My friend Coop and I are building a movement shooter together. Shooter as a genre is very popular, and never lacks well designed game. So it is challenging to build something new, novel, while maintain a good sense of design. It’s gonna be a long journey before we get to there. In the meantime, I would like document all the design thinking behind this game. Below is one of the first pieces of deign document written for this game. Cooper wrote it as an email while he was on plane from New York to Los Angeles.
Yuhao:
After Peter’s lecture on turning our limitations into features of the game, I realized the best approach is to eliminate any heavy art-related elements. I was also thinking about the mechanics from your previous game, which relied heavily on physics. Right now, in our current design, “physics” mainly show up when a player inputs something, and there’s only minimal interaction with the environment. That got me wondering how we could introduce stronger physics-based interactions between players—and also how to address one of my biggest concerns: finding a compelling gameplay reason for players to move so fast or chain their movements to maintain momentum, aside from just the thrill of speed.
When I look at movement shooters like Doom Eternal or Quake, I notice Doom Eternal doesn’t really emphasize going “very fast,” but rather continuous movement for dodging bullets and chaining weapon usage. Meanwhile, Quake focuses on speed to grab resources quickly and launch surprise attacks. We both love moving fast, maintaining momentum, and especially chaining different movement mechanics to get massive bursts of speed. But I’m still not fully convinced we’ve found a unique gameplay motivation for that speed beyond the usual “surprise attack” or “resource race.”
Then I thought about Ace Combat—the dogfights between two high-speed fighter jets. In those games, you don’t get to fire your weapon too often, and controlling your position is key. That concept of a dogfight reminded me of Smash Bros., where aerial movement is crucial to return to the stage after being knocked out. I started wondering if that dogfight idea could serve as the main goal in our game. It seems promising, especially if we replace the traditional health bar with a knockback meter.
So here’s the idea: a Smash Bros. + movement shooter hybrid. Picture a 1v1 match on a floating island arena with no walls, so players can fall off. Each player has a different ability—say, Player A has a grappling hook, Player B has an air dash—and they only have their bare fists as a “weapon.” Instead of health, there’s a knockback meter that increases each time you get hit, and the higher it is, the farther you’ll be knocked back. The objective is to knock your opponent off the island.
As the match starts, both players dash toward specific areas to pick up weapons or equipment—things like an air-blast gun (similar to Lucio’s right-click in Overwatch), a grenade that creates walls (like Sage’s wall in Valorant), or a throwable jump pad to alter the level for the whole game. Each item has limited uses (maybe 1–3), so players have to keep searching for more. You can only carry one or two at a time. The “first phase” is grabbing these items, and the “second phase” is the dogfight, using everything you’ve collected. If we make the movement system flexible and momentum-based, I think we’ll see a lot of cool, emergent plays.
The game cycles between these two phases—collecting and fighting—until a “knockout phase” occurs. For example, if Player B’s meter is high and they get knocked off, they’ll have to use every ability and gadget to get back. That tests how well they know their own tools. If they recover, the fight goes on; if they fail, they fall and lose, or we could do a Smash Bros.-style stock system.
I believe this setup is straightforward and addresses my concern about motivation for fast movement. I’m not entirely sure if everything will work perfectly, but it combines what we both love, and it seems like a fresh take. I don’t know any shooter that does this, and it fits our goal of pushing everything to the limit instead of making something mediocre.
Coop