Invisigun’s lead programmer, designer and
audio engineer Shadi Muklashy came up with the
concept while working on mech shooter Hawken,
which features an invisibility device. Earlier
versions of the game used analog movement, but
this was confusing. “It was almost impossible to
sneak around without bumping into anything, and
while it was fun, it lacked precision and strategy.
One of my game design friends suggested
movement on a grid, with the rationale being that
since invisibility is a challenging concept for the
player, simplifying everything else would help.”
The addition of the grid proved transformative.
It allows you to deduce your movements by
counting the steps from your last known position,
turning an exercise in shooting first into a game of
careful measurement and misdirection with a
generous pinch of gut instinct – a wholly different
way of using the environment in an arcade
shooter. Muklashy invokes the concept of ‘yomi’ in
competitive fighting games like Street Fighter.
“[It] roughly translates to mind-reading,
or knowing what your opponent is thinking
and playing strategically in response. There’s a
back-and-forth dance throughout fighting game
matches where the concept of yomi can snowball
and shift dramatically as players learn each other’s
tendencies. I like to think that Invisigun has
unlimited yomi due to the invisibility. Some
players can make their opponents panic by simply
doing nothing at all!”
Where Sumo’s challenge with Marianne in
Hood was to balance her Shroud ability for PvP,
Muklashy’s big hurdle with Invisigun was
preserving this element of mind-reading when
designing bot behaviour. “Everything the player
does broadcasts ‘disturbance’ events, such as
bumping into walls or stepping through puddles.
The bots will notice the location of these events
and work their way towards that location and
possibly attempt to shoot towards that spot.
Depending on the type of disturbance, they will
seek out either an exact location, or a rough
estimate within a certain radius when they reach
line of sight to that spot.”
Locking movement to a grid made things easier
here too “since disturbance locations are often
exact, and path-finding algorithms on a grid are
straightforward.” Invisigun bots have moments of
believable disorientation or uncertainty,
depending on their skill level.
“There are tolerances and
random ranges for almost
everything they do. This could
be their reaction time when
responding to a disturbance, to
every once in a while making a
misstep or two [...] to even not
‘remembering’ the precise spot
they are seeking.”DECOY POLLOI
Thinking about how a player or
enemy should feel about an
invisible foe opens the way to
thinking about invisibility not as a weapon, but an
unacknowledged cousin of stage illusion – reliant
on manipulating your states of mind as much as
the limits of human perception. Digital artist and
researcher Mariano Tomatis links the
disappearing and reappearing tricks performed by
magicians such as John Henry Pepper to modern
heads-up displays on car windshields and
augmented reality headsets. Both, he points out,
are essentially the result of cunning combinations
of light and glass. Tomatis also makes connections
between military tech and stagecraft: take dazzle
camouflage in naval warfare, designed to confuse
observers about the type of ship under scrutiny.
This too is “based on the same principles used to
decorate props involved in stage magic tricks”.
Videogames featuring invisibility and
camouflage inherit this strange, ancient
relationship between gadgetry and sorcery,
summed up by the famous Arthur C Clarke quote
that “any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic”. In a more
immediate sense, videogames are all feats of
illusion magic themselves. “All stage magic is
based on an invisible ingredient – the trick,”
Tomatis notes. This is no less true of virtual
worlds: all are generated from the unseen
workings of computer code, and not even the
most expensive and painstaking simulations are
literally and exactly what they appear to be.
One game that embraces the strangeness of
this is Nix Umbra, a first-person horror ritual set
in an enchanted forest. Visible only by the
short-ranged glare of your flaming sword,
the game’s world is randomly generated: its horror“IT ROUGHLYTRANSLATES TOMIND READING, ORKNOWING WHATYOUR OPPONENTIS THINKING”In Rain, both you and your
enemies are invisible
except in a downpour.