Designing the weapons and the thoughts behind them

For this week’s blog post, I will discuss the weapons in our game and how we’ve designed them, some discussions about them that we’ve had before and what we are planning on implementing.

We have for different kinds of weapons implemented in the game, and they all have different functionalities and they all look visually different. This was important to me because I want the player to be able to separate the weapons easily whilst playing.
The weapons we have are a machine gun, a bazooka, a shotgun and a sniper. The weapon that we first implemented and we knew we wanted to have was the machine gun. I felt that this was the best option to have as the starting gun when the player enters the game because it is very easy to use, you just have to press and hold the right mouse button, and the player doesn’t instantly have to deal with a cooldown, which some of the other weapons have.

The second weapon we decided upon was a bazooka. I thought that it was important to have very separate weapons so that the player would find them useful in different situations. If you make the weapons to close to one another, there would be no use for the player to ever switch between them.
I wanted the bazooka to use the risk/reward method for the bazooka. The player eliminates a large mass of the enemies coming towards them but the cooldown for the bazooka last for a longer time than any of the other weapons to make up for its strength.

We added the shotgun and the sniper together, and we had discussed and implemented these two weapons much later in the game compared to the first two. We decided to add these after we had discussed more what we wanted from our game and after we’d come to the realization that we had over-scoped the narrative of our game. After this we wanted to focus on the feeling of the weapons and that it should be very satisfying to shoot and eliminate enemies in our game above anything else.
The shotgun also has a cooldown since it eliminates several enemies at once, but it is not nearly as long as the cooldown for the bazooka.  After we’d added sound effects to the shotgun, it was rather easy to figure out the cooldown, since we felt that it should fit the audio feedback.
Just today we fixed the range of the shotgun. Before the bullets traveled to the end of the screen, but not it fires out a few centimeters in front of it. I’ve realized that this makes it a very useful weapon when attacking a certain enemy, which I thought was very pleasing since I think each weapon should have their separate strengths. Like I said before, the player won’t find it necessary to switch weapons otherwise.

The sniper caused us some issues since we felt that it was the weakest one out of them all. It didn’t eliminate as many enemies as any of the other weapons and we were unsure of how to show the player the cooldown of the shotgun. This is something that isn’t solved yet, and I am unsure if it’s necessary to show each of the separate cooldowns. Our game is very fast paced, and it makes the player press the shoot button as often as possible. Because of this, I think that the player is going to figure out the cooldown of each weapon rather fast. Although I’m not sure of this, and we will make sure to get outsiders to playtest our game and ask them.
We’re also currently working on solving the usefulness of the sniper. Right now the shot of the sniper causes a series of “explosions” that eliminates more enemies than before, but we haven’t had the opportunity to playtest and work out the best solution quite yet.

We are also working on a bar in the GUI that will show the player each weapon and what button to press to use them. I wanted this because, during the playtesting sessions, I noticed that no one had any clue that there even were other weapons than the machine gun that they could use. I also knew that we had no time left to show it in the gameplay, so I felt that a bar in the GUI was the best solution. In this bar, it will be easy for us to communicate the cooldown of each weapon very easily, which is another reason as to why I wanted it in the game.

We are all still working hard on the weapons, and we want them to be the best feature of our game. So far I am very pleased and I hope that we will be able to implement all of the touch-ups in the coming week.

About Emilia Daniels

2016 Game Design

View all posts by Emilia Daniels →