FPS Games

Overview

Five against five, one life each per round, money to spend between rounds — a round-based competitive shooter built in Unreal Engine, with a twist on how you win: capture a single asset and hold it, no respawns.

The Problem

Round-based shooters share a structural problem: once a round is decided, the last thirty seconds are dead time for everyone, and a straight elimination win condition gives a losing team no reason to keep contesting a lost fight.

• Playtests of a straight-elimination prototype showed players alt-tabbing or disengaging the moment their team fell behind in a round.
• A bomb-timer-style mechanic, borrowed from the genre's usual answer, only mattered after the bomb was already planted — too late to change earlier decisions.
• Early recoil patterns tested as either trivially easy or unlearnably random, with no middle ground players rated as "fair."

How We Solved It

We designed Holdout: capture the core, bank ninety seconds of uncontested control to win, with the clock decaying rather than resetting when you lose the point — so a losing team that retakes it for even fifteen seconds has changed the next round's maths instead of achieving nothing. Server-authoritative netcode with lag compensation keeps hit registration honest, and recoil was tuned over six weeks until it felt learnable rather than random.

• The clock only runs while you control the core; lose the point and your timer stops where it is.
• Banked time decays slowly rather than resetting, so a losing team still has a reason to push.
• Capture pauses while contested — one defender alive is enough to stall a whole team.
• Elimination remains a valid second win condition, not a replaced one.
• The core moves each round, so nobody memorises one setup and runs it ten times.

Key Decisions

• Decay, not reset, on lost banked time. A full reset made comebacks feel pointless in early playtests; decay kept every fight meaningful.
• A fixed recoil pattern instead of randomised spread. Learnable beats random for a competitive audience, even when random is technically fairer.
• One map built specifically for the mode, rather than retrofitting an existing layout — rotating core positions needed routes designed around them from the start.

The Result

Every round stays live until the buzzer instead of going dead once one team is ahead, and elimination remains a valid second win condition rather than being replaced. The mode, the map built around it, and the core shooting all shipped and are live.

Post-launch playtest sessions show players disengaging in the final thirty seconds far less often than in the original straight-elimination prototype.