Luca Periti

For this project, I had to produce a formative literative review that would help identify and guide my design. My goal was to ultimately take existing principles within extraction shooters, with “Escape from Tarkov” being a main inspiration, and create a more casual experience, whilst keeping those core principles and elements of tension.

Three design pillars were formed from this research being:

Complex Mechanical Behaviour – This goal was to have a complex structure of mechanics that interconnect and provide a lot of player choice and influence.

Fast Paced Gameplay – This pillar ensures that gameplay will retain a fast and fun nature whilst sustaining suspense and tension provided by the mechanics and environment.

Simple Core Loop – This final pillar aims to wrap the first two pillars together and ensure that the player’s aim will always be simple and understood, whilst the content within is chaotic, intense and complex.

The Combat / Weapon System is the main proprietor of these pillars. It runs using a structure and data table which determines what weapon the player is currently using and what its stats are. If the player was to pick up another gun (which couldn’t make it into the submitted build), the player’s state would switch to the weapon in the structure, changing the current weapon.

The shooting system works from a projectile prediction node, with the weapon information being loaded from the weapon structure.

Another system that was directly influenced by the design pillars was the Inventory System.

The original intent was to create a grid based (limited space) inventory. However due to time and its complexity, I wasn’t able to achieve that result. In turn I created a more simplified slot version.

In this system, when the player interacts with an item off the floor, it will go into a slot in the inventory. Depending on the current stack of items, if it is not at the maximum stack, it will fill the current item within the inventory until it gets to its max stack, then creating a new stack once full. When dragging the item out of the inventory, the player will drop said item depending on amount chosen to drop.

Another part of the inventory system is the Consumable / Healing System.

If the player picks up a item, it will check the “Item Type” enumerator within the actor. If the item type is “Consumable” then it is a healing item. The player will then be able to use that item within the inventory to heal themselves by right clicking the item, and pressing use.

The Multiplayer system runs off a dedicated server. Once a player presses play, it will direct them to the dedicated server. Whenever a player joins the server, it will check for the amount of players currently in the server, if that amount is lower than the threshold, then it will stay in the default map and tell the player that they are currently waiting for players. Once another player joins, it will migrate the server map to the playable level, in which the players can then roam around and play.

Once a player wants to extract, they will make their way to the dedicated extraction zone provided when spawning within the world. Once they make it there, a countdown will begin which when it reaches 0, they will leave the server.

When designing my original level, I chose to create a military airfield zone to fit with the theme. Players would spawn on the northern and southern sides of the map. Depending on the side the player spawns, their extraction would be the corresponding extraction on the other side, with one neutral extraction within the middle. In the middle of the spawns would be 3 high loot zone landmarks in which the players would want to explore to gather loot. This would encourage player convergence and would fast track player encounters. This creates a high risk/high reward scenario leading into creating the high tension and suspense scenarios whilst keeping that casual gunplay.

However, during development, this design proved to be too large for the limited amount of players that would be playing during testing. So I created and designed a smaller map with the same functionality and principles as the original, whilst adhering to the smaller player count.