Weapon Theory: Think About It!
I often had gameplay revelations when I was doing cardio in my PE class, resumably because there was nothing else to do (unless I feel like reading People's January 2007 issue) and there's an intense amount of blood going to my brain. Long story short, I had an epiphany at about pretend-mile 1.4 on the stationary bike a couple weeks ago- how we came up with weapons in the past is all wrong.
See, in Angels 20 (A20) and Angels 22 (A22), we basically thought of what weapons sounded cool and threw them in there without much thought as to what hey were supposed to do, exactly. Cool weapons, that's what we wanted! "Wouldn't it be cool if..." was the name of the game. Huge caliber Gunpod! (read about it ina book). Manually Guided Missile! (Used the redeemer in Unreal Tournament). Napalm! (Saw Apocalypse Now, wondered how it smelled).
We ended up with crap like the cluster bomb, which is a neat idea stolen from real life, but was pretty much useless, and the scatterpack, which shot a bunch of missiles which would fly around randomly. Using the scatterpack usually created an impressive spectacle as thethe areas to the left and right of the target were completely devastated while target itself remained untouched an generally unimpressed. (The only redeeming quality of the scatterpacks was that they would light villagers on fire in A20. AAAIIEE!!)
We had some understanding that there needed to be a degree of purpose and balance, but that didn't get us very far, and probably hurt us more in the end. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
One of the primary offenders I remember was the Heavy Flak, which had something like 1000 health. The normal bomb dealt 100 damage, and everything else was worse than that, so you were left with the one option of using the original "Angry Sparrow." It did 1000 damage, so you could only carry 5. That was the reasoning, anyway. This had a couple of important (and shitty) effects: 1) Since you could only carry one weapon type at a time, you had to dedicate an entirerun to killing Heavy Flak. and 2) Since you only carried 5, your aim better be pretty good. Of course, for a beginning player, these facts made the game annoying as well as almost impossible.
So, with that understanding in hand, I decided to start thinking about the interaction between weapons and the enemies, that's really the core of the game. Which is to say, this is a game about shit getting blowed up. Blowed up real good.
Just wait until there's a city...
Weapons: An Intro
I've been working on a spreadsheet of weapons attributes, because as all you crazy technical guys out there know, the world is made of numbers. Thinking about all the different ways to do damage in our current paradigm (dropping/shooting stuff of an airplane), there's a only a few real variables to work with. It can be broken down into two categories: how and how much? Thinking along these lines, I got:
1) One big piece or a few little pieces? (Distribution)
2) The rate at which damage is dealt? (Damage/sec)
3) Is the damage done where the player directs it? (Precision)
4) Is damage done for a near-miss? How far does it count? How much? (Splash Damage)
5) Is the player limited in how often they can use the weapon? (Recycle time)
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6) How much damage is available to the player in one loadout?
7) How much damage is done in one use (press of the fire button)?
Alright, having that figured out a little better, it was time to crank out some numbers to get started. I decided to use Excel/OpenOffice Calc, because I never really bothered to familiarized myself with the concept of spreadsheets before.
The sum of all these numbers is FUN!!!1But, that's not all. You also have to worry about how easy a weapon is to use. The Brimstone, a guided missile will be easier to use than say, the Angry Sparrow unguided rocket, so it makes sense that you carry less of them. The trick is to figure out the kind of arbitrary (unless you want to get into neuropsychology) "easiness" factor, which you almost always have to do in playtesting. Right now, I'm just trying to guesstimate that just to have something to throw in the code and get going.
From that table, you can see how different weapons have different rates of damage. While working I tried to add more damage when I though a weapon would be harder to use, etc. For example, the Heavy Gunpod (called the Mulciber, not sure why I didn't put that in there...) does not that much damage per second because it's supposed to be pretty straightforward. I didn't put in a field explaining it well, but the Mulciber is going to burst fire (Hence 3 units/use), and very accurate. The idea is that you'll swoop down and fire at a tank, firing a burst which destroys the target. The bullets should be close enough that all of them hit... should. Once again, playtesting might just blow a bunch of wholes in my neat chart, so we'll just have to see.
But all these weapons numbers are kind of out of context without thinking about what they are actually going to be used on. Sounds like another journal entry to me...
PS:
...don't think it'll be long for that city, either.
