Arrowhood is a 2v2 Splitscreen Arena shooter, where the players’ goal is to capture and hold on to the crown without being shot down by the other team.
Team size – 13
Engine – Unreal
Time – Roughly 4 weeks
Genre – Arena first-person shooter
Inspirations – Quake 3 & Overwatch
Design goal – Mix two sports (parkour and archery)
My Goal & Responsibilities
As gameplay designer I designed most of the gameplay features and lead the direction.
As tech designer, I implemented the gameplay mechanics and the gameplay loop, UI, Animations, and other miscellaenous things.
As a product owner, I facilitated a workflow for fast iterations and daily playtesting.
Given my knowledge of Unreal and FPS games, I knew the biggest unknown would lie in the design while implementation and iterations would be very quick.
Why was it an unknown?
Shooters generally have a distinctly high skillfloor, especially with controllers, and they also tend to emphasize skill differences. Therefore, they are an suboptimal genre for casual partygames.
The requirements added extra challenges:
Splitscreen:
- Only controller support
- Adds friction when aiming.
- Limited screen real estate and audio.
- greatly reduced situational awareness.
Parkour
- Fast movement
- Makes aiming harder
Archery
- Bow mechanics greatly emphasizes precision
- Undermined by parkour and controller requirements.
Player goal
Hold the crown without dying to score points!
Fire arrows at other players to kill them!
Use fast movement to dodge arrows, climb buildings, and dash between rooftops.
Design Pillars
Aim Assist System
How it works
Holding left trigger rotates the camera towards a target enemy.
- Signified by the white orb and lowered FoV.
Any right-stick input adds an offset rotation, to compensate for movement.
- Resets when the left trigger is released.
Design Intention
- Quite novel yet technically simple
- Removes the need to center and track players’ manually
- Emphasize compensating for movement
- Emphasize movement while shooting
- Enable faster movement
- Lowers friction & skillfloor
- Increases both speed & precision
Design Process
Problem – Shooting other players is super hard
Players had 5%~ accuracy according to our stat tracker.
Something we found early was that our fast freeform movement was fun and popular. However, it made shooting harder, as players were harder to aim at, and quickly escape situations.
Players had to quickly fire leading shots to kill each other, which isn’t ideal for a controller, with their limited range of movement.
Solution – Give players the ability to automatically center their aim on visible enemies.
This was a desperate effort to make our cursed design work.
I wanted to allow players to quickly center aim, and then compensate for travel time with the joystisck. Centering aim would make up for the joysticks’ restricted input range.
Problem – Longer distances are still hard due to travel time
Players would abandon long-range fighting altogether and get into close range and spam arrows.
Solution – Allow players to offset their lock-on aim, with their right-stick, to predict enemy movement
Movement
Mechanics
WallClimb
AirDash
HookShot
Notes
- Wallclimb / hookshot works on everything.
- Simplifies and speeds up level navigation
- Movement speed is relatively high.
- Movement doesn’t impair accuracy.
- Movement speed is unaffected by movement direction.
Design intention
- Emphasis on speed and simplicity.
- Reduce downtime after respawn.
- Simplifying level navigation lowers skillfloor.
Thought Process of making everything climbable
The movement in arrowhood was a key part in making the game approachable.
During playtests, we early on noticed that people liked the movement mechanics.
During further playtesting, when we tried restricting movement by reducing climbable areas to create more complex level design, we noticed that the gameplay slowed down drastically, and new players were more confused, as navigating the level was harder.
We wanted to make the game as approachable as possible, and settled making everything climbable.
Powerups
Freezing Arrow
Bomb Arrow
- Picked up at spawnpoints in the level, these temporarily empower the players arrows.
- The reward makes the powerups explicit objectives for players to play around.
- Adds tactical depth to level movement and gameplay, with little complexity.
"Explicit" objective?
Most shooters, especially tactical ones, have implicit objectives, such as highgrounds or chokepoints that offer tactical advantages. These rely on players discovery, and reward them for understanding the level geometry. This is not ideal for a partygame.
Contrarily, these powerups’ spawnpoints are instantly recognizable as advantageous, without analyzing the level thoroughly.
Macro Gameplay Design
Main goal– reward good players without scrutinizing others.
Win Condition
- Hold the crown without dying to get points.
- The crown and its wearer are visible through walls.
Intention
- Add depth through strategy
- De-emphasize skill-difference.
- Easy to understand.
- Always visible – apparent directive.
- Comeback-mechanic for losing team.
Teambased 2v2
- The game is designed for 2v2 Only.
Intention
- Add depth through teamwork.
- De-emphasize skill-difference.
- Easier to balance.
- Players can mix teams to even out skill differences.
Personal Scoreboard
- Players have hidden, and individual scoreboards.
- Shown while button is held.
Intention
- Acquire playtest data for analysis.
- Opt-in competitive aspect
- Emphasizes individual skill.
Controller mapping
- Controls based on modern first-person shooter controls.
- All important actions are on the shoulder buttons.
- Notably, jump.
- The right thumb is free to always control the camera, enabling naturally faster gameplay.
- Supports the speed pillar.
- Lowers friction & skillfloor.
Bow & Ammo
I scripted the bow as well as both iterations of the ammo system.
- Arrow charge while holding the firing button.
- Releasing shoots the arrow at a speed based on charge time.
- Every player has 5 arrows that. automatically recharge over time.
- Represented by sprites under the crosshair.