Shooter

The majority of the tuning I performed on this project was in regards to the game’s combat. I gathered 5 play testers and recorded the data from their test’s into a spreadsheet. For the combat, the main data I recorded was the Time-To-Kill (TTK) for each weapon against each enemy. After analyzing the data, I changed the values of several variables to get the TTK for the enemies into the time ranges wanted for the project.

There are two types of weapons for the player to use and two types of enemies for the player to fight. The two weapons are the pistol and the rifle. The two types of enemies are fodder and elite.

Before the tuning, the pistol did the higher damage of the two and the rate of fire was low so the player could shoot it almost as if it was a rifle. I tuned the pistol to be a slow to fire weapon that packs a large punch. I raised the value of the fire rate to heavily slow down how fast the player could shoot the pistol. I also raised the amount of damage the pistol does to make it more worthwhile to use even though it was slow to fire.

The rifle did much less damage than the pistol when starting out and had the same rate of fire. After gathering the data, I tuned the rifle to keep its low damage, but I lowered the value for the rate of fire to allow the player to shoot the rifle at a faster rate. I also increased the amount of ammunition the magazine for the could hold so the player did not have to reload as often and slow them down.

The fodder enemies were too easy to kill before the tuning, even more so after the changes I made to the pistol especially. To make sure the player still hit the TTK range wanted for the fodder enemies, I increased the amount of health they had.

The elite enemies had far too much health when gathering the initial data, making the TTK high. To lower it I decreased the amount of health the elite enemies has to hit the TTK range. I also increased their movement speed to make them more of a threat to the player.