This time! Weapon selection and rocket launchers!

So far in our game, the players haven’t been able to pick what weapon to use. Now that’s about to change.

The weapon selection is planned to be accessible from the main menu. The most interesting part of this will be the stats presentation. At the moment they are being presented as the stats the game actually uses. This is very clunky and many of the values presented will not be of any use to new players.
So why are they there? Because we discussed it in our group and came to the conclusion that we might as well plan for the more experienced players early. This information is similar as to what one can find on other shooter games wiki’s. Such as the stat block for weapons on TF2’s wiki.

It isn’t a detriment for our game to have this option, so it can stay. The simple stats will use fewer values by combining existing, or not bringing them up. Most players learn what a weapon is by playing with it after all.

Now, weapons and game feel.

That is the game feel I felt was missing. Camera shaking, muzzle flashes, satisfying sounds. Our biggest hinder to make it even better is a more responsive character model. But that would be a bonus. At the moment though, it does feel like a shooter.

The launchers are currently added by switching a variable in a Gunparent-child to true, and adding the size of the explosion.

Besides variations of common firearms, rocket launchers were one of the first weapons planned for this game. This is because they fulfill two unique criteria among modern firearms:

1. They affect an area. This is important since this game will encourage movement and flight to find and kill opponents, and to counter that area weapons would be a natural choice for new players.

2. They’re not effected as much by gravity as grenades or grenade launchers. This is important to one of the early weapons since the players will move deftly through the air, which would make gravity-affected projectiles very difficult to use.

Despite these criteria, our first rocket launcher has one huge misstep that invalidates the reasoning for both points. It only explodes if it hits an object, meaning it’s easier to hit opponent moving on the ground but is just as hard, if not hardest, to hit opponents in the air with.

This is why we have planned to add this particular rocket launcher as a more difficult option, and then are going to add more choices as to how the rocket explodes. By proximity and remote detonation.

A proximity-based rocket would have the advantage that it effectively quadruples the ammunition size, but since most of that area would be the outer limits of the explosion it wouldn’t be as effective. It would still give the players the kick of actually hitting their opponents.

Remote detonation would be the middle child of these option, since the player would be able to click the firing button again to detonate the rocket mid-air. This option will truly test if the players can judge distance in our game, something that can potentially be very important when flying around in huge open areas.