Right, time for another, ever-so-slightly bigger update.
First off, a new avatar I made for myself, roughly meant to represent a bird. Whether it does is a different matter altogether, but I think it looks cool.
Second off, I've changed a melee weapon once again, but this time it's mostly just an aesthethic rework - the sledgehammer is (possibly again) a shovel now. It still is a "medium-sized bashing melee weapon", but looks a bit nicer. Plus according to Game Exchange it's actually a pretty deadly thing...
The most important part however is a rework regarding the ranged weapons.
See, previously each of the weapons had individual maximum range values after which the bullets/shells/arrows would simply vanish.
Combined with attack speed and damage values, it kinda made them hard to balance right. I faced a similar problem with melee weapons but since they now deal the same damage per attack I thought I could apply a similar mechanic to the primary weapons as well - didn't quite work out.
What I've done instead is that the 3 ranged weapons now all have the same maximum range (probably a bit shorter than what it used to be for the bow, but still), but their damage ramps up/falls off depending on the distance between them and the target.
If you've played something like TF2 you might be familiar with the concept - most weapons deal higher damage up close and lower damage at higher ranges.
This also means that their base damage values are also unified but vary depending on the weapons' range scaling, and those are:
- high at close, average at medium, low at long range for the shotgun
- low at close, average at medium, high at long range for the bow
- average at all ranges for the SMGs
Now, you might be thinking "Dark, why do the SMGs deal flat damage at all ranges?".
See, the idea is that the SMGs will be at a disadvantage at the other two weapons' effective ranges but the most effective at medium range, because while they all deal roughly the same damage at medium range, SMGs' increased fire rate gives them an edge against opponents using the other two weapons.
The falloff/rampup numbers should be high enough to give the bow/shotgun users an advantage when facing an SMG user at long/close ranges respectively, and they have a few other, less obvious advantages (high spread for the shotgun allows to more easily hit a fast-moving target, for instance).
Of course this doesn't take into the account stuff like terrain, ammo management and other weapon types into the account, but I think it gets the general idea across - spamming SMGs everywhere will not only chew through your bullet reserves pretty quickly but also not give you many good results at all ranges, encouraging the use of melee and explosives weapons.
I'll be closing this with weapon pose sketches. Since I want the game to be relatively readable, making sure that you can immediately recognize your opponent's weapon and adapt is a big thing, so all weapons should look reasonably different from each other. Hence these:
Could they be better? Probably. Do I care? Probably not.
Until next time!