Game Mechanics Sniping in side scrolling shooter. Can it be done?

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FallFlat

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I am working on a game with 1280 x 720 resolution. If the player is on the left most side of the screen, while the enemy is on the right most side. The distance between the two is just about 30 steps at most. It is not really that far away.
Is there a way to do a long distance shot in a side scrolling action game?
 
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Khao

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There's an old multiplayer game from the early 2000s called soldat that was pretty much the classic multiplayer FPS formula, except in a 2D sidescroller. With Jetpacks. The way the Sniper Rifle worked, is that when you crouched, you could actually slowly shift the camera away from your character towards the direction you were aiming with your cursor. So you could easily aim at something that was off-screen from your character's perspective. Of course, this also means that while aiming, you can't see your surroundings, as you're literally not in the screen anymore. But that makes perfect sense for a Sniper Rifle if you think about it!

The game's still supported with running servers and it's 100% free to play if you're curious about it.

BTW I mean free to play as in literally free to play, not as in the monetization strategy. It's worth clarifying in this day an age.
 
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Niels

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I am working on a game with 1280 x 720 resolution. If the player is on the left mode side of the screen, while the enemy is on the right most side. The distance between the two is just about 30 steps at most. It is not really that far away.
Is there a way to do a long distance shot in a side scrolling action game?
There are multiple solutions:
-make the camera zoom out when aiming the sniper rifle
-move the camera ahead of the player
 
Yeah, like Niels said, there are multiple solutions to this, and it just depends on your design! Some other ideas off the top of my head:

-Allow the player to control the camera and possibly see a laser sight of where they're going to hit
-Make this its own mechanic - While holding the aim button, the camera constantly pans to the right at some speed. The camera moving becomes the aiming mechanic and adds challenge to sniping
-Aiming goes into "first person mode," completely changing the camera (I don't recommend this option, but it shows that there are really a lot of solutions to this problem!)
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
I agree that scrolling the camera away from the player character is a nice way to do this, there's more than one game that does it and it captures the feeling of using a sniper scope really well (since you can't see your surroundings anymore). Just keep in mind that you should use a laser sight line or something to show the bullet's line, because you can't see OBSTACLES near you while sniping either.

(A compromise solution would be to have a separate smaller view showing what's around the spot where you're aiming, cut in while the normal view shows you aiming with the sniper rifle)
 
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