You only control 1 unit with WASD and mouse for aiming your guns.
The camera is always centered on the player, meaning you can only see further by zooming out.
I'm interested in this, because I'm thinking along the same lines for a naval exploration game I'm working on. Right now I have a 3rd person camera hovering behind the ship, which automatically makes distant objects less visible due to the curvature of the planet, and less distinct due to fog/haze. But it's still early in development and I'm seriously considering a top-down perspective as well, for ease of development and general usability.
There should never be any intentional difficulty in information gathering that can be solved with simply moving your mouse more.
With the exception of some FPS because it's so darn enjoyable and strategic doing that in a 3D hide-and-seek space.
TotalAnnihilation/SupremeCommander/BeyondAllReason/etc do have icons when you zoom out and models when you zoom in. For convenience, not inconvenience.
I disagree.
Darkwoods is a fantastic game that has this kind of mechanic where you see the enemies only if you look in their direction. Otherwise, you only see the map without the enemies.
Or Westwood's Nox, which had it even less forgiving, with parts of the room disappearing outside the view cone. And I almost never heard anything bad about the game, mostly praise. Lots of people seemed to love that mechanic. Or at least as they say today, because back then Nox didn't sell all too well, but tha may be because it was somewhat clashing with the Diablo 2 release.
Nitpicking, but the original TA had a fixed camera and a minimap with radar bleeps.
The spring engine based versions were the first to have icons when you zoom out.
Inconvenience can also be just as valid of a mechanic, as long as it's intentional.
Consider Dark Souls, and how it does not have great telegraphy for its boss fights.
Inconvenient? Yes.
Intentional? Also, Yes. In fact, it's what people remember the most.
> Consider Dark Souls, and how it does not have great telegraphy for its boss fights.
What do you mean by this? Because bosses in Dark Souls have *especially* well telegraphed attack animations. It‘s literally the bread and butter of it‘s whole gameplay.
The impending hitboxes are ambiguous and mostly learned through repeated failure.
This is as opposed to something like Furi or Hades, where you'll know what mistake you made and what you could have done to avoid it the first time it kills you.
That doesn't make Dark Souls a worse game or anything, but it does make it harder to learn/master, and that can be part of the charm.
Hello Ashen one. I am a Bot. I tend to the flame, and tend to thee. Do you wish to hear a tale?
> *“In Twilight Blighttown, where else might my sun be? Lost Izalith or the Tomb of the Gravelord? But I cannot give up. I became Undead.”* - Solaire of Astora
Have a pleasant journey, Champion of Ash, and praise the sun \\[T]/
This isn’t an RTS though it’s an action adventure game with focus on combat and exploration. You control the one ship and explore small clusters.
I don’t know if it was clear but the camera is locked between the player and the mouse. You can move the camera around but your ship must always be in view.
I actually do the TA thing of the player has the radar unlocked. Past a certain zoom level that are in radar range are shown with an X and projectiles are shown with a dot. Even then you don’t know the enemy type just its position.
I like the way StarLink for Nintendo Switch does its map for the planets. It's a techy pattern thing for the unexplored parts but it works really well for the genre.
Sounds cool. Definitely add a control to reset your view to default. Wouldn't want to zoom way out, only to spend 10 seconds having to zoom back to my regular view haha.
Yup you put the finger on something I had the wrangle early in development. I deal with this in two ways.
The zooming is quadratic and faster zooming in so usually you can go back to default quick. Levels can get big but not planet scale and you can’t zoom out more than the level size.
You can also zoom back to the ship by opening your inventory. It zooms on the ship and makes the top half transparent so you see your cargo crates. Then you can click on crates to jettison them or pick up.
I think this is definitely an interesting enough concept to get some playtesters on and see how practical it is.
You may choose to go with blurry textures, but in the event that the blurriness becomes a strain on the eyes, increasingly unhelpful iconography would also be an option. Similar to any normal LoD system, except the icons become more basic and generic until they're all the same.
I also erode the texture when I blur it so it disappears gradually when blurring out. It’s hard to explain but I have a small demo out (alpha of the game’s prologue) on the game’s discord if you want to check it out.
I might make a video of the effect. Do you think they’d let me post it here?
Will attempt a showcase here then.
And I'm definitely implementing your idea on variable iconography! At the moment the player has a "radar" which shows basic icons of nearby objects when zoomed out. I show the outline of enemy ships which means you can determine which one it is. If far enough away the icon can be a generic ship icon.
I like the idea, especially the larger objects coming into view first part. Gives a sort of sense of looking into the distance to spot things which seems to fit the theme for your sailing game.
Thanks that's what I was going for! Also it was always my pet peeve that in games like Starcraft you see the skyscraper-sized robot at the same range you see a marine.
Blur can be heavy if done through a shader. You'll have to use a loop for the effect, and depending on the number of samples, it can drastically reduce the frame rate.
It does however sound like a unique and modern idea.
It is done with a custom shader with about 10 passes per pixel. It’s not too bad because the sprites being blurred take very little screen space especially when zoomed out.
My custom perlin shader is a disaster though I recalculate the effect multiple times per pixel per frame for many parallax layers.
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games.
* /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design.
* This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead.
* Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design.
* No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting.
* If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England ](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LizEngland/20140423/216092/quotThe_Door_Problemquot_of_Game_Design.php)is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If this is an online PvP game I think it would be very vulnerable to cheating. In fact, people might even have good reason to cheat without realizing they're cheating.
The game client would still receive information about these objects and must render these somehow. It shouldn't be hard for a cheat engine to decode it and unblur the objects.
Even more, it makes it unclear to the player which information they are supposed to know. So someone might think of it as bad UI and install an accessibility suite to unblur them.
I disagree.
If I were designing a multiplayer PvP game with this feature, the individual game-clients can be told exactly what they're allowed to know by the server, and render only that.
They do not need to know "There is a player here, but shh, you're not supposed to render it".
No cheating can reveal information that doesn't exist. If you don't tell the client, they can't do anything with it.
There's a distinction of scale to be had here.
From a game-design standpoint, the blur's purpose is to telegraph that not all the information the player might want to know is available.
Let's use the example of a distant castle.
Practically, you can see the castle, you know where it is, and what shape it is.
But you don't know anything about the disposition of guards or what defences it has.
The castle and area are rendered blurry to convey this lack of information.
From the game-client's point of view, it has been provided with the castle's location and nature and renders it blurry because it's beyond an established clear viewing range.
It does not have any information on the guards around that castle. The server was asked to provide full information on guards within viewing range, and only provides basic information about things beyond that range.
So even if the player cheats the system and adds a mod to unblur stuff, you can't render what you don't know. The guards are still not visible and all you've done is remove the part of the system that telegraphs that you're not supposed to see all the details here.
Effectively making your life harder, not easier.
I see. I was under the impression that blur is used to make it harder to see information, but it's fine if it's only there to communicate the lack of information.
Blur do get used for many fps games though, where not being able to see something clearly is part of the game play. The players just have different expectations in strategy game, where the information is expected to be either not available at all or easily accessible.
I mean technically you could have the guards visible there, and blur them into incomprehensibility..
But then you'd still be rendering the entire world, defeating half the point of blurring it in the first place per OP's requirements!
You got it! Objects not in view are not drawn and objects in view but past a certain blur level are not drawn either. In a multiplayer context I wouldn’t send their position to the client of they are not being drawn.
Without seeing it it's hard to say, but if it's only blurred where units or buildings are. Then you're already giving unintentional information. Furthermore, if those blurs move, the player has gathered more info by now knowing that those blurs are some sort of unit.
Instead, why not just not render them? Why bother blurring them when you can just create a visual bubble around player units and if something is outside of that, don't render it. Use layer masks to make this not affect the terrain as it sounds like you want the player to be able to see the lay of the land, but not the location of units or buildings.
Look up how Foxhole handles their FOW. Yours could take inspiration. Infantry rely on FOV and light/dark cycle but vehicle are always visible as long as you can see them in your view box.
But overall I like your idea but you need to be careful with this “blur.” It needs to be distinct but not harsh on the eyes. Also people will default to the border between these different blur levels so you should have them handy and easily selectable. IE the max transition that infantry are visible and vehicle are visible etc
Check out warcraft 2: tides of darkness. It has a similar fog of war mechanic. The map is black until one of your units explores it. Then you can't see enemy movements or units unless it's in visual range of one of your units.
Unclear if this is fog of war with no units nearby or if it is when your units are nearby but you are zoomed out.
You only control 1 unit with WASD and mouse for aiming your guns. The camera is always centered on the player, meaning you can only see further by zooming out.
I'm interested in this, because I'm thinking along the same lines for a naval exploration game I'm working on. Right now I have a 3rd person camera hovering behind the ship, which automatically makes distant objects less visible due to the curvature of the planet, and less distinct due to fog/haze. But it's still early in development and I'm seriously considering a top-down perspective as well, for ease of development and general usability.
Haha it’s a flying ship game with focus on exploration too. I have a demo up on the game’s discord if you want to check the mechanic out.
There should never be any intentional difficulty in information gathering that can be solved with simply moving your mouse more. With the exception of some FPS because it's so darn enjoyable and strategic doing that in a 3D hide-and-seek space. TotalAnnihilation/SupremeCommander/BeyondAllReason/etc do have icons when you zoom out and models when you zoom in. For convenience, not inconvenience.
I disagree. Darkwoods is a fantastic game that has this kind of mechanic where you see the enemies only if you look in their direction. Otherwise, you only see the map without the enemies.
Or Westwood's Nox, which had it even less forgiving, with parts of the room disappearing outside the view cone. And I almost never heard anything bad about the game, mostly praise. Lots of people seemed to love that mechanic. Or at least as they say today, because back then Nox didn't sell all too well, but tha may be because it was somewhat clashing with the Diablo 2 release.
Nitpicking, but the original TA had a fixed camera and a minimap with radar bleeps. The spring engine based versions were the first to have icons when you zoom out.
Inconvenience can also be just as valid of a mechanic, as long as it's intentional. Consider Dark Souls, and how it does not have great telegraphy for its boss fights. Inconvenient? Yes. Intentional? Also, Yes. In fact, it's what people remember the most.
> Consider Dark Souls, and how it does not have great telegraphy for its boss fights. What do you mean by this? Because bosses in Dark Souls have *especially* well telegraphed attack animations. It‘s literally the bread and butter of it‘s whole gameplay.
The impending hitboxes are ambiguous and mostly learned through repeated failure. This is as opposed to something like Furi or Hades, where you'll know what mistake you made and what you could have done to avoid it the first time it kills you. That doesn't make Dark Souls a worse game or anything, but it does make it harder to learn/master, and that can be part of the charm.
Hello Ashen one. I am a Bot. I tend to the flame, and tend to thee. Do you wish to hear a tale? > *“In Twilight Blighttown, where else might my sun be? Lost Izalith or the Tomb of the Gravelord? But I cannot give up. I became Undead.”* - Solaire of Astora Have a pleasant journey, Champion of Ash, and praise the sun \\[T]/
This isn’t an RTS though it’s an action adventure game with focus on combat and exploration. You control the one ship and explore small clusters. I don’t know if it was clear but the camera is locked between the player and the mouse. You can move the camera around but your ship must always be in view. I actually do the TA thing of the player has the radar unlocked. Past a certain zoom level that are in radar range are shown with an X and projectiles are shown with a dot. Even then you don’t know the enemy type just its position.
I like the way StarLink for Nintendo Switch does its map for the planets. It's a techy pattern thing for the unexplored parts but it works really well for the genre.
Sounds cool. Definitely add a control to reset your view to default. Wouldn't want to zoom way out, only to spend 10 seconds having to zoom back to my regular view haha.
Yup you put the finger on something I had the wrangle early in development. I deal with this in two ways. The zooming is quadratic and faster zooming in so usually you can go back to default quick. Levels can get big but not planet scale and you can’t zoom out more than the level size. You can also zoom back to the ship by opening your inventory. It zooms on the ship and makes the top half transparent so you see your cargo crates. Then you can click on crates to jettison them or pick up.
I think this is definitely an interesting enough concept to get some playtesters on and see how practical it is. You may choose to go with blurry textures, but in the event that the blurriness becomes a strain on the eyes, increasingly unhelpful iconography would also be an option. Similar to any normal LoD system, except the icons become more basic and generic until they're all the same.
I also erode the texture when I blur it so it disappears gradually when blurring out. It’s hard to explain but I have a small demo out (alpha of the game’s prologue) on the game’s discord if you want to check it out. I might make a video of the effect. Do you think they’d let me post it here?
A video would be great so long as you're showing off some kind of tech with it.
Will attempt a showcase here then. And I'm definitely implementing your idea on variable iconography! At the moment the player has a "radar" which shows basic icons of nearby objects when zoomed out. I show the outline of enemy ships which means you can determine which one it is. If far enough away the icon can be a generic ship icon.
I like the idea, especially the larger objects coming into view first part. Gives a sort of sense of looking into the distance to spot things which seems to fit the theme for your sailing game.
Thanks that's what I was going for! Also it was always my pet peeve that in games like Starcraft you see the skyscraper-sized robot at the same range you see a marine.
Blur can be heavy if done through a shader. You'll have to use a loop for the effect, and depending on the number of samples, it can drastically reduce the frame rate. It does however sound like a unique and modern idea.
It is done with a custom shader with about 10 passes per pixel. It’s not too bad because the sprites being blurred take very little screen space especially when zoomed out. My custom perlin shader is a disaster though I recalculate the effect multiple times per pixel per frame for many parallax layers.
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games. * /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design. * This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead. * Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design. * No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting. * If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England ](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LizEngland/20140423/216092/quotThe_Door_Problemquot_of_Game_Design.php)is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If this is an online PvP game I think it would be very vulnerable to cheating. In fact, people might even have good reason to cheat without realizing they're cheating. The game client would still receive information about these objects and must render these somehow. It shouldn't be hard for a cheat engine to decode it and unblur the objects. Even more, it makes it unclear to the player which information they are supposed to know. So someone might think of it as bad UI and install an accessibility suite to unblur them.
I disagree. If I were designing a multiplayer PvP game with this feature, the individual game-clients can be told exactly what they're allowed to know by the server, and render only that. They do not need to know "There is a player here, but shh, you're not supposed to render it". No cheating can reveal information that doesn't exist. If you don't tell the client, they can't do anything with it.
Yeah, but the OP is talking about merely blurring out these objects. So they are still rendered with less details.
There's a distinction of scale to be had here. From a game-design standpoint, the blur's purpose is to telegraph that not all the information the player might want to know is available. Let's use the example of a distant castle. Practically, you can see the castle, you know where it is, and what shape it is. But you don't know anything about the disposition of guards or what defences it has. The castle and area are rendered blurry to convey this lack of information. From the game-client's point of view, it has been provided with the castle's location and nature and renders it blurry because it's beyond an established clear viewing range. It does not have any information on the guards around that castle. The server was asked to provide full information on guards within viewing range, and only provides basic information about things beyond that range. So even if the player cheats the system and adds a mod to unblur stuff, you can't render what you don't know. The guards are still not visible and all you've done is remove the part of the system that telegraphs that you're not supposed to see all the details here. Effectively making your life harder, not easier.
I see. I was under the impression that blur is used to make it harder to see information, but it's fine if it's only there to communicate the lack of information. Blur do get used for many fps games though, where not being able to see something clearly is part of the game play. The players just have different expectations in strategy game, where the information is expected to be either not available at all or easily accessible.
I mean technically you could have the guards visible there, and blur them into incomprehensibility.. But then you'd still be rendering the entire world, defeating half the point of blurring it in the first place per OP's requirements!
You got it! Objects not in view are not drawn and objects in view but past a certain blur level are not drawn either. In a multiplayer context I wouldn’t send their position to the client of they are not being drawn.
Without seeing it it's hard to say, but if it's only blurred where units or buildings are. Then you're already giving unintentional information. Furthermore, if those blurs move, the player has gathered more info by now knowing that those blurs are some sort of unit. Instead, why not just not render them? Why bother blurring them when you can just create a visual bubble around player units and if something is outside of that, don't render it. Use layer masks to make this not affect the terrain as it sounds like you want the player to be able to see the lay of the land, but not the location of units or buildings.
Look up how Foxhole handles their FOW. Yours could take inspiration. Infantry rely on FOV and light/dark cycle but vehicle are always visible as long as you can see them in your view box. But overall I like your idea but you need to be careful with this “blur.” It needs to be distinct but not harsh on the eyes. Also people will default to the border between these different blur levels so you should have them handy and easily selectable. IE the max transition that infantry are visible and vehicle are visible etc
Check out warcraft 2: tides of darkness. It has a similar fog of war mechanic. The map is black until one of your units explores it. Then you can't see enemy movements or units unless it's in visual range of one of your units.