Sniper Map

One of the new features that came out of the redesign of the missions is that there are now more sniper nests than snipers. This means that the player will be able to reposition the snipers around the mission area. So we had to come up with a system to allow the player to control the position of the snipers and luckily one of the games we looked at during the research phase of the game had such a system. It had stuck with me as it seemed to be a simple solution that added a new menu page and keep the controls simple.

The Strangers

The flash game The Strangers gave the player two snipers that could move around to four sniping positions. To do this the game had a special menu that showed a map of the world, each sniper with their field of view and each position. When the player mouse’s over an empty position they can see that position’s field of view and two buttons representing each sniper. To move a sniper the player must mouse over an empty position and then click the button for which sniper they want to move here. Then while a sniper is in transition the player sees a progress bar under the position they are moving to; the player cannot do anything with that sniper until they reach their destination.

Remote Shepherd

There were a few things that I felt could have been done better in our implementation of the move sniper menu. The most obvious change is that I made the map look like a physical road map and gave each sniper element a hand drawn look. We did this to give the menu a gritty comic book look and feel unlike the digital look of The Strangers’ version. The other changes were made to the controls of how the player got to this menu and how they interact with the map.