Pancho Villa — Day 3: Abilities and Controls
November 15th, 2006 by Pierre-Alexandre Garneau
At its core, the concept for this game is a third person shooter, like Gears of War but with more sombreros. The innovation is more in the historical setting and the feel of the game than in technical gameplay aspects. Nevertheless, a few game mechanics are worth detailing.
Horseback Riding
Pancho Villa is renowned for his daring cavalry raids. Indeed, every man in his army had a horse — there was no infantry. As such, it’s obvious that a large part of the game will occur on horseback.
Controls while riding will be as close as possible to controls while on foot. As such, moving the horse will be similar to movement on foot: pressing a direction will make the horse move in that direction.
In Oblivion, horses are controlled like cars: left and right turn the horse but don’t make it advance, while up makes it go forward in the direction it’s facing. I find this hard to use and confusing — why are the controls different than on foot? So in this game, the horse will move like vehicles in Halo. That is, the left thumbstick will dictate direct movement relative to the current camera orientation.
Weapons and Ammo
There will be 4 types of weapons in the game that Pancho can carry with him. Each will be based on real weapons:
- Pistols (with unlimited ammo)
- Riffles
- Shotguns
- Dynamite (like a grenade)
- Knife (only used in stealthier missions)
As for ammo, I dislike the tendency of most games of putting it all over the place in random locations. Why are ammo crates laying on the ground in the middle of nowhere?
To avoid this, ammunition will be located in logical places in the game. Luckily for us, the game takes place during a war so there are plenty of locations where ammunition can be found. You’ll also be able to ask for spare ammo from fellow soldiers — another good reason to keep them alive.
Health
I really like the HUD-less approach to health that’s popular these days. You don’t have a health bar, but if you get hit the screen becomes red. If you can avoid getting hit for a few seconds, your health quickly returns to normal. It’s more immersive because you don’t have an abstract health icon on screen and levels aren’t filled with improbable healing items.
The problem with that method is that you can get close to death repeatedly and just hide for a while each time. It removes some of the stress of combat. To avoid this, the time it takes before you regenerate gets longer each time you do regenerate. Only if you avoid being hit for a very long time does this time return to normal. This makes it a dangerous proposition to get hurt too often.
Moreover, the difficulty should self-adjust. The game should detect how easy or hard a time the player is having (by how often he gets hurt, how many headshots he makes, how many enemies he kills and so on) and adjust enemies by giving more or less health, making them shoot more or less precisely and so on. This keeps the game fun for both experts and beginners.
Death
I hate redoing a part of a game over and over. It’s just frustrating to backtrack because you were surprised by some unseen enemies, especially if you haven’t saved in an hour. Frequent checkpoints are good for this, but I preferred the solution used in Prey better — So I’m going to steal it shamelessly.
When you die, a skeleton Pancho Villa will find himself in a Day of the Dead themed underworld (think Grim Fandango), being harassed by spirits to bring him to his grave. Villa isn’t one to give up on life so easily! You’re being pulled slowly toward your coffin, but if you can shoot enough spirits before you reach it, your return to life.
Each time you die in a level, you get pulled toward the coffin a bit faster. If you fail to shoot enough spirits in time, you really die and return to the last saved checkpoints. Regular checkpoints need to be saved anyway to make sure the player doesn’t lose too much progress if he real life intervenes and he has to stop playing before the end of the level.
Controls
Controls is one thing I prefer to keep standard if at all possible. If you use controls similar to those of a popular game, you make it much easier to jump in for those who have played it. In this case I’ll use controls similar to those of Gears of War.
- Left thumbstick: Move
- Right thumbstick: Move the camera
- Right trigger: Shoot
- Right trigger button: Reload
- Left trigger: Move camera to first person to aim precisely
- D-pad: Each direction is assigned a weapon type, pressing that direction switches to the current weapon of that type
- A: Run
- X: Action (use item, pick up, get on or off horse, ask for ammo, etc.)
- Y: Look at a point of interest (used to bring important objects to the player’s attention)
- B: Melee attack (pistol whip, knife strike, etc.)
- Start: Pause (shows a menu, the map and current objectives)
Listed like this, it can seem a bit daunting but it’s quite simple really. The sticks move the character and view, the right trigger shoots, you choose weapons with the d-pad — that’s the basics you really need to know. Other important actions can have a pop-up appear on the screen to tell you which button to press (eg. “X: Ride horse”) and the other actions can be mastered as you progress in the game, they’re not critical.
I intuitively really like your approach to health, and I can’t remember seeing anything quite like it. What I’m afraid of, though, is that the problem you described about hiding yourself to heal will still exist, only each time the player will have to wait somewhat longer… and of course, waiting is seldom fun. And this is further compounded by “Only if you avoid being hit for a very long time does this time return to normal” - when the player finds out about this rule, he might just wait out this whole period each time he gets hurt, to maximize his healing potential.
I also think that making the horse controls the same as the foot controls (or very close) can be a good idea, but it made me think about one thing that really can be different on a horse than on foot. Fairly often, a cavalry will fire in a different direction than the direction the horse is moving ; for instance, the horse might run alongside a target and the rider would shoot towards it.
One way to do this would be to adopt Robotron-style controls, with one stick controlling movement and the other one firing, but this can be difficult to handle. Another one would be to reserve a button to lock the direction of firing, like in arcade games such as Contra 3 or Shock Troopers. There’s probably other ways too.
What do you think about it?
Yeah, I thought about those factors concerning health. It’s the kind of thing that’s really hard to tune on paper. At this step of design, I think it’s better to give ideas on how to deal with problems, then tune it once you can play it.
It’s hard how it will actually feel in the game. Considering the penalty for dying is very low, maybe it just won’t be worth it to lose a lot of time, as you say. Or maybe players will do it anyway — it’s impossible to know until there’s at least a prototype to play.
As for horse controls, with the controls I mentioned it would be easy to shoot sideways. Since it uses the same controls as on foot, shooting sideways can be done the same way as strafing on foot. Your horse goes in a direction, but you keep the camera in another and shoot that way.
Ah, so the camera also controls aiming. Got it. Haven’t actually played Gears of War so I wasn’t too sure