Guns and Ballistics - Ben Bissett

"Guns and Balistics"

Ben Bissett - 06/20/2025

This week I placed a large focus on the weapon systems for the game. The big problem to overcome was, how do we get good variety and enough unique feeling weapons? I established a clear goal for this system improvement so I listed out three main points:

1. Each weapon should each have a unique design with their stats fitting a certain play style.
2. Weapons need to fall into a specific class role that will allow players to intuitively understand how a gun should be used.
3. Weapons should be interactable inside the world, allowing players to pickup and discard them.

The first and second main goals I tackled together by creating a stat table for the 11 planned weapons. This table consisted of the following stats: damage, bullets per-shot, fire rate, magazine size, range, aiming accuracy, hip-fire accuracy, and movement speed modifier. From their I organized the weapons into the following categories: Assault Rifles, Sub-machine Guns, Shotguns, Snipers, and Handguns. From there each weapon was assigned varying stats to ensure a wide spread of values across all categories and weapons in like categories behave similarly to one other. The methodology led to weapons that range from performing well in close to far ranges and each one feels like it has a purpose. 

The final task I was completed by creating a weapon spawn point that can be placed around the map. This spawn point selects a random weapon at the beginning of the game and creates a weapon for the player to go and pickup. This brought me to the point of implementing an interface which allows the player to detect weapons that are able to be picked up. When an item is viewed within a certain range close to the player a hud element hint displays the interact key to the player alerting them they are able to interact with the weapon. The player can then pick up the new weapon, replacing their old weapon. To allow for weapons to be persistent in the world, I removed the actor from the spawn point and duplicated the weapon in the players hands with physics and an impulse to toss the old weapon away. I then had to sync the ammo counts on the new and old weapons so when the player equips a discarded weapon the original magazine will still have the correct amount of ammo.