One genre of video games is known as “shooter” games, in which players engage in forms of combat using various weapons. Within the shooter genre, the game may be developed in a first person context, in which the player views the scenes through the eyes of the shooter. Alternatively, the game may be architected in a third person context, where the player views the scenes from a camera viewpoint removed from each character.
Some shooter games enable the player to control squads of characters, rather than just a single character. The player can give an order to a selected character of the squad, and that character carries out the orders without direct intervention from the player. Representative squad-based games include Poject Eden, which is developed by Core Design Ltd. and published by Eidos Interactive for Sony's Playstation® game system, and X-Squad, which is developed and published by Electronic Arts for Sony's Playstation® game console.
In previous squad-based, third person shooter games, the interfaces used for issuing a command to a squad member were cumbersome. In some games, the interfaces were implemented as a series of pull down menus that the player had to traverse in order to assign a particular command to a specific character.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved interface for issuing commands to a squad of characters in a shooter video game.