Greetings fellow scientists!
This last month at DinoBoss HQ I’ve been busy building a bunch of new weapons for the game, so I thought it would be fun to share a little bit about my weapon creation process.
Theme
To get started I first needed to find the answer this question:
“If this is a food technology lab, why on earth would there be weapons here?!”
The answer I came up with was quite simple - because you build them! You’re a scientist after all, so why not?
The advantage of this approach is that it already sets some restrictions and steers us away from the usual military guns and instead moves us towards coming up with some more creative weaponry, since we’re dealing with experimental technology. It also provides some neat ways to balance the guns since they are not meant to be perfectly constructed - more on this later.
I thought it would be fun to really focus on this scrappy hand-built style of cobbled together weaponry so I started to do some research online for hand built weapons, and … well let’s just say there’s some pretty crazy people on the internet 😀And I’m sure glad they exist!
As an example, here’s someone who makes a homemade laser, the health and safety in the video is er… non existent.
As another example, here’s a tiny vid showing a homemade plasma rifle constructed from …. plastic bottles.
Gameplay goals
Next thing I focused on was figuring out what the gameplay goals should be i.e. what type of weapons make sense in this type of game. So to answer that, first we can list some aspects of Demon Spore that make what it is:
- Dynamic growing tentacles.
- Area denial i.e. enemies grow to take up the play space and ‘deny’ or restrict the player’s movement.
- Large groups of small enemies that can multiply.
- A lot of enemies that need to get close to you to attack you.
- A lot of lab equipment that can be used to stun, confuse or distract/group enemies.
With these things in mind, what are some types of weapons that would be useful for dealing with those kinds of threats?
- Some accurate guns that can pinpoint weak spots (e.g. the base of a tentacle)
- Some guns that can fire through and penetrate several enemies (or tentacles) at once.
- Some guns that affect large areas to clear out growing tentacles or take out lots of small creatures.
- Some weapons that are only effective close up, to encourage the player risking to get near dangerous melee enemies.
- Weapons that create synergies with the lab equipment e.g. fire combining with a smashed oil container.
With those goals in mind, here’s a few weapons that I came up with.
Tesla Coil Gun
From a special effects point of view, this video of a guy building his own lightning gun was a big inspiration.
I thought it would be cool to have a weapon that really played on the properties of electricity i.e. the ability for it to conduct and pass across from one object to another. So an obvious thing would be to take advantage of any water spills on the ground to amplify the electric blast. I also thought it could be really interesting to have the electricity pass on to nearby targets. So if you have a few enemies grouped together, you could shoot one to pass on the electricity to others.
Also the electricity could momentarily stun enemies, meaning this gun could be a great one-two combo for stunning an enemy then finishing it off with the axe.
Lazer Guided Buzzsaw
This is inspired from one of my favourite weapons from Dead Space, The Ripper.
But instead of the disc just shooting out straight ahead, I thought it would be interesting to have a weapon where you could actually control the projectile itself, and steer it to its destination, slicing through tentacles on the way! I’m thinking this could be super useful for steering past obstacles and targeting the weak spots of larger creatures.
This one is still a work in progress, so no gifs yet!
Radiation Beam
I wanted to have a weapon that you have to hold the button to charge up, and the longer you hold down, the more the power is built up. Similar to how the Tau Cannon worked from Half Life 2. But the twist here is that on high charge the beam would ignite the floor itself, allowing you to use it to sort of paint a line of damage across the ground to stop tentacles from growing past it.
Limitations/Downsides
Super destructive powerful weapons feel great to use in a game, but they create big issues with balancing. If every gun is super powerful, combat becomes too easy. A cool way to achieve balance is to give weapons some downsides or limitations. Going back to the theme I talked about earlier - if these guns are hastily hand-built in a lab, we can conveniently play into this to give the weapons some downsides that are quirks of their construction!
So for instance, if you charge the radiation beam for too long, it will overload and backfire, causing damage to you. When using the lazer guided disc, your character will be completely vulnerable to attacks. Before blasting out the electric charge, make sure you’re not stood in water in case you electrocute yourself! The idea is that these downsides mean the weapons take some time to master and have the feeling of dangerous experimental technology.
Alright, I hope you found this interesting, but these weapons aren’t going to build themselves, so I’d better get back to work!
Until the next time.
Ed