Dev Thoughts 2 - 9 - 2024

So in a bid to start doing more generalized articles on game design I foolishly thought tackling the subject of shotguns in shooters would be an easy win. Well, I was wrong! So while I’m still getting my thoughts together on that, I figured I’d get into the state of Inhuman’s weapons and some challenges I’ve faced over the course of last year with it. Some of this might make it into the larger article on challenges with weapon balance, so I suppose you can view this as a rough draft for that.

Weapon Balance

“Balance” is a word that gets tossed around in design talks a lot, with the assumption that a well balanced game is a well designed game. But there’s a few key things to note when we consider what balanced actually means. Are all game elements supposed to be equally strong? Are all player strategies equally effective? The answer in my opinion is obviously no, whatever game you make is ultimately going to favor certain strategies and certain options, and what really matters is if the game remains fun.

So what does this mean in the context of Inhuman’s weapon balance? Well basically we want weapons that enable our design goals, which would basically be:

• Reward players who make intelligent decisions during combat
• A constant push and pull in fights with soldiers
• Keep combat biased towards mid to close range.

Each gun in our roster needs to give the player a unique tool to deal with specific situations without being the answer to all of them. This informs our next two design pillars as well, as we need to also make sure guns aren’t too effective at killing enemies at a distance if we wanna create an experience where the player is constantly weaving in and out of cover at close range.

We focused on 3 weapons for our core roster:

• Pistol does decent damage when your land headshots, but it can be hard to use when you’re under fire.
• SMG has a more forgiving accuracy cone which enables more “spray and pray” gameplay.
• Shotgun makes quick work of the basic soldiers, but it’s pretty trash at a distance

The last point here ended up being our most contentious. We got the shotgun “balanced” early on, doing what I wanted without it easily clearing the field, but it got a litany of complaints. At worst, players opted to not use it at all and just relied on the SMG at close range.

What is a shotgun anyway?

Players seem to have really strong feelings on what a shotgun should do for them. At pretty generous ranges they still expect a max of 2 shots to kill any basic enemy. In the context of Inhuman I blame some of this on the fact that players are still coming in with expectations from Half-Life 2, where the shotgun is incredibly strong. This was tough for me to accept for a long time though, as I had been pushing for tankier enemies to enable our desired “cat and mouse” gameplay loop.

My fears over this were relaxed quite a bit after we got our 2nd heavy enemy online. I decided to start including chargers, ordinals, and suppressors regularly in our enemy squads rather than treating them as boss enemies. With these tanky enemies taking so much of the player’s focus, reducing standard soldier health felt a lot more natural. So ultimately, some of our weapon balance ended up happening outside of the weapon itself.

Recent Changes

Along with improving our weapon balance, we’ve got some new details to add to the game’s realism. The pistol and SMG now have some snazzy new dry reload animations, along with support for chambered rounds and staged reloads.

We recently got one of our levels to a state that’s basically done barring some updates to art and story. Now we’re able to playtest the state of the game across a whole chapter rather than in small chunks. How we use the dynamic resupply system has really been informed by this. In Half-Life 2, dynamic resupply is basically used to constantly top the player off before, during, and after combat. We’re a bit more confident about players being able to consistently avoid damage in our game, so our balancing is a bit stricter.

Through most of the level we use presets which target different ammo types or health and place them according to how easily they’re found and what kind of action is coming up. So, powerful supplies like SMG grenades are often tucked away in the corners of the map, in vents or in closets, while pistol ammo is abundant and often on the main path. We try to keep the player around 40-50% health, and if they’re hoping to get fully topped off they’ll have to explore to really get it.

Thanks to some ports from other modders, I’ve gotten Zombies using some modified animations from Alyx. In the past they simply used Zombine sprinting, now they’ve got a different way of speeding up to chase the player while keeping a unique animation profile from the Zombine.

I think the game's in a pretty good state! Combat feels great, we've got pretty much all the pieces we need for a good gameplay loop, and a good chunk of our levels are fairly complete. However there's a lot to do to improve pacing, which means more time is needed for content. I'm pretty confident it'll be worth it when it's done. As for this Patreon, I’m gonna try to do more random “dev thoughts” posts, relating both to Inhuman and random stuff I’m playing. I’m also hard at work figuring out a bigger article I wanna post on medium hopefully this month or next, so look forward to that.