You could also factor in proximity senses (listening/smelling/feeling) around your character into your system here. In FPSes you could usually know the general direction an enemy is just by listening to the sounds your speakers/headphones emit. Even without surround sound, you could still tell whether or not a nearby enemy is to your general left, right, or behind you. In a top-down shooter with tunnel vision, simply playing these sounds where the enemies are relative to your hero's position might not be so effective, as playing a sound just a little bit off from your top-down center hero probably won't be as effective as playing the sound completely off to the side of the screen as in FPSes.

So to help with this visually you could add a nearly skin-tight detection bubble around your main character, and even a fading effect as the bubble's radius goes out from your hero, transitioning into the darkness/fog around him. You could still play the sounds where they are, its just that now you have a clearer sense of where things are in your close proximity while still mainly depending on your front tunnel vision as your "main" detection method. I would make sure the proximity detection bubble is small enough to keep some mystery intact while still being effective enough to know where an enemy is when it gets immediately near to your flanks or back. As well as making sure later on as you get wider vision upgrades, your close-proximity detection is small enough so to not make those upgrades redundant.

Or you could do what StarCraft 2 did with its Terran proximity warning system - keep your detection range/tunnel how it is, but whenever something comes immediately near you that is out of your tunnel sight, you could represent that as a colored dot in the darkness around you so to keep some mystery intact.

I mainly see this necessary if say you have a lot of melee enemies in your game (like zombies, or facehuggers, or zerglings). When you start taking damage from an unknown number of melee enemies you can't see yet, it'd be pretty helpful to know which direction they are hitting you and from that, where to escape to or which direction to turn to face.

[Edited by - Tangireon on November 22, 2008 8:39:44 PM]

Quote:Original post by Tangireon
You could also factor in proximity senses (listening/smelling/feeling) around your character into your system here. In FPSes you could usually know the general direction an enemy is just by listening to the sounds your speakers/headphones emit. Even without surround sound, you could still tell whether or not a nearby enemy is to your general left, right, or behind you. In a top-down shooter with tunnel vision, simply playing these sounds where the enemies are relative to your hero's position might not be so effective, as playing a sound just a little bit off from your top-down center hero probably won't be as effective as playing the sound completely off to the side of the screen as in FPSes.

Well, if we discount smell, taste and touch, as you don't really use them in any game, you end up with just sound. What if, to represent this, the sounds approximate location could appear on the screen. This would give the player where they came from. Maybe just a little white dot - nothing too immersion breaking (such as a big neon sign saying sound here). This could fit in with the peripheral vision thing - as a thing moves out from central vision it slowly becomes an indistinguishable dot, until that is all it is.

This would work as a substitute for the speaker, maybe the position of the dot would be accurate in relation to the direction of the sound (it is much easier to detect from what direction a sound is coming from) but it's proximity might be more off. A player could think something is far off, but is just behind them.

Also, I remember a post a while back about paranoia (I think) An idea that came of that was as the player went deeper in to the game, they became more nervous. Maybe that could factor in to this. The player would have the option to really strain their hearing - giving an immediate advantage of improved hearing range. However, as a player continually used this power,they would start hearing things that weren't there.