For Fury I acted as the primary programmer, the “Lead Gameplay Engineer”, and the Designer who compiled everyone’s ideas into something cohesive. I really wanted to share with everyone some of the behind-the-scenes decisions we made along the way. We had to come up with a lot of rules and guidelines to make the game we wanted, and I hope you all have fun learning about it! For now we’re going to deal mostly with the most obvious thing: How levels were designed for the game’s layered “Combat Loop”.
First Ideas
Bombshell’s world consisted of alien landscapes, and we had been tasked with providing something much more “real world” and grounded. In 2016 3D Realms gave the team permission to reconceptualize the game world and character for the Ion Fury version of the universe, barring a few key appearance markers for Shelly.
In our concepts Shelly would be not-too-young to be believable (around age 27), and grounded but snarky. Someone who may like to go out for a drink, but can get down to business with a “get shit done” attitude. She would be a reminder of the female protagonists we had grown up with like Ellen Ripley, Anne Lewis, Sarah Connor, Judge Hershey and countless others from action and science fiction.
The world would be Neo D.C.: a near-future dystopian cityscape with the world divided by financial and military strata. The player would travel from poorer districts to wealthier ones, climbing to different heights and construction quality. The background of how the world functioned wouldn’t be explicitly told in story, but instead experienced by the player through the broader design.
Game Loops Cereal
We worked tightly as a team to come up with the right balance of game systems. When designing the gameplay I placed a focus on consistency, believability, and multiple interacting learnable systems. This made things natural, flexible and fun for players, and gave mappers a clear way to communicate their intent.
Bullet Ballet
Since it’s a large part of the gameplay, first we had to determine the flow of combat. This went through tons of iterations. Originally enemies had more health, and more “smart” tactics (like flanking and circle strafing), and combat was closer to a game like F.E.A.R. After lots of testing and experimentation we settled on a different goal:
Shelly would be a “glass cannon”. Incredibly agile and powerful, but unable to take much direct damage. Players would need to actively avoid taking hits in order to win. To accommodate this, enemies were given distinct styles, attacks, sounds, and animation tells that make it easy to see a threat in advance. Each distinct cue gives a different warning, letting you know what kind of attack is coming to plan ahead for. Projectiles of all types could then be dodged and hits maneuvered around.
Instead of a few very tough and smart enemies we landed on large groups of “trash” enemies mingled with other types in order to turn combat into a dance of constantly shifting priorities. Mappers were directed to place enemies in groups with mixed types. Their differing weaknesses, movement patterns, and projectiles created the rock-paper-scissors-like ballet of picking targets and avoiding incoming fire.
Lots of testing was done to balance “Time to Kill” and “Time to Death”— that being how long it took the player to kill an enemy and vice versa. Each enemy was repeatedly timed to see how long it would take before Shelly was dead starting from full health, and had their attacks tweaked to hit specific time targets. Each enemy also had an encounter stop-watched in order to see how many times you would have to hit them to kill them – measured in seconds – with both their health and Shelly’s weapons adjusted accordingly.
Of course, we knew you can’t always avoid every hit so there’s…
Health Booster Boogie
To balance health we decided to have both instant use Medpaks and carriable Medkits. Mappers were told to restock the player in the next area after major combat (or long string of fights), and sparsely around the edges of those combat areas. Shelly’s health declines rapidly when not successfully dodging hits, so the combination makes players feel like they are living on a knife’s edge but still able to recover from mistakes. A late game addition was the occasionally spawning Emergency Syringe to help stay alive, as some players felt slightly too punished in close fights. To keep balance there’s an actual check for your current health, and the number and frequency spawned depends on difficulty.
As a bit of a boost to players and to build some lore, edible food pickups (Shelly’s fav is Pizza) were added after initial testing as a way for players to restore themselves and even gain more than 100% health! Similar to arcade games of old, we decided that such a small object should give a small but important temporary effect with a touch of additional ridiculousness. Not only do you get more health, but the more you eat the faster all of your movement gets.
Even with all of that help, Shelly is made of glass so you’ll still die quickly unless you have…
Shards, Shards Everywhere!
Armor became integral to balancing the gameplay. Keeping up your armor keeps you alive twice as long, so from the early days we included three sizes of armor suit (Light, Medium, Heavy). To make things feel more predictable, unlike games such as Duke Nukem 3D, there was no randomizer on armor’s usefulness — the same size hit will always give the same size protection letting you soak damage and survive impossible feats. The Hazard Suit was planned early on not just to give protection from environmental damage but against all kinds of acid, gas, or “nuke” attacks that enemies might fire your way, giving you a hidden advantage.
To keep a constant forward momentum we added Small Armor Shards to replenish your supply in small numbers along the way. Us designers especially pushed for them for dual purposes: First, they would rain from enemies during big hits that caused gibs, encouraging you to keep the combat flowing and take risks.
Second, since Armor Shards make players feel safer they would be used as breadcrumbs to guide you through the level. With a small nod to the designs from classic games like Super Mario Bros., major path points or important areas had them placed in distinct lines in order to push you in the next direction subconsciously. The more suggestions we made with shards, the more players were able to find the critical path without even trying.
Ammo/Weapon Placement
Weapons aren’t just for making things go boom. Where, when, and how you actually receive weapons is an important step in the game’s overarching design. Your arsenal is spread out over the entire game in stages to bring a stronger feeling of accomplishment, and to give the player time to become experienced with the new weapon they’ve just been given. The early zones feature Disperser (Shotgun) and Bowling Bombs alongside the occasional SMG. By the midpoint you start to see the Minigun and Ion Bow, and late-game focuses on giving a twist and a refresh to the game with things such as the Disperser Grenades. By this point you’ve also seen the Cluster Puck sprinkled throughout the entire campaign, meaning that the levels can act more as a test of the skills you’ve mastered.
Weapons which were meant as critical to progression were to be placed in obvious, well lit locations and positioned in a way that best attracts attention. Ammo for that weapon would appear near it so you could start to associate the two. Then a scenario where that weapon is useful would appear after, and players could learn a bit about how it works.
Slightly more than the bare minimum amount of ammo was placed along the main paths in order to balance the number of ammo restocks, with extra ammo placed off to the side and in secret areas. Secret areas could also be used to give the player less “important” weapons, and even the chance of seeing powerful weapons early on. Having the reward of extra bullets encourages players to explore the entire level, and gives less experienced players a chance to keep their weapons from being empty since being able to shoot with less accuracy means you’ll run out of bullets faster!
When level designers wanted to require a certain weapon such as explosives, or highlight a certain style of combat, they were asked to place the weapon and some ammunition for it beforehand. They were also asked to restock the player after every autosave point, in order to refresh themselves from the hard work of getting there. Level Designers were otherwise discouraged from forcing players to stick to only one weapon by not giving enough ammo variety. Every weapon is useful, with a unique set of advantages and disadvantages that can be twisted to fit different combat situations. Even the starting pistol, the Loverboy, and your baton–the Electrifryer–can be used with great effect throughout the entire game (fun fact: big enemies are weak to it!).
All of this subliminally tells the player to keep pushing through, and they feel a strong sense of accomplishment just from the act of getting and using the game’s weapons.
PowerUps
PowerUps were added as a fun extra. Max and I, especially, are huge arcade fans and wanted to bring in that sense of something over-the-top into the combat loop. These were left as timed abilities to create small Superhero moments. It’s a way to shift things to the player’s advantage for a moment without seriously affecting the wider game balance. The Hazard Suit can do extra duty as a breathing tank — also getting you through toxic sludge and protecting you from toxic attacks, Super Damage doubles your attack power, Blast Accelerator gives you infinite instant-Homing Bowling Bombs, and so on.
Having the Jump Boots, which gives you a Double-Jump, meant the mappers could include new kinds of hard-to-get-to areas and secrets, as well as spice up the combat in open rooms. Honestly, this also was the most difficult one for development; particularly after we added the Pocket Inventory it meant players could (and did) potentially get to all kinds of crazy places!
It Isn’t the End After All
Don’t worry, we’ll come back in Part 2 and talk about Secret Areas, Sounds, and much more! Oh, and don’t forget Aftershock — it’s an expansion after all so we’re expanding with new elements, and I’ll be able to talk more about them next time!
In the meantime don’t forget to Wishlist Aftershock, and follow Ion Fury on social media for more updates.
Happy trails,
Jonathan “Mblackwell” Strander
