Freeze techniques

[leileilol]

What would you do?

Sometimes in game design I get stuck thinking about three freeze conditions:

- Freeze at any HP for a short time (Rocket Crowbar)
- Freeze at 1hp for a short time (Duke3D)
- Frozen death (Hexen)

and i'm pondering which one's the least annoying and most effective way toward frozen fun.

Of course, in QuakeC, there are many ways to simulate a freeze. The easiest is a freeze_finished .float and a quick switch to MOVETYPE_TOSS to immobilize the player (or if dead, MOVETYPE_BOUNCE with a T-1000 shattering touch would work for effect)


Freeze guns are rare these days. Batman & Robin made them uncool, I guess. Everyone should chill. Puns totally intended.

[Supa]

How about door number two?

Why not keep track of a separate health for freezes which regenerates over time and is decremented by hits from freeze weapons, and the player freezes when it hits zero. For feedback you could give the hit player an alpha'd blue viewblend which gets more and more visible as the freeze health gets lower and lower - you could also add a special set of pain sounds that only play when taking freeze hits.

[ChOwW]

My personnal answer would be "Freeze when having low HP" .

The lower the HP, higher would be the chances to freeze a player.
Of course, the freeze time would differ with the player's HP.

Anyway, I also like Supa's suggestions. The blue dynamic viewblend can be a nice feature, as well as the pain sounds!

[mankrip]

I like the Mega Man approach: In each of his games the weapons behave differently, and some enemies are affected in different ways. It makes the game more strategic, and freeze weapons are something I think that should be heavily strategic.

You could even make a freeze weapon able to freeze item boxes to block enemies, or stop doors from opening/closing for a certain amount of time. Scrags could fall on the floor and either break in pieces if the floor is solid, or become platforms for the player to walk over liquids (including lava). Dogs could be kicked around like turtle shells in Mario. Enforcers could be immune (due to their suits), players wearing the enviro suit could also be immune, and shamblers could be powered up in some way instead of being damaged. I think diversity is the key.

Being able to freeze a shambler and then kill it with a single axe hit wouldn't make much sense, because shamblers are huge. But for dogs and fishes, this would be appropriate.

In Quake, the shotgun is fun because it can stun enemies, can kill enemies, and can trigger buttons. The rocket launcher is fun because it can either hit directly or provide splash damage, and can also be used for rocket jumping and trigger buttons either directly or indirectly. And so on.

[Dr. Shadowborg]