Hi Everyone,
This is the final part of my 3-part blog. If you haven’t already seen them, check out my previous two posts about the team and QA testing.
Since I specialise in gameplay, for the last part of this development blog I would like to share my personal goals for gameplay changes upcoming this year and what I will be focusing on and pushing for as an individual on the team. I’ll mostly be referring to gameplay changes in the rest of the post as per update 4.4.0 (which was unfortunately part of our larger update that was reverted from the live servers for the time being).
The things that I am going to be working on personally are:
- Weapons and Game Balance
- Clarity and Visual Improvements
- Sound/Audio & General Competitive Viability
Weapons and Game Balance
Starting off, I am pleased to say that we’ve received a lot of feedback regarding the new weapon values and weapon feel, though the testing period was very short. We’re currently going over internally how to fix some of the more major problems impacting gameplay right now, bugs and general issues alike.
I’ve identified a problem with the bullet drop changes which sort of mess up the formulas and calculations I made when implementing them. While it was absolutely the intention to increase the skill ceiling of landing a long-range shot past 200m, it was never the intention for bullet drop channels to affect under 100m combat, or for the drop to feel so immediate.
Currently, our bullet physics apply the drop rate immediately. This means that the bullet starts to drop the moment it leaves the barrel. Therefore, if an increased amount of multiplier to base bullet drop value is applied to a weapon, it will drop considerably before it even reaches a distance of 200m in flight. What should happen is that the bullet should only start dropping after a certain distance or amount of time travelled. We don’t plan to simulate real life 1:1 in our game. That’s not the kind of game we want TFE to be. But at the very least we can go for semi-realism for the sake of smoother gunplay. We’ll attempt to fix this or at least compensate for it while it remains an issue.
To fix this issue, it is likely that it will require a chunk of our programmers’ time, which we don’t have spare at this stage. In the meantime, I will take a look at this issue in more depth. In case I don’t find a better solution, we’ll lower the amount of bullet drop to compensate for this in a future update.
Our aim is to have more bandwidth for laser-accurate weapons in our game, so that we remove ‘RNG situations’ from close- to mid-quarters combat as much as possible, with the exception of a few weapons.
Obviously, greater bullet drop at distance makes longer shots more difficult; we certainly don’t want to make it easy to get kills with an assault rifle versus snipers who have spent a considerable amount of time running out of the general play area to support their team and spot the enemy from a mountain. That said, we don’t want to introduce random mechanics, such as bloom, and damage reduction at a distance, or to make it impossible to land shots at range by increasing the spread, since that would also affect close-range gunplay. It’d be lazy if done that way and I don’t want to do it like this, at least not extensively.
It’s up to the players to learn how far up they’ll need to aim to kill at various distances; it’s expected that some players will be able to adapt and get these kills, but there should be a considerably lower percentage of players with this ability following this change. I am compensating for this by allowing laser-accurate weapons with barely any spread in the game to reduce ‘luck’ in close- to mid-range gunplay and stay true to the easy-to-pick up but hard-to-master aspect of the game.
Look forward to higher accuracy for the effective range of your weapon. Your bullets will go closer to where you are pointing while aiming down the sights or through the scope, at the cost of recoil and other things.
Speaking of accuracy, there has been a bug with the grenade launchers which has been around for a long time: random inaccuracy and the grenade not spawning properly at the centre of the weapon. This is another issue that we’re going to be tackling as soon as there’s time allocated for it, since it’s a frustrating bug to deal with for our CQB players; I’ve raised the priority for getting this fixed.
The goal is for the grenade launchers to be deadly accurate and completely ‘skill-based’ with a slower projectile speed, more drop and a smaller kill radius to compensate for its near-perfect accuracy (don’t worry - everything within a few metres will still be an instant kill!). This goal will be met after fixing the above bugs. Afterwards, we will analyse the feedback and data to see if further adjustments are necessary.
Snipers are currently in a tough spot; some players absolutely love them, others absolutely hate them. And it doesn’t look like that’s going to change any time soon. One thing’s for sure, snipers aren’t going to be removed from the game. However, the snipers as is are currently clunky and we’re not happy with the usability of a sniper weapon in our game at the current stage, and there are some minor and lower priority plans to make them less clunky for players coming from other games. That has been our main feedback, after all. They should be more relatable if you are used to snipers in other FPS games. Making snipers easier to use at shorter ranges should be compensated with making them more punishing to use when a player misses their shot.
To clarify and solve the mystery once and for all, the Sniper class is not supposed to jump higher to get into unintended places in our level design. That’s a bug, not a feature. This will be fixed and the classes will be balanced. Our levels were not designed with that in mind; a lot of our players actually managed to get into some pretty crazy spots our designers hadn’t intended to be reachable and, while that’s cool to see, we simply can’t allow one class to be able to access these spots if we want to keep our game both casual and competitively viable. A spot in the playable area should be available to all classes or none.
Gunners use machine guns and their job is to suppress the enemy. In theory, they don’t need to be accurate. In theory, they should spray at close- to mid-ranges so that an enemy cannot peek or so that they need to reposition. In the longer term, there were plans for it in the form of stances. The changes to the weapon spread of the Gunner class were in relation to those plans which have now been pushed back.
Those stances were meant to be implemented in the near future to be able to emplace your weapon on any low cover or to use a bipod when laying down to have perfect spread accuracy and other smaller benefits, while running ‘n’ gunning without aiming down the sights would remain inaccurate.
That has backfired and the feedback we’ve received is that ‘gunners are unplayable now’. While I personally believe this is a drastic statement, for the time being we’ll slightly increase the ADS accuracy of the heavy weapons and increase the combat walking speed to be the same as the other classes. There are no plans to reduce the recoil or the hipfire spread, and the reasons for it are mentioned below.
In our original vision, the Gunner class was also not supposed to have Claymores as an extra option, so I plan on removing that access for now and I plan to monitor how it affects the gameplay loop.
The goal with the changes in 4.4.0+ with ADS (Aiming Down Sights) was to make ADS laser-accurate, while hipfire is more punishing at a distance, consistent across all weapons. Hipfire bullet spread should be generated more randomly, so that the player makes a decision whether or not to fire from the hip for point-blank battles, or to be scoped in at an angle you’re comfortable pushing or holding with ADS. I’ve made significant changes to the aiming speed on all weapons based on the class of weapon to simulate roughly the weight of the weapon, balanced with the range of its scope, too. This is purposeful; it adds consequence to being caught off-guard as a player.
The main idea for this change is to spice up gameplay on a competitive or higher-skill level than your average players, where decisions that you take significantly affect the outcome between losing or winning a gunfight. Players that run around mindlessly while hipfiring might not have a good time and, while I don’t intend to attack any specific playstyles, TFE is moving in the direction of both competitive viability and tactical, more cerebral gameplay to succeed on the battlefield.
Visual Clarity
Moving on from gunplay, we’ve got to talk about Visual Clarity.
Visual Clarity is an important aspect of any game. From both the feedback we’ve received from the community and our own experiences, we feel that there is more that we can do to improve it. For example, we see great potential in working on aspects of blending and the fading of visual effects. By working on these areas, we can improve the gameplay experience for both seasoned and new players.
One option which we previously explored was to change the colour parameters for the character; however, we feel that we can do more. For any future additions or changes to the uniforms or character models, additional changes should be made to our textures and materials in our stock levels. This is how we plan to add visual clarity to our game and lead by example; community level designers using stock assets will also benefit.
Take a look at the image above. In this scenario there are three soldiers with three different types of uniform. Can you tell the difference with one look?
For the next scenario, we’ve taken the same scene from above but reduced the contrast of the level lighting setup and cleaned up any additional material functions. Then, we brightened up and desaturated the background against which the character will be tested. On the spectrum of light and darkness, we're pushing the character out on a different point of the spectrum than the rest of the level materials/textures. It's a compositing technique, commonly used in art and design to make specific things stand out from the rest of the art piece.
(This is one of the many techniques we as game/level designers and the community map makers can use to achieve peripheral vision clarity, where now, no matter where you look in the scenario below, the enemy character models will be visible.)
Direct image slide comparison can be found here.
The main goal with visual clarity is for the player model to be distinguishable from terrain and objects in the level, specifically when similar textures, tone of colour or contrast conflict occurs. Future changes to visual clarity need to take into account this ‘relative’ relationship between the elements.
At the moment, it spoils our players’ fun (mine, too) that the enemies can be on your screen without you being able to see them. While that may be realistic in a real combat encounter, that is not the gameplay we envisioned.
A player should be visible with a single glance at the surroundings; they should contrast the environment. This is for the sake of gameplay and we’ll sacrifice some of the realism and graphical quality to achieve that once more.
Try to spot the second character in the above scenario.
Direct image slide comparison can be found here.
Now that I am taking over the gameplay design decisions on this front, I will be making sure personally that this issue is fixed. I will be cross-referencing all of our official stock levels and changing them as needed in the future to allow for the player to be seen with a glance in the most vital parts of gameplay. This means that I will be making some changes to the uniforms, materials and objects commonly used in our internal level design workflow, as well as in EDDIE, the public level design tool; in fact, that was the goal of having new characters being made, too – improved ease of use and flexibility.
Speaking of new characters, a while back we shared work-in-progress new character model shots; you might be surprised to find out that we've shelved these characters. This was done because the source content did not meet our technical standards. We're looking into new options and opportunities for new characters and animations; in the meantime, we'll continue using our existing characters, making the best out of what we've got by applying contrast and colorology theory as mentioned above.
Unfortunately, our current characters are stuck with one huge problem in terms of fundamentals of game design as part of the model: the fact that they wear a mask (with the void underneath it!)
To shed some light on why this is a significant factor: when a character wears a mask, it takes your brain a significantly longer time to react to the information on your screen that you are looking at a person and not an object in the environment. The best course of action in terms of first-person shooter design is for characters to have unobstructed faces and eyes; that way, when a player scans the environment, they’ll be able to tell apart an inanimate object from a player character without confusion almost immediately, without the delay of second guessing. So, when we do introduce any new characters, or end up modifying our existing ones, this will be a major goal: to avoid having fully masked characters in our game. We might opt in for half-masks, for example.
A part of the texture and material adjustments, we will be adding a hint of another colour to the uniforms of our characters. This small change will make a difference; adding even slight hints of another colour to the mix will affect how our eyes perceive the tone and colour of the characters against the environment. During this process, we’ll naturally be fixing any problematic darker tones or shadows within the game that we can find, as demonstrated in the above screenshots.
Currently, TFE renders both the player and the level geometry on the same “layer” or “pass” meaning that any effects we add to the level also apply to the player character and this can be problematic in achieving the desired results. To combat this, we’ll be looking into experimenting with modifying the shaders and splitting the rendering pipeline for the player character, which will decouple some parts of the relative factors in visual clarity management mentioned above.
This is where you, the players and the testers, will need to guide us in finding the issues; we can only find so many of those blending-in spots ourselves. We’ll need the guidance of our testers to QA test once we release new adjustments to the level, visual clarity, and characters.
Sound Design
Moving onto the last subject mentioned: the sound design and the footsteps.
There is no question about it: when you try our game for the first time, you’re greeted with the displeasure of being both blind and deaf, very strongly speaking. Visual clarity redesign will fix the ‘blind’ part of the equation for good gameplay feel and sense; however, that leaves us with sound.
Sound is a very important part of gameplay clarity: mainly footsteps and anything that affects the position of the player, the enemies, and the friendlies. On our development team, we’ve never had nor currently have anyone that is experienced with sound design. As an individual, I know what the sound should feel like in a first-person shooter and how it works as part of the sound system in Unreal Engine, but I don’t have the practical experience in this field to implement and reach our goals and vision for this at the moment. Should we find a Sound Designer and a specialist in this field, we’ll bump up the priority on this subject and discipline but until we can find one to work with us, in terms of gameplay balance, this is last on our list of priorities currently, though in relative terms it should be much higher on the list.
After I am done with the gunplay rebalance, I will be moving to work on Clarity for a long time, without really looking at anything else. Until we have a sound designer that can manipulate the sound to be close to what we envision it to be in Task Force Elite, we’ll need to figure this part out ourselves, which means a lot of experimentation and likely mistakes are to be expected as part of the learning process.
Therefore, I will mostly be focused around balancing our current audio and sound effects instead of adding anything new to the table, making sure their attenuation is reasonable. That is to say I will research and learn how to get our current audio to have hopefully better directional output, along with making sure the footsteps are heard and are very distinguishable between the various surfaces. Our level design should include more surfaces than just barely audible sand in objective spaces, so that’s something for us to take a look at too.
In terms of sound effects of weapons, right now when you get shot at it is very hard to tell exactly where you are getting shot from and that’s against our vision of gameplay clarity. So this will most likely be the second priority to adjust after getting the footsteps right. To introduce and solidify the walking mechanic and increase the tactical usefulness of stealth, the footsteps should be audible almost at all times when a player is close by and not walking. And although not realistic, when a player shoots, you should be able to pinpoint their location: both the direction and distance. The direction might actually be easier to work with; however, the distance might be tougher to implement accurately to the gameplay vision.
Conclusion
And there you have it. These are my goals in written form as part of dedicating my free time to the project and using most of my experience and knowledge on the subject of first person shooters and game design. Both in directing the gameplay and feel of Task Force Elite and helping with the hands-on implementation of the items needed to succeed in our vision. In terms of the gameplay vision that we had when we started this project, it was largely competitively focused, and a lot of the upcoming changes might feel wrong, misunderstood, or at times threatening to what parts of the community might like about the current state of the game.
That is very understandable, and I would like you all to be vocal about it, if that’s the case, and provide feedback to us on that matter. To further avoid this issue, with any changes we make we’ll try to make sure to explain the reasoning behind it, as to avoid any misunderstanding and for you the community to understand our thought process a bit more.
While most of us certainly don’t have the spare time to spend on writing huge development blogs and announcements such as this one (this one took far too long, and took away a bit from development time), I hope that this will change in the future, with the addition of a technical writer to our team who can write up new announcements and posts, without taking away large amount of time from the development of the game.
Thank you very much for reading, playing, and supporting our game. I hope the information I shared is going to provide some clarity on what the team is currently going through and what we plan to be working on next, and sheds light on how we will handle it to bring the project closer to completion.
As a reminder, you can contact us and ask us any questions on Discord via our official Red Spear Studios Discord server: https://discord.gg/redspear
Best wishes to everyone and for the project,
Signing out!
See you in-game.
Lucas ‘Demonic’ Musial
(part-time) Lead Game Designer at Red Spear Studios
(full-time) Technical Level Designer at Kythera AI
