A more in depth look at the technical aspects of SMART - Link
It was partially designed as a response to the current prevalence of cover based gameplay in shooters. Slpash Damage has a background with the Quake engine, and the team wanted to “merge the movement of jump pads and rocket jumps with the feeling of realistic shooters” that are popular today.
“The limits of SMART were largely defined by playtests,” said Alphonso. Eventually the team settled on the idea that “anything that you can see over, you could vault over, and you could only mantle things that were above your head.”
“Early on, the heights were pretty high but we scaled them back because escape was too viable an option,” he says. They didn’t want to have to scale weapon damage upward, so escape had to be limited.
The game’s bots are core to its gameplay, as the single player campaign is fully-integrated with the multiplayer and co-op, in that they are the literally same mode, drop-in, drop-out. Bots, at first, “always tended to take the shortest path and used the smart system a lot more than a normal human would, this became very confusing for a new player,” says Alphonso. Players would “literally not know what was going on.”
The bots had to be restrained by increasing the perceived costs of navigation, but this had a downside – “players don’t see the AI using the SMART system as much as they can,” he says.
In the end, the players did not use at (in general) as much as he would hope. He sees three potential reasons for this:
- Ingrained FPS movement patterns. “Players will go with what they know when that’s a viable option,” he said. Games have a certain style of navigation players are set in using. “We consciously allowed for this” in the level design, he said, but it was still disappointing.
- A lot of concurrent events that distract from SMART options. There’s “a lot going on in Brink,” he says. " Your teammates are always there," there’s objective info, the enemy threat. “Essentially there’s a lot for the player to be thinking about, and I think a lot of times SMART gets lost.” Says Alphonso, “I think this is why a lot of games that have parkour systems isolate it from the core gameplay.”
- A combo of perceived effort and the tendency toward the path of least resistance. “A natural tendency” in all creatures, he said, and one that “level design has been exploiting this for as long as we have had an industry.”
