Hello, my name is Joakim and I’m the lead designer for this project. Besides those duties, as part of this project I want to become a better system designer. So I’ll also be designing our weapon system. My biggest focus will be to make the process of creating weapons simple for both designers and programmers, and making sure that it will have room to grow for possible future additions.

During our first 2 weeks, we have made huge advancements in the basics of this game. Network capabilities, respawning, bullets, all of the things one would expect from a shooter. We haven’t reached the point where we can test actually playing a match however. So my first step in designing the weapon system will be almost entirely theoretical.

I started by thinking about the standard bullet weapons in shooters and what variables they all need. Such as rate of fire, reload time, clip size and much more and wrote it down. Then I started to think about a weapon type many thought of when discussing this game, rocket launchers of various kinds. More variables were written down. The variables came from both what felt like obvious needs and by checking other games and what relevant stats they had for their weapons.

Now that I had a basic for what variables were needed, I wanted to give clear guidelines for creating weapons when deciding what values were going to be used. What is the highest damage, and what will have to be sacrificed for that power for example? Thus, a point-buy system. By converting practical values to a symbolic value the different abilities can be measured. A weapon with the highest possible rate of fire would cost 60 points out of a 100, leaving fewer to distribute to other variables.

While I started sorting out variables were interesting, I thought that this system would need example weapons of what the highest values represented. The highest rate of fire would be a minigun.

That is when something hit me that would change my approach.

This necessary example would mean that after the highest possible values of respective variables were created, the weapons created afterwards would be various kinds of medium values. Which isn’t very engaging to a large part of the shooter audience. A niche audience might like this variation of values, but that can be achieved with a broader system too.

So I thought, what system releases new content that is varied, content that can give plenty of different playstyles and still is far from reaching all potential combinations of its system?

Pokémon.

Now I know what you are thinking. Pokémon =/= guns.

But design principle for potential combinations is intriguing. I wanted to have effects on certain weapons to give a varied playstyle, but by making it a bigger part of the core design instead of a small bonus it could make every gun unique, instead of a variation of a standard.
To make it more focused, I also decided that these types always would affect the opponent. Other weapon abilities could benefit the user, but they would have to come from other categories.

That is one variation, which is currently called Effect type. The stats of a Pokémon are simpler to find a comparison to, since the guns already have various variables that are needed. But this would create rather few combinations. More is needed.

Kabi suggested making the weapons have various Modes that can be switched between during gameplay. These modes would affect the stats in moderate ways, such as sacrificing precision for a higer rate of fire or maybe sacrificing damage to make the effect of the weapon stronger. I thought this was nice, since it would eliminate the need to design side arms as well. This would be similar to how Star Wars: Jedi knight 2: Jedi Outcast and other game in its series uses their weapons since they all have two ways to fire. See the example below, first a stable, slower shooting mode followed by rapid fire with lower accuracy.

This could still be expanded.
By making every weapon have three settings, and the settings are not the same for each weapon, this would create an immense amount of possible combinations. To continue the comparison, this would be our equivalent to moves.

With all of that in mind, here is a theoretical weapon:
Odin 12B Sniper rifle
Effect type: Slow
Weapon modes: Effect-prone, Automatic, Precise

But what about the weapon variables? More math is needed for that, and we will hopefully see how that works next time.