Easy Target


Categories: tools

A Versatile targeting selection system for Unity with a focus on being designer friendly.

Introduction:

Easy Target is a system to implement target selection in a video game and easily iterate on it to get desired outcomes. The system breaks apart game parameters, such as distances from targets, that the designer can then mix and match. these individual parameters can be tweaked in real time to adjust the system’s calculation. The philosophy of this framework is to isolate what can influence target selection and provide an interface to allow a designer to tweak the system until it feels just right.

First/third person shooter? Top down Hack-and-Slash? Soccer? Easy Target is quick, versatile, and expandable.

Why Easy Target?

Target selection for third person games can be finicky, and choosing the right target when you hold an aim trigger can be difficult given specific circumstances. Often, player’s expectations aren’t met when the algorithm calculating the selection is only using a couple of simple variables and it can be frustrating as a game designer to account for edge cases. This system exposes many aspects of the environment to the targeting system so that it can take into account the players complex set of expectations.

This framework provides many build in defaults like 3D world distance, 2D screen distance, and Angle difference between user input and target. These parameters and more are managed by the developer and can be set and used as needed.

Features

  • Fast Target selection calculation.

  • “Occlusion” efficiency step before calculating priorities.

  • Multiple simultaneous targeting systems.

  • Easy designer data structures to tune selection parameters.

  • Expandable framework.