Veni Vidi Violence (vVv)
What is it?
Veni Vidi Violence (VVV) is a Fast Paced FPS actually in development using Unreal Engine 4. It's intended to be play using a gamepad. This project is one year long, with a 12 member team including Game Designers, Game Artists, Developers and Sound Designers.
VVV puts you in the Ancient South of France as a Time cop. Your goal is to destroy an hydroelectric dam that Romans, with the help of time travelling Axis force member, will use to power firearms factory.
Credits to: Arthur JAMES, Loïc LECOMTE, Paul ARTIGE, Jorys ABADIE, Morgan CAMENEN, Lucas DZIURA, Victor GIROUX, Jonas FELIX, Eddy NJIKI, Louise JEANSON, Pierre RAMEY, Floriane MOREL
Big thanks to: Mikee Goodman for the voice acting
Design intentions
When developping Veni Vidi Violence (vVv), we focused on two design pillars taken from the Quantic Foundry Gamer Motivation Model to craft the desired experience as they fit our editorial target:
- Sensory overload
- Destruction
We also wanted to convey that experience through the gamepad which was one of the main challenge. Playing a FPS on gamepad is always a bit clunky so it's hard to convey a feeling of speed and excitement while struggling with the aiming component.
To match our design will, we designed a brand new aim assist that I will explain more in details in a next part. You can see the overall result in the gameplay video:
Overall design
We wanted our character to feel like a violent storm, a super agent capable of beating an entire army. In order to do so, we gave him a large panel of actions.
The Feature Loop is made of three components: Run, Fight and Resolve.
Run comprised: running, jumping, dashing, climbing and swapping which is a unique ability who enables the playable character to switch his position with an enemy while smacking it against near surfaces.
Fight comprised: shooting with the rifle, shooting with the shotgun, shooting a time stop wave, dealing powerful blow and throwing grenades.
The rifle is meant to be a versatile weapon, it deals long range damage to a simple opponent. It is usable in every situation.
The shotgun deals damage in a wide area in front of the playable character. It deals damage depending on the distance. It is useful as a crowd management tool, since the main enemy is a close range one.
The time stop wave can be used as a crowd managment tool or as a panic button. It stops enemies and their projectiles for a certain time. This ability colldown after few seconds.
Finally, the player can throw grenades to face a specific type of enemy or large groups of melee ones. The grenades bounce on the ground and walls and explode after few seconds. They also explode when hitting an enemy.
The player character can also deliver powerful blows to enemies. It is a useful options when reloading.
Screen spacing
As part of the readability, we designed the silhouette of the playable character's weapon following certain rules:
- Weapon's vanishing lines must aim at the screen center
- The aim column (in white in the images) should be as empty as possible
- The weapon must take screen space to look powerful
We studied several games like in the following schemes:
Finally, we stopped on the following scheme as a reference for the future gun silhouettes and placement in the camera:
Aim assist
Gamepad is clunky. We needed a aiming system that allows players to run and jump around while shooting at enemies using a controller.
We tried several options before finding the good one. We copied some of AAA games' aim assist to start but is wasn't enough to convey the experience we wanted.
The idea behind our aim assit is that players have to place enemies barely at the center of the screen to shoot them. With that concept, the crosshair is irrelevant and tell misleading information: it tells that you have to be precise. So we removed it, and replace it in some way with the rifle pointing at the enemy that will take the shot for extra sign.
The aim assist decide which enemy will take the shot based on two factors: their distance from the center of the screen (player's will) and their distance from the playable character (threat).
If players wants to shoot at specific enemies or elements, we added a laser sight that get rid of the aim assist.
Playtests
Playtest were hard to organized during COVID-19 but were essential to sport weak points in our work. We managed to organized few playtest in real life and the others were in remote. You can see the overall process of it in my website by clicking HERE