Recoil Riot is an online multiplayer first-person shooter built in Unreal Engine 4. In Recoil Riot, every gun has enough power to send you flying, which serves as the fuel to a high-octane fast-paced movement focused shooter. Players show their skill using one of three available guns and an alternate equipment ability to dominate their opponents. On this project, I have been responsible for initial implementation and design of all combat mechanics and movement, as well as elements of the overall game-mode.
 

Recoil Riot was developed as part of a DigiPen Institute of Technology 3-semester class in team game development beginning in Fall of 2018. It is published on the DigiPen game gallery here.

Recoil Riot's combat is an interesting and unique challenge. The ammo supply in your gun does not just determine how many times you can shoot your opponent, but also how much you can move. This results in a variety of interesting problems. Originally, I thought that players would not like always being flung backwards, and offered them alternate fire modes on each gun that did not have recoil. However, playtests found that players instead had issues being overwhelmed by the number of options, and the recoil was less disruptive than we thought, so I instead focused on making the primary fire of each gun more satisfying to use.

Another interesting design problem we have had to tackle is the issue of the "sniper rifle" archetype. Since the beginning prototypes, the entire team wanted to include a sniper rifle as a primary weapon. However, since the experience that Recoil Riot is trying to deliver is based on fast movement (often in the air!) and sniper rifles generally punish people moving up or out of cover, we haven't been able to create a traditional sniper rifle. Instead, I built a gun that we call the "Beam Rifle". As the only hitscan gun in the game, as well as being the only gun in the game with the ability to kill an enemy with a  single shot, it interests the same type of players that are interested in a sniper rifle. However, since it has both a charge time and a continuous beam instead of a single bullet, it takes more skill to use and doesn't discourage movement as heavily.