The Camera Is The Enemy
Friday, March 25, 2011 at 3:56PM
Sirlin

Check out this "second-person shooter"

The camera is actually the enemy looking at you, and there are multiple cameras (split screen) when there are multiple enemies. This is a pretty interesting idea and the game explores it well. There are slow moving enemies, fast moving ones, enemies with shields, teleporting enemies, a really annoying bird thing that suddenly swoops in fast, zombie enemies that come back to life after killed, and more. The "blind" enemy is one of the more interesting ones in that you have to use the cameras of other enemies to even see him.

The ammo mechanic is simple and well-done too. You have a laser and missiles, each which recharge slowly to their max capacity. It takes 3 laser shots to kill a normal enemy and one missile. It's actually suboptimal to sit on your unused missiles, because then you aren't getting any benefit out them refilling over time. So using both missiles and the laser is a good idea. I'm glad that playing in a fun way is also the right thing to do here.

I just wanted to spotlight an interesting mechanic for you guys, but go ahead and play it for yourselves.

Unity3d and Sirlin Games

This second-person shooter was made in the Unity game engine, by the way. Speaking of Unity, if you're an experienced Unity programmer, or a programmer who would like to learn more about Unity, you could help out with online versions of my card games, or a fighting game, all of which are using Unity3d. You can talk to my tech lead Thelo about it here.

Article originally appeared on Sirlin.Net (http://oldsite.sirlin.net/).
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