When we decided on making a six-axis shooter, one of our first (and most raucous) debates was on weaponry.  Weapons can make or break shooters, and frankly, they’re a lot of fun to talk about.  

The bulk of our team was raised on classic action-style shooters from the mid- to late-90’s.  Naturally, we were gushing over weapons from classic franchises like Unreal Tournament, Quake and Tribes.  We created our first weapon sets with these basic archetypal functions, but found we wanted to be a bit more creative.

While discussing weapons one night, our team started talking about more emergent weapon experiences.  We all enjoyed games like Portal and Magicka, which work more by giving players toolkits and not just more grandiose firepower.  Both of those games get a lot of mileage out of their mechanics because players enjoy experimenting with the weapons almost as much as they love solving puzzles or frying enemies with them.  From that discussion on, we knew we wanted to make Retrovirus into a game that gave players classic shooter firepower alongside a toolbox of tricks that would be suitable for player experimentation.

Retrovirus started with a set of weapons inspired directly by Unreal Tournament.  Our weapon set included basics like miniguns, missiles and railguns.  We wanted to make sure they followed archetypal rules, so players would be able to step in and instantly understand their function.  Keeping the weapons intuitive is especially important for Retrovirus, as we want the player’s focus to be on movement in a six degrees of freedom setting above all else.

With those archetypal weapons in place, we decided we wanted to bring the “toolkit” aspect into play using one of our game’s central themes: anti-viral scanning.  Because all of the action of Retrovirus is taking place inside a computer’s software, it makes sense that “killing” an enemy would be akin to deletion.  We decided that the player’s weapons would fire projectiles that would effectively be “flagging” enemies for deletion.  In Retrovirus, this is represented by weapons leaving behind “residuals” with each shot.  The residuals themselves continue to cause an effect, like a movement slow or a minor damage-over-time effect.

To tie in the scanner, we added effects which are triggered when players scan these residual shots, whether they exist in the world, or better yet, on an enemy.  This gives every weapon a “one-two” punch, where players set down residual shots and trigger them to control their enemy and their environment.  Our minigun has residual shots which can trigger a knockback originating from the residuals themselves.  Need a quick boost?  Shoot the wall and scan the residuals to do something akin to the Team Fortress “rocket jump.”  Enemies rushing in?  Pepper them with the minigun and shove them back by scanning the residuals.  The possibilities are numerous, and most importantly, fun to experiment with!

We’re really enjoying the weapon mechanics in house, and we look forward to showing them off.  If this blog has piqued your interest, you should check out our livestream, set to begin on January 25th, 2012 on own3d.tv.  We’ll be posting more details on that shortly, and our first episode will show off our weapons system in more depth than we can do with the written word.

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