Systems Design Process - Low Barrier Combat Control Design for Handheld Friendly Shooter
Design Goals
This design project is for an up-coming commercial multiplayer shooter game intended for release on PC with support for both mouse-and-keyboard style input, as well as controller inputs for controller and handheld players. The goal was to:
Start with an intentional and considered design that makes both input styles valid as definitive play styles, and not afterthoughts
Avoid alienating prospective players that might be turned off by a high input skill check to enjoy the game
Design the controls, mechanics, and interaction policy to encourage coop multiplayer play that leaves room for communication, coordinated cooperation, and collaborative strategizing.
The design process outlined here is informed by first-hand experience, but follows a typical research-based iterative design process.
Within the space of shooter games, a wide range of input conventions have standardized over four decades of their history. The standard 1st/3rd person shooter convention is unsuitable for the subject game because of a relative high skill barrier for new and casual players, results in a skill ceiling delta between mouse-and-keyboard versus controller input styles, and because it permits a view distance that undermines an aspect of the creative direction of the design.
This design project sought out to explore a control styles from shooters with divergent designs as well as games from related and adjacent genres for existing solutions, to glean insights from those designs, and to use that as the basis of a design around which mechanics and interaction policies could be adapted to.
Strategic Impact
Expanding the addressable market - In addition to being a best practice to make designs as accessible to as many players as possible, the team is small without any preexisting player community, meaning that it is strategically enfranchise the largest prospective player base across as many spectrums of player skill, play platform preferences, or familiarity with this genre.
Integrating mechanics into creative direction - The game thematically emphasizes action-survival-horror, so a balance has to be struck between empowering expressive play, building tension in combat, and leaving room for enemies to surprise the player in otherwise open terrain.
Design exploration - Both mouse-and-keyboard PC shooters’, as well as controller-based console/handheld shooters’ have standardized input schemes grounded in competitive origins. The subject game’s design pillars afford an opportunity to depart from those conventions and explore alternative solutions that might be better suited for a play style that isn’t centered around expressive play and player empowerment.
Designing for cooperative play - A central conceit of the game’s design is cooperative multiplayer play. The style of cooperative play intended by the design benefits by ensuring that players have the capacity to communicate, cooperate, and strategize collaboratively.
Evaluating Criteria
The design problem is concerned with balancing the following needs.
Maintaining familiarity - The game’s input schema should be largely familiar enough such that fans of mouse-and-keyboard shooters and controller-based shooters are not having to completely relearn developed muscle memory to play the game. Too dramatically departing from conventions could make the game feel like fans of the genre are being punished for their experience and make the game feel like it’s more about battling the controls instead of playing the game.
Reducing input complexity - The convention for shooters is a 4DOF schema. For less experience players simultaneously controlling two independent movement directions and two rotational directions simultaneously can be overwhelming.
Building tension and injecting risk - Typical shooters’ input schemas have been refined to maximize player capability to increase the skill ceiling, however when the game’s design doesn’t start from a place of player empowerment, this freedom can undercut sense of tension in the game.
Freeing cognitive load - The pace of conventional shooter designs highly privilege tactics as the first skill check for players, again for the purpose of raising the skill ceiling, however designs that deprivilege benefits from high actions per minute (APM) and precision can shift the emphasis to other differentiators and skills.
For these reasons and more, an alternative
Constraints
Input standards - The design focused on mouse and keyboard input schemes, as well as the controller standard popularized by the PlayStation - for the scope of this project, the design did not consider simpler controller designs such as 8-bit controller conventions and handhelds with those input patters, joysticks, VR/AR/XR and motion based inputs, mobile, or other designs.
Unity native input manager - Though more sophisticated input managers exist for the Unity platform, they were not used in the development of this game nor considered in the design process.
Research and Findings
The research process consisted of comp analysis and affordance mapping. A short list of games were considered for their input styles and tense game feel. Games that were available for both mouse-and-keyboard input schemes and controller input schemes were analyzed based on game reviews on platform pages, VODs of live plays, and forum posts. Secondarily social media based reviews were considered. The games were assessed for the frequency and nature of complaints about the input schemes by both core and non-core players, the control scheme’s contribution to the game feel, and subjectively considered for how much cognitive load the inputs demanded of players based on their ability to commentate while the players were in extremis.
Resident Evil 1-5
Why Resident Evil The first five entries in the Resident Evil (RE) series uses “tank controls” - a scheme by which forward and back move the character along the axis defined by their facing direction, and left and right applies a yaw rotation. Pressing forward and right simultaneously would result in the character forward while turning to the right continuously. RE’s tank controls were considered because the game is notable for its simpler AI behavior, giving the impression that the game may be easier to control than it is.
Affordances - The virtue of this design is that it makes the movement deliberately a little unwieldy, making combat scenarios more frantic and tense. This design accentuates the affordance presented by the challenge of precisely controlling the rotational rate based on angular input to maintain an imperfect sense of control by the part of the player.
Reception - On controllers (as the game was originally designed for) tank controls might be familiar to some, they don’t simplify controls so much as making them deliberately challenging and thereby requiring that the enemy behavior design be forgiving. It is effective at building tension by drawing emphasis to the moment to moment gameplay by commanding the players’ attentions to every action, minimizing cognitive capacity for cooperative play.
The mouse-and-keyboard implementation seems to have highly controversial reception amongst shooter fans because the significant delta from shooter conventions not coming across as intentional.
Don’t Starve (Together)
Why Don’t Starve - Don’t Starve (DS) and it’s multiplayer version Don’t Starve Together, though not a shooter, was considered because it successfully offers an alternate control scheme that uses WASD for movement with few complaints. Like shooters, the camera’s perspective defines the reference for the axes that the avatar can move along, however, the avatar will turn to face in whatever direction they’re running.
Affordances - DS has players from outside of the shooter player base, but few players have complained of the game’s controls being complexity being challenging. Controls-focused posts instead primarily focusing on the button mappings for players addressing the expectation gap from point and click ARPGs like Diablo - like using ‘F’ for melee combat as opposed to Left Mouse Button — not movement, camera orientation, or other locomotion issues.
Reception - In general, the elimination of the mouse (for mouse-and-keyboard) and the right stick (on controller) seems to have made the locomotion result in low friction for first-time to casual players. Though WASD is more commonly an shooter and 3rd personal action game staple on PC, the simplification doesn’t seem to be an issue for players that have more ingrained habituations from those genres. ARPG players seemed to be the most vocal about their experience with the controls, but since they are primarily concerned with a point-and-click convention, they fall outside of the scope of this project.
The Ascent
Why The Ascent - The Ascent is a recent entry with a “twin stick shooter” control scheme. In The Ascent, the camera’s forward direction is essentially static, so the left stick and WASD determine the players movement along the ground plane, and the right stick / mouse cursor position relative to the avatar determines the facing direction of the avatar. Twin stick shooters were considered because they should be simpler because it primarily puts 3 axes at the players controls instead of 4.
Affordances - Twin stick shooters’ fixed camera perspectives and static axial orientation relative to the world space typically makes movement very simple, even for new players. However the delta in difficulty in aiming between mouse-and-keyboard versus controllers are significant. Mouse input give players a high degree of precision in aiming, and speed in transitioning from target to target. Conversely, the manual challenge of precisely inputting precise angular yaw directions with a thumb stick is challenging because of the imprecision, making it much harder to hit enemies at distance and frequently requiring some sort of aim-assist to bridge the challenge gap between play styles.
Reception - The Ascent’s implementation of twin stick controls are as good as any entry using that style and only suffers from shortcomings of the entire schema. Like other twin stick shooters, the game seems to be considered significantly more challenging on controller, though avid twin stick shooter players appear to manage without specific issues. Players that purchased the game that fall into the cross section of inexperienced players in the twin stick genre that play on controller had a vocally negative response, particularly in light of the enemy behavioral designs that seemed to have been tuned for the higher skill ceiling of mouse-and-keyboard players.
Insights
Players can have unfavorable experiences with a game, even when a game accommodates their input mode of preference if the game is not tailored to those modes.
RE players that were new with the franchise complained about the mouse-and-keyboard controls, which was not originally available within the franchise before releasing on PC.
Failure to level the skill ceiling can make games challenging, if not impossible to tune for.
The Ascent players on controller struggled with content that mouse-and-keyboard players didn’t. Fast moving, relatively small enemies that dodge as they approach may be only slightly challenging for a mouse cursor to track, but all but impossible on a joystick without the aid of generous aim assist.
Translating a control scheme to another input style in a way that dramatically conflicts with established generic expectations can result in a strong negative reaction, even if those choices intentionally align with the game’s overall experiential intent.
RE players enjoyed or at least accepted the tank controls when the game was on console, but PC players playing later release on mouse-and-keyboard were less accepting.
Established fans of the franchise may have been more tolerant because shooter controls hadn’t yet been established when the first Resident Evil was released. PC players on the other hand likely included newer franchise adoptees that were unfamiliar with the franchise’s designs and expected the game to play like other familiar shooters that by then had adopted largely uniform control schemes.
Simplifying and reducing the simultaneous axial control count does make the game more playable to less experienced players.
DS players, even first time players, seemed to have little issue acclimating to the controls. And based on footage from Let’s Play VODs, players seemed to have more cognitive bandwidth to coordinate and communicate with each other, even in height of combat.
Controllers allow for more nuanced movement than keyboards. Because keyboards have discrete binary inputs, movement inputs are limited to all-or-nothing movement in 8 directions, while chording (using Shift) could additionally allow for a secondary speed. Meanwhile, a controller’s joystick allows a player to have much more granular control over both direction and speed.
This can be beneficial for tactical games that benefit from stealth, but even in cross-play scenarios, this doesn’t usually translate to a net advantage for controller based players.
A mouse can allow players to have significantly better control over the rate and amount of rotation in both large gross movements and small fine adjustments compared to the right stick of a controller.
At the highest levels of play, mouse and keyboard inputs offer a higher skill ceiling, but for newer players, both are considered very challenging.
Both the mouse and joystick are challenging because 3d shooters expect players to track moving targets along two simultaneous rotational axes from an independently moving reference frame.
Because the significantly smaller input resolution of the joystick, across the entire skill spectrum, a game’s design should anticipate that controller players will take more time to get on target, and have less continuous time on target.
Proposed Solution
The game will have a rotating controllable 3rd person perspective camera.
This allows the camera be positioned close to the character avatar so enemies can approach the player from their blind sides.
Unlike classic twin stick shooters, this will allow the player to look in all directions affording for more hidden vantages to encourage exploration.
Like classic twin stick shooters, the camera’s pitch will be restricted to limit how far players can see like the Silent Hill franchise, using camera perspective frustum instead of fog to limit players views around their surroundings.
The camera will have yaw control via mouse and right stick; no direct pitch control
Removing direct pitch control should simplify the input complexity without too significantly altering expectations around established conventions
Avatar locomotion control will have 2 separate modes: a “hip fire” mode where the camera’s yaw rotation is actively controlled, and an “aim fire” mode where the camera’s yaw is locked, a free moving aim reticle cursor establishes the facing direction of the avatar.
The intent of the two mode solution is to address the conflicts between three factors:
1 - Desire for skilled players to be able to leverage their higher skill by permitting further engagement ranges.
2 - The need of lower skill players for support by lowering the initial skill hurdle by offering a vector of assistance for lower skill players, especially controller players.
3 - The team’s desire to level the player skill envelope to allow for a more uniform experience across both input formats.
The “hip fire” mode is intended to allow for more movement centric play, utilizing aim assist to improve effective accuracy.
The “aim fire” mode is intended to offer more precise shots at longer distances without aim assist at the additional risk of a locked camera direction. The camera will lower and pitch up to allow the player to see further.
“Hip fire” mode is intended to play like a third person shooter with some of the simplification and accessibility of isometric ARPGs or twin stick controls.
The view allows the player a greater sense of awareness extending behind the avatar.
The aim assist is supported out a visually discernable range allowing players to affectively maneuver around enemies and environmental obstacles and hazards while still easily landing shots on nearby enemies.
“Aim fire” mode is a intended to play like the aim mode of early Resident Evil games where the camera locks, and transitions to shooting gallery style play.
The player can still maneuver their avatar, albeit at a slower speed.
The view allows the player a closer view of the enemies directly in front of them at the cost of sight behind their avatar.
The benefit of switching to “aim mode” is offset against the risk of being more vulnerable in terms of visual information, lower movement speed, and a lack of aim assist because the player’s combat envelope increases dramatically.
Future Evaluation Criteria For Iteration
Currently the first pass of this design has been implemented, and as we enter testing, the following will be evaluated and addressed over time.
For Inexperienced Players (Of Shooters/Of Input Style):
How quickly do the players reach a point of minimal competency (be able to shoot intended enemies while deliberately dodging attacks) in terms of minutes and play attempts?
Do they struggle with inputs? If so, which and why?
If testing single player: how quickly do they start engaging with non-combat heuristic refinement? How quickly in terms of minutes and attempt count do they show interest in mission objectives, purchasing specific upgrades, or engage with questions of optimization/efficacy/progression?
If testing multiplayer: What percentage of communication with their partner is uttered inside versus outside of combat? Do they interrupt their own speech at the onset of combat? Do they struggle to respond to their partner?
For Experienced Players:
What habituated input actions do they struggle with? Are the errors persistent or are they correctable? If corrected, how long does it take to adapt?
If testing single player: while unprompted, what percentage of the time do players engage with each mode? Do they favor one - ask why? Distinguish between favoring one mode versus disfavoring another.
If testing multiplayer: observe what percentage of time each player uses each mode with attention to if there is a notable disparity between players. Was it deliberate and coordinated?
