Hey guys, Whales here. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a veteran Tremulous player with seven years of experience under my belt. I’ve ranged from playing on casually-focused servers like |SST| and uBP, and administrating X, to playing competitively in clans such as ><enocide, Sea Men Syndicate, -sg., and most recently, Pk. I also served as a gameplay balance consultant for Unvanquished in its early stages, until I had to leave to focus on school and work. I’m coming back from inactivity, and I’m hoping to do a pretty thorough audit of the game to give a lot of feedback and ideas wherever I can.
This is hopefully part 1 of a larger series of posts, but we’ll see how much free time I have in the coming weeks.
I want to focus on readability and kinaesthetics of the game for this thread. Specifically, the human team. I haven’t finished through all of the weapons yet, but these are things that stood out to me on a quick run-through.
Before being able to discuss this seriously, it’s important to first define Kinaesthetics, or “game feel”. “Game feel” is exactly what it sounds like, how the game feels to play. This is a highly subjective matter, but in most cases, it’s literally the most important thing about your game.
“Game feel” encompasses a lot of things about a game. Does something that’s supposed to represent something real (see: a gun) actually feel like it’s real-life counterpart (see: a gun)? Another important factor is whether you feel like the action you make on your keyboard/mouse/controller feels like a 1:1 relationship to what the character does.
A good example of tweaking “game feel” is adjusting your mouse sensitivity. I’m sure most of us reading this have a pretty steadily set mouse sensitivity, and we have it set in a way that feels like the motion of our mouse corresponds exactly to how our avatar is reacting. For an example of how bad game feel can affect a game, go turn your mouse sensitivity way up. When you do, it feels like your avatar is out of sync with you. Your brain and arm say you’re aiming at a spot that’s off of the screen, but the screen says otherwise.
Needless to say, it’s not very fun to play a game where you feel out of control.
Also needless to say, it’s fun playing a game where you feel powerful. You have a profound effect on the experience of other players, and on the state of the world.
Kinaesthetics is about giving you these feelings without needing to adjust avatar strength, helping you have more fun, and helping the game stay balanced.
For a better intro on this, go watch Campstar’s Errant Signal on Kinaesthetics.
Here’s a short list of games with good game feel, and a respective list of their counterparts with poorer game feel:
(Note that this says nothing about the quality of each game here. All of these games are generally good games, they just have varying quality of game feel.)
Good:
Call of Duty (4 and up)
Super Meat Boy
League of Legends
Chivalry
Rage
Bad
Arma 2 (guns felt like cap-guns, movement is slow and awkward)
Dustforce (slow starts, overly-complicated movement, heavy-feeling jumps)
DOTA 2 (turning animations, really slow autoattacks)
Skyrim (swords feel like foam sticks, spells feel like water balloons, floaty/weightless movement)
Fallout 3 (guns feel like cap guns, no sense of bullet impact outside of VATS, REALLY floaty/weightless movement)
Readability is a simple concept, but is also very important to the “fun” of a game.
Put simply, readability the ability of a player to quickly determine the impact of their actions on the game.
Some quick examples of readability in Unvanquished:
Seeing if your shot/swipe hit.
Seeing where your/the enemy’s grenade is.
Seeing if you killed that dretch, or whether you need to look out for a quick headbite.
Good readability in a game means that you don’t have to stop the action of the game to know exactly what’s happening around you, and what impact you’re having on the game.
Readability is most important in the venue of online multiplayer, where you don’t ever have the time to stop if you’re wanting the edge you need to win.
WEAPON FEEL
Weapon sounds and hit particles are a deceptively important piece of the feel of a game. It doesn’t matter if your gun is a 1-hit kill, it will always feel weak if there’s no visible effect when it hits. To the contrary, your gun could do 1 damage, but it would feel unstoppable with the right sounds and animations.
Unvanquished is lucky enough to have a fantastic team working on its assets, but there’s still the fact that nobody is full-time, and it’s hard to prioritize what needs to get done.
Here, I’m hoping to list changes that can most greatly improve the feel of the game, but require minimal development effort.
RIFLE
Right now, I don’t think anyone would argue that the rifle doesn’t feel a little hollow when it fires. Many of us know that the rifle is one of the higher DPS weapons in the game, but it definitely doesn’t feel it. There’s a few reasons for this.
-No recoil animation
While firing, the rifle is completely static. You could replace the rifle with a static PNG and you’d barely be able to tell the difference. Just the littlest bit of kick will make the rifle feel that much closer to, well… a rifle.
-I’m shooting with a sewing machine right now
The sound the rifle makes when it fires is pretty soft, and doesn’t really give the impression of a rifle. It has a high, tinging, clanking noise. It sounds like a sewing machine, or someone pouring coins into a glass. Simply getting an updated sound with a little more “crack” and “boom” could greatly improve the feel of each shot.
-Hit particles
There’s two sides to correcting the hit particles for the rifle. The first is on the readability side, which is arguably the more important side.
It’s very difficult to see where and if you hit your target. There’s blood splatter, and there’s the hit marker; in the action of the game, both of these are easily lost. The blood is very low-contrast and can be missed entirely in dark light. The hit-marker appears over your crosshair, and not over your target, where your eyes are focusing.
There’s a few ways to fix this, but my preferred method is to have a “spark” particle that flares up differently than the missed shots when you hit your target. This doesn’t necessarily feel like a rifle, but when you’re putting this many bullets into a target, it doesn’t really feel like a rifle anyway.
Alternatively, glowing blood, which is cool too.
The second issue with the rifle hit particle is about game feel. The rifle feels noticeably weaker than the 1.1 rifle, despite the fact that the stats have only been imperceptibly changed.
The reason for this is the fact that the hit particle fades in. It’s really that simple. If the particle simply popped in instead of fading it, it gives you instant feedback to each of your shots.
SHOTGUN
Since Tremulous 1.1, the shotgun’s game feel and readability have both been very problematic. Despite being many peoples’ most-used weapon, it’s hard for even experienced players to tell whether they hit a shot or not. Is that two or three shots landed on the goon? I dunno, do you feel lucky, punk? Is that double a dretch’s health in one shot? Yeah, I guess.
The shotgun has gained a sense of power with its model update, but there’s still some tweaks that should be made.
-Uh, what are those lines?
The particle effect when you fire the shotgun is… odd. There’s some lines that get drawn in different directions then fade away, which is an effect I’ve seen associated with firing bullets exactly zero other times. It solves some of the readability problem of “where did my bullets go?” but it creates the game feel problem of “what the hell am I actually shooting?”.
I’d like to see the shotgun use the (corrected) rifle particle and the changes that I proposed above, to give a better sense of impact to the bullets, and a better sense of how much damage you’re doing per shot.
-Hit him right between the… atoms.
Sometimes, when you shoot someone with the shotgun, the blood spatter/hit particles just don’t happen. They took damage, but it looks like a miss. All of the weapons in the game have this problem to some extent, it’s definitely the most problematic with the shotgun, as most of your feedback from the gun is the blood that flies out of the alien.
This creates the “do you feel lucky, punk?” situation noted above, where you can’t be sure whether you missed, or the particles for your hit just didn’t appear.
This also happens when you land a killing shot; no hit particles appear.
All of these situations reduce the feel of the shotgun’s power to the player, while in numbers, the shotgun is actually a little over-tuned.
LASGUN
This is probably going to get its own post, since there’s a lot to say about the lasgun, and it would clutter this post even more.
MASS DRIVER
The mass driver is in a bit of an odd place. Thematically, it’s an incredibly powerful beam rifle/particle accelerator/railgun that should be blowing holes in the cores of planets or something equally futuristic and badass. In execution and balance, though, it’s just a relatively weak rifle-like laser. It does barely any damage, and it sure feels like it too.
-(t)rail gun
Adding a projectile trail to the shot of the MD would increase readability for players on both sides of the gun. It gives players who are shooting the MD a reference as to where their last shot was, and how much they need to move to track their target. It gives players who are being shot at with a Mass Driver the ability to tell where their attacker is firing from, reducing the effectiveness of sniping from one position.
The mass driver has some problems that aren’t quick-fixes; they’re problems that are deep-seated in the concept of the mass driver. These are probably the slowest changes out of everything I point out in this thread, and would carry heavy production expenses.
-Recoil
The MD kicks up with its recoil, which makes sense when you look at people firing weapons like shotguns and hunting rifles; they all kick up when people fire. So why is this a problem? The gun is animated as if the gun itself is causing the upward lift. In reality, recoil kicks directly back, and it is in part the skill of the marksman that directs the recoil upwards.
By having the gun kick directly up, it reduces the apparent power of the projectile.
All of the weapons with recoil animations have this problem, but it’s especially pronounced in the MD.
-Actual weapon power
I’m trying not to stray into balance in this post, but this is one of the places where it overlaps with the theme and feel of the game.
The expectation of the mass driver is much like that of the AWP or Scout in Counter Strike: a high-power, high-accuracy weapon with slow shots and poor close-range performance. The Mass Driver executes on the accuracy, but fails on these other two expectations and thematic elements.
The simplest solution to this is simply raising the damage and lowering the fire rate of the Mass Driver, but this isn’t a satisfying solution for the player, and also creates problematic gameplay interaction between the MD and lower-level alien classes.
My preferred solution for this is a charging Mass Driver. Lower the base rate of fire, and have an uncharged shot not kill a dretch. Holding down the fire button would charge the mass driver; the longer you charge, the more damage it does (no overcharge). After 3-4 seconds, the damage would cap out around 70-74 (not enough to two-shot a mara, to encourage grouping with another player). This lets the MD be a real threat to aliens of all classes, but compensates that power increase by removing its role as the instant dretch annihilator (a role that overlaps with the flamer already).
PULSE RIFLE/FLAMETHROWER
The pulse rifle and flamethrower are both in pretty good places as far as feel goes, but they could both use some minor touching-up with particles.
The pulse rifle particle is a little hard to see, and really doesn’t jive with the gun’s namesake. Realistically, the thing that could biggest benefit the game feel of the pulse rifle is a name change. Changing your expectations brings the experience closer in line with the theme.
The flamethrower causes some performance issues, and the fire definitely isn’t pretty enough to warrant a 40FPS drop. Here, we just might have to accept that fire has never looked good in any game besides Metal Gear Solid 3 and cut our losses.
LUCIFER CANNON
The lucifer cannon probably has the best feel out of all of the weapons in Unvanquished. It does huge damage and by golly, you know it. There is one small readability tweak I’d like to see for the projectile, though.
As part of the explosion animation, it would be nice to have a clear part of the animation that corresponds exactly to the splash range of the impact. A simple way to indicate this is to have a sphere that grows from the center of impact and fades to the edge of splash range. This both gives you the information of the range, while also implying to new players that the damage lessens the further you are from the impact.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
A huge thanks to anyone who got this far. I’ve got the notes laid out for three more of these posts, one for human buildables, and two for alien game feel and buildables, respectively.
Please try to keep from getting too pedantic in discussion, this is all about concepts and ideas. Please do, however, feel free to bring up your own ideas and thoughts into this. If you find any sources (like other games) that illustrate one of the points discussed in this thread, please feel free to bring it up.
Smell ya' later. 
