Re: [GD-Design] gesturing

[Kimmo V. <kim...@op...>]

>Target selection is a big part of what we want to do, and I should have 
>devoted more time to emphasizing that. If we eliminate aiming, we 
>obviously need target selection somehow so there would be some sort of 
>lock-on system.  Our prototype uses a a simple lock-on system and the die 
>hard console FPS players felt it worked well, so I didn't dwell on that 
>part of the system.  In our prototype we didn't use aiming, but instead 
>weapon selection as the end-game.  It worked well enough, but it was 
>tricky to balance to prevent button mashing.  We did it by making the 
>damage inflicted relative to the distance and added a reload delay so that 
>the closer you were the more damage you inflicted so people had to decide 
>who was going to shoot when. I wouldn't classify our game as twitch, it's 
>somewhere between a Black and White or MMORPG where you choose commands 
>rather than directly attacking (e.g. Star Wars Galaxies) but in 
>first-person view.

I would take the concept of target selection further by basing the game 
more around the idea
of timing and stealth. The player doesn't stay alive by having the best 
eye-hand
coordination in the hood, but by being well aware of the current situation 
and being
nerveless enough not to leap out too soon or too late. Take your favourite 
target
selection system, mix it with auto-aiming controlled by how much time you 
let your
character spend to aiming, and make taking cover a factor, so that there's 
no room for
the potential auto-aim Rambos. Aiming also needs to take longer if you've 
just run
across the room and have otherwise performed acrobatics. I won't go into 
details with the
controller, because each platform needs to be considered separately, but 
the high-level
concept applies to all platforms, including PC.

For instance, Raven Shield on PC was a very pleasant surprise to me as it 
had many of
these features I described above, and I really hoped to see them in Rainbow 
Six 3 for
the Xbox, but unfortunately they were only partially implemented. Yes, the 
game was now
tougher to beat than it would've been otherwise, but that's mainly because 
they didn't make
timing, cover and stealth a big enough factor.

Kimmo