Finding the balance for Inhuman
Added 2022-10-23 01:59:58 +0000 UTCLast article I outlined 3 core goals I've been wanting to solve for the game, and I think I'm pretty much happy with my results after trying a couple of things. These goals were:
- Clear tells when an enemy is about to attack you
- Finding more ways to showcase an enemy’s state through animation
- Incentivizing the player to close the distance with their enemy more often
A constant problem reported by playtesters was a lack of confidence in when they were safe to attack soldiers. I tried various adjustments to their accuracy, giving them delays where they were guaranteed to miss and other situations that could cause them to miss, but players never really picked up on the "rules" to any of this. I realized the issue was less to do with soldier accuracy and more to do with the fact that players were largely unable to tell what the soldier was planning to do at any moment. By default, soldiers were always aiming their gun straight at their target, basically signaling that they could shoot the player at any moment. Luckily, other human npcs had animations that let me solve this problem.
I present to you the single most important animation in the game:
This simple transition animation from idle to aiming has finally made the player's safety (or danger) clear. If you see a soldier aiming at you, you obviously know you're in some real danger. To go along with this, I've got transition animations for most stance related actions. So soldiers standing up to shoot or vice versa actually have a small delay, signaling to the player that they're about to shoot or that they're hiding for a bit.
More soldier animations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_7GPqiQWXA
These animation changes also allowed for the soldier's intentions to read a lot more clearly to the player. Soldiers actually hiding behind cover use an animation set from the metropolice, separate from their crouching and aiming stance they might use out in the open. Also gave them this hunkered down running pose from the rebel to more cleanly telegraph when they're running to cover. Players should be able to see this and understand "this soldier will not shoot me." Even if he did stop to attack you, he'd still need to raise his gun back up, so there isn't that gross feeling that he's snapped from running to shooting you immediately.
And yes, these animations even solved most of the 3rd goal. By having animations that clearly denote the soldier's state (running to cover, attacking, hunkering down fo cover) the player's openings became far more clear. Seeing playtesters start to feel more confident rushing in between enemy attacks to blast them wiith the shotgun has been really satisfying!
The main result of all these goals being solved is basically me getting to have the game the way I always intended it. I really love combat with the soldiers in Half-Life 1 and it's something I've tried to recreate/modernize a bit in Inhuman, but I've struggled to get players properly playing around them, which is an issue I've observed with HL1 as well. Now that there seems to be a lot more of a reaction to the enemy's intentions, I've been able to actually bump up the difficulty of the game a bit to force the player to be more deliberate. Your openings to attack are more clear, but the punishment for messing up is far harsher than before which I think makes for a pretty exciting combat loop!
I know I've talked about wanting to write more in the past but I'm seriously committing to it now. This article is pretty much the result of me noting down my thoughts over the week and organizing it into an article at the end. This is something I'm gonna try to do at least twice a month if not weekly. If you've got any questions or critiques feel free to lay them on me.
Thanks for reading,
Bradley Toliver
