Greetings, survivors! Welcome to our latest Development Log.
One of the essential elements of Decision games has always been a variety of weapons for destroying hordes of enemies. Some might even say it’s the most essential element, but we cannot confirm that as our “unarmed” players might quit the game, and we won’t have that. You know we love you, even though you’re crazy.
When designing weapons, we had to consider that the game is viewed top-down (close to isometric, but in a three-dimensional, modern perspective). For some weapons, this was very important because their use depended directly on the distance to the target.
For example, Sniper Rifles and their unique ability to aim at long distances. Since this particular mechanic has to work waaay more differently in our top-down game, we had to engineer the entire mechanic from scratch. Now, when aiming, you’ll get a reticle that, while reminding you of the regular sniper scope you’re used to from other shooter games, will also feel new, fresh, and incredibly difficult to explain. Good thing we have a visual aid, or this devlog would feel awfully dull. OBSERVE!
If, however, you prefer a little bit of an older spin on warfare, the BOW might be more to your liking. As fans of the series know, the Bow has been prominently featured in another one of our games, Decision: Medieval. While we meant to create three different bow styles, each one with different looks and play styles, we just, uhh… . But who knows, maybe they’ll still make it to the game once it’s been released? ;)
To work the bows, you’ll have to hold and charge them. The longer you charge the arrow, the further it’ll fly and the more damage it’ll deal to your enemies. We tried to keep the bow as simple and as fun as possible, so there aren’t many complex mechanics to contend with while using it, just a lot of fun. The bow is good to use in the game’s early stages, as it has a longer range than other starter weapons if you’re too chicken to take on the monsters head-on.
Finally, we come around to the guns a real soldier (one who’s not afraid of a little Alpha Zombie) would use — SHOTGUNS! A true classic, there’s not much to improve on here, but we still like to mention them as much as possible, just because.
With great stopping power comes great responsibility, and our responsibility was to balance these bad boys so that they wouldn’t just become sniper rifles that you simply aim in the general direction of an enemy and watch them turn to dust.
To achieve that perfect “oomph”, we created several small projectiles with different trajectories, which created an area damage effect. There were uhm… difficulties in adjusting this. We had to consider the parameters of each shell and its probability of hitting the target, as well as the impact the range would have on their damage. Having stayed up a few nights with a spreadsheet and all kinds of simulations open, we got the effect down nicely, and the shotgun is now powerful as all hell, but not so powerful that it’ll play the whole game for you.
Now, you may be asking: “CAN I USE ALL THE WEAPONS RIGHT NOW? BECAUSE I REALLY WANNA GET A MINIGUN ON THE FIRST NIGHT!11!!1!1”
And the answer is… uh… kind of?
You have to know how to use them in order to, you know, use them.
For context: weapons are divided into three main classes: Melee, Firearms, and Heavy weapons. To utilize the full potential of any weapon, your survivors must have the appropriate skills at the necessary level. If your skill for, let’s say, firearms is coming up short a few points of the required amount for your shotgun to be effective, it will not be as powerful. This will not prevent your survivors from using these weapons, mind you, but it will massively reduce their effectiveness.
Your weapon skill increases as you use a weapon, but you can also improve your weapon skill with the appropriate equipment. For example, a combat helmet will increase your skill in heavy weapons.
Each weapon requires a different skill value, with more powerful weapons requiring a higher skill level.
So there you go. No miniguns at level 1.
There are more than 30 weapons in our game. We tried hard to balance this many different weapons, and we knew that balancing so many just by eye wouldn’t work, and we couldn’t adjust them by experience either. We had to create a massive table with all the parameters and formulas to help us distribute the values for the different weapons. For example, we considered parameters such as damage, rate of fire, reload time, impact radius, range, ammo consumption, etc. All of this was taken into account when calculating the effectiveness of each weapon. When adjusting efficiency, we carefully changed all parameters to evenly distribute the weapons from the weakest knife to the most powerful rocket launcher!
Each weapon has to be useful at different stages of the game, and each weapon also has to have compelling and exciting mechanics. To that end, we worked hard to create each weapon, sometimes facing difficulties when developing more sophisticated weapons such as the flamethrower, which you’ll get to read more about in a later devlog!
Since we simply cannot cram all of the exciting weapons into one Development Log, we’ll have to end this one here, and in the next devlog, we’ll talk more about the less conventional Dust Bowl weapons, like the Flamethrower, Grenades, and even a sneak peek into some weapons that we plan on adding to the game later on in its development cycle! ;)
Thank you for reading, we hope to see you in the next one!
Decision: The Red Daze team
