For my final year dissertation at the Games Design and Production course at Salford University I decided to explore my favourite historic game mechanic, Source Engine air movement. If you have ever enjoyed CS:GO surfing, Team Fortress 2 rocket jumping or the great snappy movement found in Quake titles then you know what I am referring to. Below you will find a showcase of my work and relevant links to the written study and demo gameplay video.

Developing a Better Implementation of Air Control

in Multiplayer First Person Shooter Games

My dissertation has three main components, a veteran player survey, a written study and a game demo.

The veteran player survey was used to identify problems with the existing implementations of air control in the source engine and quake ecosystem of games and also to get an early idea of possible solutions and counters to the problem when coming up with new implementations.

The written study covers the history of the mechanic, featuring analysis and insight into the source code provided by developers for Quake 3 and data-miners for Team Fortress 2. It also covers my thought process into developing and implementing improvements to the mechanic after porting it to the Unity engine to create my demo, and a breakdown of the level design in the demo that supports my findings.

The game demo features not only gameplay, but video and text to explain the reasoning behind the design of the demo. Playing through the demo could potentially help developers down the line understand what potential the old implementation of the mechanic still has in today’s videogames.

Download the written component: Developing a Better Implementation of Air Control in Multiplayer First Person Shooter Games by Ignacio Roca.pdf

Watch the demo gameplay walkthrough: