What lead Phase 2?

During the first major demo at HTC, the biggest bit of feedback I received while hosting the demo was that players wanted more guns, followed by the need for more maps. Taking this feedback on board I pushed for a more diverse combat system that rewarded player creativity - quickly this drive lead to me taking on the project lead role and designing many systems that would be used for later games and unreleased updates.

Fennec Labs was a small company at the time, so I took part in multiple jobs that really pushed my skillset further.

Adopting Agile Methodology and Jira

The biggest difficult we faced in Phase 1 was each team member had a completely different schedule with a limited window for meetings. This was mostly due to the different work style each person had this included office, hybrid and remote working with flexible working days/hours and time zones to boot. I introduced biweekly planning meetings and the use of Jira to help keep track of work and deadlines.

In the early days a lot of this was bare bones but even in its limited capacity it helped mitigate some of the communication issues inherent to a team split across different buildings and time zones.

Weapon types

The Pistol

The first weapon in RE:COIL, despite its age it was still modified in the combat update. The original Pistol had one fire mode where the longer you held the trigger the more damage the bullet would do. The main fault with this system was it was fire on release - which cause spammed shots to feel unnatural or not fire at all.

To correct this we developed a fire mode concept where players could toggle between multiple fire modes. The new default fire mode was a more traditional press to fire pistol and the alternative fire was the original charge fire mode. This fixed the issue of an unresponsive gun but created a new issue of people struggling to find the fire mode button.

The Shotgun

The shotgun had two fire modes, a wide spread shotgun and an AoE grenade launcher. The shotgun caused a number of balance issues due to the small 6x6m areas inherent to Arena scale - the best solution we found was in the environments we made, rather than the weapon itself. By ensuring that there were a diverse amount of long corridors, sharp angles and arena debris, the shotgun pellets would catch on things where the other weapon types would not. This gave other weapon types the ability to punish an overambitious shotgun user.

The AoE grenade was also an unusual learning experience. The blast radius of the grenade was almost half the entire playspace but very rarely felt that large. This was due to those same corridors and sharp angles blocking the extremes of the blast. This helped me develop my spacial awareness when designing levels both in this project and future ones.

The SMG

Like the previous guns the SMG had two fire modes, a fast firing automatic bullet hose and a slow firing frozen bullet mode. The fast firing mode had a slightly worse dps than the pistol but was offset by the ease of an automatic weapon. The slow firing mode was a more unique mechanic I came up with, where bullets would appear as stationary mines on trigger pull, then would travel at super fast speeds on trigger release. This created a pretty dynamic weapon that could control areas of the map when used correctly.

Despite the mechanic being interesting most people who play RE:COIL are novice gamers who struggle to understand pull and release mechanic. This results in most players just using the fast firing mode. This did teach me that sometimes a simple solution is better than an over complicated one.

VR UI

A key mechanic linked to the weapon system was swapping weapons. I came up with a utility belt concept, where the options appear at approximately your waist height and slowly moved around you to match your view direction. The simplicity and natural immersion that VR brings helped people who were new to VR understand this implicitly. I took this mechanic to later games I designed.

Level Design

During this phase I spent time working on maps that complimented the new guns. I was responsible for the greybox and initial blockouts of both maps shown in the above trailer. I relied heavily on re-using elements of existing maps to support any new elements I made as I was still very inexperienced and relied heavily on expierence of the people around me. The biggest difficulty I faced while creating them was lighting and light probes - which I’m still grappling with today.

One Game, Two Control schemes

During this update I was also a part of the team tasked with coming up with a control scheme for the Striker Mavrik Pro. One idea was create a new version of the game that dropped multiple features, including the shield, in order to support the Mavrik. This was an imperfect solution that had push back from the feedback we gathered from player testing. Instead I suggested we used the same tracking device that was used on the Mavrik to track the players other offhand. This allowed for much easier cross play as neither control scheme had a direct advantage over the other.

The only disadvantage that comes up from using more tracking devices was it added more points of failure to the system. Fortunately however players were happier with a buggy infrequent shield over no shield at all.