One of our biggest design problems coming into the new semester was that the two guns we had didn’t feel different from one another; they were both full auto, shot quickly, and could be fired one handed with literally zero recoil (although this was mainly cause the old recoil was bugged thanks to Event Tick). Now that we were adding even more guns to the game, this was going to become an even bigger problem: how do we make each gun have its own role and feel different in terms of feel and ease of use? While having different fire modes, damage outputs, and magazine sizes can change the way a gun functions, if guns like the gigantic Light Machine Gun can be one handed like a Glock, they’re all going to feel the same.

The answer, dear reader, is recoil.

Recoil is perhaps the most important aspect of gunplay feel for any game; besides the loud noises they produce when you pull the trigger, recoil is the most prevalent piece of feedback the user receives from a gun, and that stays true in the virtual world. The way a gun recoils determines how powerful it feels; a 9mm pistol has little recoil because it fires a relatively tiny round; a 12 gauge shotgun kicks like a mule because its firing hundreds of tiny pellets out of a shell two times the size of a 9mm round. If the Pistol and Shotgun of Cash Force had the same recoil feeling, then the sense of power the shotgun should have (or vice versa) would be lost. 

With this in mind, I designed a new recoil system that takes advantage of the wonderful input virtual reality provides. Instead of using complicated math for recoil that I used last semester, there are now three values: Recoil X (backwards towards the player), Recoil Y (pitch recoil; the gun goes up), and Recoil Z (yaw recoil; the gun moves left and right). When a weapon is held with one hand in the game, these values are at their maximum: this is where the feeling of power is bestowed. Now if a player one hands the Tommy Gun rifle, it will kick all over the place and make it impossible to hit the broadside of a building….

…which is where the reduction modifiers come in.

To emulate a real life shooting scenario, recoil must be reduced in order to actually hit targets; no one in their right mind would shoot a large caliber rifle with one hand on full auto. Instead, they would grab it with two hands to reduce how much recoil is felt between shots, helping to stabilize the weapon. But this alone is not enough for some weapons. Rifles, machine guns, and other long weapons need to be shouldered to get the gun fully stabilized; if you hold a rifle out in front of you with two hands, its still gonna kick all over the place.

My new recoil design is based on this exact principle! Holding the gun with two hands will apply a reduction modifier to the three recoil variables that makes the gun significantly easier to control between shots. On top of this, holding the gun up to the player’s body area (its very generous) will add another reduction modified for shouldering. These two values can be applied alone or stack to get the full amount of recoil reduction. Now two handed long guns actually need to be shouldered and held with two hands to be effecitve and the smaller guns like the SMG and Pistol can be one handed effectively, even dual wielded! This makes the long guns focused on accuracy while the small guns are focused on rounds down range. Effectively, the new recoil system has totally changed how the game will be played; using the different guns is going to feel a lot more different now!

(did I say I was going to show, not tell? Well, I suppose I should write a blog series on FPS gunplay sometime cause I get really excited talking about it; perhaps over the summer *hint hint*)