Scout Mode

As I mentioned in an earlier post we created a new game mode called Scout where the player views through a camera and has a directional microphone. The first thing to notice the HUD is designed to match what the player would see while looking through the viewfinder on high end digital camera. The squares and circle have no bearing in our game, but are there to simply match what would be seen through a real camera's viewfinder.

Scout HUD

The only element that remains from the shooter mode is the compass that is there so the player can now where they are facing. All the elements for the scope have been removed because you are no longer looking through a rifle scope. The character dialogue areas have also been removed because the player in this mode has noise canceling headphones on to focus on the sound picked up by the mic.

Dialogue Bubbles

The image above demonstrates how the dialogue that is picked up by the directional mic is presented to the player. We spent a week discussing several ways in which we could present the dialogue to the player. We finally settled on using comic book bubbles to keep all dialogue consistent throughout the entire game. With this approach we did lose the ability to lower the volume of noise on the edge of the mic’s range which he cleverly got around. As a voice becomes quiter we replace more and more characters in the dialogue with random characters. Then the location of each bubble is randomly selected as any locational information is lost when using a directional mic.