Role(s): Game Designer

Team Size: 1 person

Game Engine: N/A

Dates: September 2023 - December 2023

First-Person Melee Presentation

A presentation about first-person melee combat in games

  • I spent a lot of time trying to make each slide as visually appealing as possible, making custom icons and messing around with layouts. I think the resulting slides are great to look at, which in turn helped me keep my audience engaged with the information I was presenting.

  • During my research, there were a lot of technical terms that I had to learn about, and a lot of design decisions that I had to explain to people who were unfamiliar with this type of genre. I think I was able to explain my research in an understandable way, using images and icons to help illustrate my points.

  • While my slides are full of information, I wanted to make sure that my presentation didn’t fall flat with my delivery. To mitigate this, I I figured I’m not presenting a cure for cancer, so I could afford to throw in a couple of jokes.

    It’s something I can’t really prove obviously, but I promise that everyone was engaged and saying “wow Tucker you are so funny! We love your presentation so much! A++!” :)

What I Did Right

  • When I was looking into games that had first-person melee mechanics, there was a ton of information that I had to condense down into the 8 minutes that I was allotted. I tried my best, but I still went a couple minutes over my allotted time. However, my presentation was pretty well-paced, I think that this sector just has a lot of information to talk about.

  • There were a fair amount of games where, based on my criteria, it just barely didn’t have enough in its first-person melee combat to qualify for my presentation. If I had more time, I could’ve talked about various games from Bethesda, Rockstar, and CD PROJEKT RED, and the various ways they tried to implement their melee systems.

  • One of the things I thought about when presenting any kind of research about history is that I could inadvertently create narratives that were not true. Looking into it, first-person melee is not a clean history of innovation and improvement, but more like a series of starts and stops. I may have implied that the development was more clean than it actually was, but I think that comes with the territory of determining history.

What I Did Wrong

  • I do not own a VR headset, so I was unable to look into VR combat. I had a whole list of games to potentially look into, but considering my time constraints, I decided to stick with traditional console and computer games as opposed to VR. However, I think many of the things VR excels at are difficult to implement onto other platforms and vice versa, so it would be cool to compare the two mediums.

  • Looking into first-person melee, I came across a fantastic GDC presentation from Arkane about the difficulties of creating first-person melee combat for Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. I wanted to incorporate some of the information I learned into my presentation, but I already had so much information that I decided not to for the sake of time.

  • This would be way beyond the scope of this class, but I would have loved creating a prototype of a first-person melee combat system using the information that I had learned from my research. I could then playtest it, improve it based on feedback, and then present my findings using real-world data.

What I Could Do Better

DOWNLOAD SPEAKER NOTES

For my Applied Ludology class, one of our assignments was to make three presentations about a sector of the games industry of our choosing. For these presentations, I decided to research and talk about first-person melee combat within games, specifically games that directly focus on this type of combat as opposed to just first-person shooters with melee animations. I think this type of combat is not overly represented within games, and I believe that a competent first-person melee system would be massively successful. I wanted to take a look at various games that attempted this, and point out the good and bad elements of those systems. I combined all three presentations into one for convenience, with the assignment details in the speaker notes at the start of each presentation.