Welcome to this weeks State of the Game! Work continues on the new version of No Man’s Pass and it has brought up a very interesting discussion on the forums.
The basic idea is, what are the ideal ranges to be fighting at? This has a major impact on the level design and it’s something I had gone through a lot when creating Giant Leap, a big reason why that level is much smaller than the other levels.
Since No Man’s Pass is the biggest level so far, it really started to become apparent that there was something off with the ranges and level sizes. So I did some tests.
Here I have a ‘range test’ setup showing what it is like fighting at 400 meters and 200 meters.
And here is the same setup at 200 meters.
As you can see in these images, 400 meters is actually a really LONG ways to be engaging the enemy at.
The issue is, most of the levels were designed for engagements at OVER 1000 meters, and are several thousand meters across.
To me, this seems like a fundamental flaw. This also means movement speeds are designed for covering hundreds of meters, which leads to snipers have a big disadvantage. Even on a completely open level like Crater Arena, a sniper can not disable a target faster than the target can close the distance in engagement ranges.
I will be spending this week tweaking values and building some prototype versions of no mans pass to help be choose a course of action to peruse.
I would love to hear your feedback on the forums!