Episode #2: The Dual Function of Cover: Guiding Player Action in Stealth and Combat Layouts
How combat spaces are composed
How to handle cover placement. So how do we handle cover placement? What’s the thought process that we should apply?
You can’t have cover without thinking about what it’s good for, and depending on what game you are making, it can stand for a lot: In a stealth game, it serves as a path tracer, so the player can actually maneuver around the NPCs placed in the map.
Stealth Game — Cover Placement Illustration
The way cover is placed in this example is based on a few simple principles:
- The player will move from cover to cover to avoid NPC detection.
- This implies that exposure to an NPC’s line of sight acts like a “window of opportunity” moment.
- The player waits for the NPC to look away before moving to the other cover spot.
- Based on the turning patterns of the AI, you can break down parameters that can affect how hard this scenario can be.
Examples of parameters: Traveling Distance and NPC Look Duration
This could lead towards an interesting combination that juggles with the distance between covers and the NPC looking/turning direction. Of course, other parameters could be applied as well.
In cover shooters, it serves as a way for the player to avoid the enemy, survey the battlefield, and move from cover to cover to circumvent crossfires.
In these kinds of situations, we can apply the same chart as before, but we need to replace Look Duration with Shooting Duration.
Some hybrids use a blend of Stealth and Combat cover to facilitate both playstyles. Games like GTA, Watch Dogs, and Mafia 3 blend stealth and combat spaces into one unified space that serves both purposes. However, since these games are also open-world games, for the sake of immersion, they also have to reflect the world in which they exist. This means they have to be justified from a narrative standpoint. In order to do that in a way that doesn’t raise any eyebrows, one method of actually placing cover in a realistic space is to actually consider the concept of:
Implied Spaces
An implied space is a subdivision of space that is implied by being delimited by other bits of geometry or functions.
This concept comes from architecture and can be used to solve cover placement in level design. For example:
For example:
By creating a niche inside a space, we can actually imply the idea of an auxiliary space that can serve both as cover placement and décor, all without sacrificing the leading lines needed to establish direction within a layout section.
Here are some other examples for a more combat-oriented space:
Another example of implied space is shadow/shade spaces. These kinds of spaces exist simply because they are shaded and provide a different type of visual cover for the player.
For this sort of cover placement, there is a need for us to have some sort of control over the sources of light inside the environment.
