Welcome to the first Dev Diary for Guardians Planetfall!
Today we are giving you a small tease of the machine gun you all saw in the trailer, because yes, the belt handling is pure dopamine.
This gun falls into the Support category and is called in via a stratagem from your ship during an operation. Its strengths come from the huge ammunition capacity, excellent crowd control, and even some penetration capabilities.
But how do we decide what a weapon will be and how it will behave?
Everything begins with a Weapon Design Document, where the gameplay requirements are defined. From there, we work closely with the concept artists, exploring body shapes and silhouettes, how the grips should feel in VR, the mechanical movements the player will interact with, the realism of how the weapon operates, and how feedback like ammo counters or visible rounds should be presented. And, of course, we always keep in mind the most important metric: how cool it feels to use.
After a lot of iteration, questions, feedback, and experimentation, we end up with variation sheets like this one:
After iterating and debating on functionality and player interaction, we moved on to the final refined concept, sometimes merging elements from multiple versions of the variation sheet.
This final design lets us clearly visualize the intended silhouette, aesthetics, and VR handling. It's essentially an upgraded, polished version of the earlier explorations, representing the culmination of feedback between Design, Game Direction, and the Concept Art team.
Even once this concept is created, the work isn’t over. It goes through many additional iterations alongside blockouts, which are quick 3D versions used to validate ergonomics, interactions, readability, and how the weapon feels in VR before committing to full production.
Below you can see the final chosen concept for the machine gun.
We hope you enjoyed this first look behind the scenes. If you'd like to see early blockouts, work-in-progress tests, upcoming features, or share quick feedback directly with the devs, our Discord is where all of that happens first. That's where we post news, dev updates, test announcements, and open discussions as development moves forward.
👉 Join the Guardians Planetfall Discord: https://discord.gg/pprchMHjve
Thanks for being part of the journey as we build Planetfall together. 🚀