How to make a paintball game.

If you're going to make a paintball game, you need to do it like this.


  • Focus on one league only, like the PSP. Ignore woodsball because that's better served by games like CoD, and because paintball is a small market and you dont have the cash to throw around on redundant content.
  • Focus on the gameplay first and foremost. Capture the experience. What does a team have to deal with at a major tournament? Weather affects sliding distances and stamina. Refs running around can be distracting. Crowd noise and coaching.
  • Individual skills unique to paintball need to be included to get the feel right. Reloading while shooting is a big one. Slides, dives, running and gunning, communication. All of this could be built into an RPG system *if* you have the time and money.
  • Use a new distribution model like steam, XBLA, PSN. Don't waste money putting boxes on shelves.
  • Get the basic gameplay right before worrying about how many markers you have in the game. You can add that sort of stuff later as micropayment addons.
  • Get movement to feel right. Acceleration and deceleration. More like Mirror's Edge than Quake.
  • In that vein, remember that the brand of marker has no effect on gameplay. All markers should be identical besides sound signatures and looks. This also stops things from becoming "pay to win" which everybody hates.
  • Get the look right. By focusing on one league you only need one set of bunkers, so there's plenty of time to get all the event locations true to life. Build 3D versions of all five PSP stops.
  • Customisation is then a big one. Provide a way for players to import their own jersey designs, or create them in the game. Custom field layouts, bunker setups, player profiles, marker anno.
  • Stats. Just like PBA.
And that it how you do it. One league. A real sports game as it should be. If you have a whole lotta money and time left over then perhaps recreate Living Legends or OK DDay from satellite data etc. - but really, get the basics right first.

Comments

Post a Comment

Keep it civil.

Popular posts from this blog

Paintball is impossible to film live.

Image
This shot looks great on a poster. It sucks during live coverage. Anyone can make an exciting paintball reel in premiere or final cut. It's MUCH harder to do it live.  We've been debating this for so many years. Paintball has certainly been on TV before, but it's always been... mid. If you ask a paintballer why it's so hard to film they'll normally tell you "because there's no focal point". And they're right - paintball has no single point of focus. Action can be happening everywhere, all the time. Every player "has the ball" all the time. That's part of what makes it so much fun - you're not being left out if nobody passes to you. But mate it sucks to film in a way that is easy to follow. How do you know where to point the cameras? And even if they're pointing the right way, things happen so fast that a lot of the time you end up missing things because you're on the wrong camera at that moment. So how do you decide which ...
Read more

Try not to puke

This one is a workout. aka Push the Payload. Take a standard speedball field. On one team's side at the 30 in the middle there's a differently colored aztec or small temple.  Two teams of 4.  Make sure there are clear corner markers and a clear startgate that's tall and can be used for cover. When shot, you respawn by running around one of your own back corners, across to your other corner, then back to your startgate. Wipe yourself down (or sub out) while in cover, then rejoin the fight. Or: wait for teammates to show up and then all breakout at once. Your call. Your goal: push the payload , which is the aztec. You need to get it past the 50 to score one point, to the opposition 40 for two points, and to the opposition 30 for three points and a "delivery", ending the point. Then there's a break between points and now the other team goes on offense and tries to push it the other way.  A match would be two five minute push attempts per team, for a total 20...
Read more

We're trying to design a new version of pro paintball

Image
Hypothetical: We're trying to design a new "pro" version of speedball. Maybe it needs to be: team based easy to ref. Probably shouldn't be getting refs to count bodies during the game. no electronics. To keep it playable for walkon or outlaw games. no timers other than the main game limit. Again, this is a ref load and outlaw ball issue. easy to admin. So, I think just one or two objects. Having loads of flags gets a bit funky. easy to explain. No complex scoring structure. Definitely no points-per-kill or points-per-body (alive or dead).  playable anywhere there's bunkers. No need for walls or buildings or whatever. Minimal special equipment. So ideally you could just use a flag or a ball. No paint lines required to mark the field. Again - outlaw. Any field, anywhere, any time. An incentive balance that makes flag action happen while the opposition still has bodies alive at least, say, 50% of the time. What happens when you put all that in your brain and stew on ...
Read more