player's hand positions. There will be gunfights in your game, and people will reload during them. It would be very annoying if a player lost because during the intensity, he couldn't place his mouse on a relatively small area
@@blikthepro972 Actually it would be a good thing if that happened because the player would realize they need to fix their weapon design. One of the design pillars of this game is to focus on "weapon feel" to make the player understand the importance of operating the weapon.
@simulacrumgames I see your vision. However, how will you keep newer players from being discouraged? Newer players will die to older ones and instead of going "hmm I should make my gun better", they might just quit. Now I'm not suggesting changing your entire vision to deal with noobs, I'm just asking what you have in mind for that
@@blikthepro972 That's an easy one! 😁
This is a singleplayer only game!
cool idea
Thank you!
for the hand pointing away from the player you should use the cross product I think
Thanks, I still get confused on when the cross product is useful, I'll look into it.
@@simulacrumgames it's very useful, it's like "perpendicular" but in 3 dimensions
I've used it to calculate forces for a raycast wheeled car
so whenever you need a vector that is perpendicular to a normal, you use a cross product
@@simulacrumgames you should watch linear algebra course by 3blue1brown, it's easy and useful
good potential, keep it up
i feel like these convoluted reloads would make guns like revolvers irrelevant if more modern weapons are added
You'll be the one developing those more modern weapons, so feel free to develop a breach load revolver or none at all! Just remember: an automatic pistol chamber isn't ever going to be able to hold up to as powerful of a round as a revolver can.
(Check out video #2 in the series for a more detailed response to comments like this.)
I like the fallout laser rifle blueprint where did you get it?
Thanks! The model used is linked in the description. The blueprint shader is part of an engine plugin.
It's like a hand simulator
seems kinda tedious, maybe try simplyfying iy a bit? you could make the reload require a mouse motion that way you can easily show it during reload and it can be practiced and it would feel like a single step instead of multiple
Thanks for the feedback! The primary focus is "feel" so things should feel tedious when they are. Reloading a revolver is much more involved than reloading a modern pistol. The challenge is to figure out how to not make things too annoying. Half of that is on me and I'm going to leave the other half on the player when they're making their own designs. That's why I think recording player reloads and being able to play them back (or some other solution) for more "casual" play is important.
I think you typically won't *want* to manually reload (unless you're hardcore), but if, for example, the gun jams you'll definitely always have the ability to manually operate all the components and clear the issue.
You should add customizable grenades as well lol
Hmm, we'll call that a stretch goal? 😅
if you need help with VR, I have a couple years of experience using VR in different engines, such as Unreal, Unity, Godot, and even standalone js.
Thanks! I'll keep you in mind when I get to that stage! If you want, you can join the discord (link in the description) to keep in contact.
@@simulacrumgames Already in! username is different there, it's Ares/AresDev over there
aint that the laser musket from fo4
gud video
Seems like pretty uncomfortable to play since FPS need to be kinda fast. You can check out hand simulator game, it's pretty slow when you need to do something and i think it's not that great for FPS games
Thanks for the feedback and the info about that game!
Yeah, I've definitely noticed that it isn't easy to do things super quickly and have been thinking about ways to address that.
One of the things you'll need to do most often is reload and that's why I was talking about maybe being able to record the player's reload process and have the option to play it back on button press/hold would be a good feature.
Basically, it should mostly feel like a typical FPS whenever you're aiming and shooting. But overall the goal is to make it somewhat "feel" like you're actually operating different things... differently. So not everything should feel awkward and frustrating like surgeon simulator or whatever, but you also won't have all the conveniences and "cheating" of an FPS made to be as accessible as possible to everyone.
Let's be honest, I see a gun, and I immediately am like yay a new genre, oh another gun, Nvm.It's another shooter,
Why can't we have more magic based pvp games, I know it be hard and complex, but what if everyone can make their own spells and compete in ranking, and do a rock paper scissor balancing
I said this under your other comment as well, but we've all got to start somewhere. I think if you watch the video all the way through you'll see that the shooting portion of the game is there to provide the "application" half of "research".
The reason this is a shooting game and not magic is because it is much, much easier (but not easy) to begin conceptualizing this type of mechanics with real world limitations instead of arbitrary magical ones.
I also think if you read the description you'll see that this project is intended as a stepping stone to what I would consider my real "dream game" which would have these same types of research/application/global-system-integration as a true RPG experience.
For an extremely basic example of how I first began to tease out player-based-research-feeding-back-into-gameplay, watch this terrible video: ua-cam.com/video/5BrLNYfaPPo/v-deo.html
The ideal being: menus to change parameters of a spell is too limiting and straightforward. Each type of magic should have its own method of study/creation closely tied to the philosophy behind their magic as well. A priest studies and believes different things about magic than a shaman or a wizard does. I would love to start making my dream game right now, but I know I'm not ready to do it justice yet.
This shit like nasa
fo4 laser musket?
Need a 3d modler for your game
Absolutely! Hopefully someday... 😅
maybe gyro support too?
Maybe!
At least make it possible to change projectile pathing types and have actual projectiles (basic striaght, genade, but then have trajectory types like curve, homing, aerial striking, maybe even combination of the types, hell make landmine grenades that turn to scatter homing projectiles on triggering) literally magic is no deforent then a gun, its just the creativity of the explosion and projectile pathing, along with player altering effects, vfx is flashy but hell you can make the vfx be bullets, this type of comment is what I stress to every youtube dev, think outside the box and dont get sucked into the trends,
There are far more gun related multiplayer shooter games out there, make yourself shine deforently,
And I challenge everyone I ask, knowing Im not going to be heard, to attempt a good magic based pvp game that requires player inherent skill, not systematic skill differences, magic is inherently difficult to balance if you think damage and effect but it gets easier if just design "counterplay, R,P,S, and power deforentce" both fire and water can be equal depending on the output of both,
water is 1, fire is 2, fire equals out,
water is 1, fire is 3, fire over comes water
Water is equal or greater than fire, fire looses,
Cant design balance if you're not also designing strength of power deference. Sure, on rock paper scissors, water beats fire, but if fire is stronger, it just turns to steam or continues to burn
Anyways im a nobody, but I do hope someday someone sees my ranting comments and understands
Thanks for commenting! I'm not at the stage yet where such variations are necessary to open up the gameplay, but I'll keep the idea in mind as I get further along.
Just to clarify this isn't a pvp game. It's intended to be a design-and-use game for creating new weapons from the ground up.
Have you played Receiver 2?
I played Receiver 1!
@@simulacrumgames You should for sure play Receiver 2. One of my favorite games of all time. Similar to the first game but highly polished. Your ideas on controlling the gun manually reminds me of it.
@@jamesfenimore174 It was definitely one of the inspirations behind more immersive controls! I'll have to play 2 someday