Development Blog - How weapons are designed

What would a First Person Shooter be without some awesome weapons? Selaco being a sci-fi shooter leaves tons of room for experimentation and we certainly make good use of that. In this bi-weekly blog post, we dive deeper into how weapon designs are made.

Before we begin with a new gun, we start with the obvious: an idea. Coming up with a fun idea is, in many ways, the easy part. Sit down, close your eyes and give yourself 10 seconds to come up with a weapon design. You most likely came up with something that looks great, didnt you? It’s easy! Imagining things is easy. Now, try to take this weapon you just pictured in your brain and turn it into an actual gun that you can physically look at. Draw it out on paper, or model it in 3D. Suddenly it becomes much harder, because you either don't know how to draw, or the idea you always had in your head ends up not looking nearly as good as you thought it would.

And that’s not everything. This awesome idea of yours also needs to work within the game. Did you come up with a 50-barreled rocket launcher? Awesome, but does it work in Selaco? Most likely not. Did you come up with an assault rifle? Cool, but what can we add to that assault rifle to make it unique and different compared to the other assault rifle in the game? We try to make a roster where every weapon in the game has a purpose in your arsenal. We don't want to add 5 different assault rifles, 3 shotguns and 35 Bazookas. We want a right weapon arsenal where each gun serves a purpose without becoming too situational. Ideas are easy, being clever with an idea is (in most cases) not.

For this example, I’ll be mostly referring to the Nailgun, one of my favorite guns in Selaco right now. The idea began simple: ‘’We need something like Doom’s plasma rifle. A projectile based weapon that deals more damage than the machinegun, but uses slow moving projectiles as a trade-off’’. This is not unheard of in first person shooters, so coming up with a gun like this was a no-brainer. We love F.E.A.R., it’s our main source of inspiration, and that game uses a Nail Gun to good effect. It’s not much of a projectile weapon there, but maybe we could turn it into one. And thus the addition of a nail gun was considered!



The next step is to do prototyping. This stage is fun! Mainly because you get to goof around and try weird stuff before settling in with a final idea. I am very visually oriented, so I always need something to look at. Solution? Rip a gun from another game and use that as a placeholder. I always liked Quake 4’s nailgun, so I decided to use that.

The original intent was to have a nail gun that shoots blue crystalized shards (shown in the GIF). It’s a gun our Sieger Enemy type uses, so we experimented with that here. We thought it would be a cool idea if killing a Sieger would drop his gun for you to use, but eventually, things changed and the decision was made to turn it into a weaponised tool. A nail gun used for construction, but heavily modified by Sal (Dawn’s friend) to become a powerful weapon to use in combat.

Up next is the concept art stage. This is, without a doubt, my least favorite part because it makes me anxious. I like all of our weapons and I don’t want to work on a gun that is not as good as the other guns. The community has many expectations and we have to meet those. I explain my ideas to the concept artist (who will be named Silvia from here on out!) where I try to explain ‘the idea’ that I came up with as best as possible.

Silvia is a very stubborn concept artist (in all the good ways!). She is more than capable of coming up with ideas that are far better than mine and, in many cases, we end up with something completely different from what I had originally intended. After discussing things, she starts making some shapes and sends them my way.



This is where the anxiety kicks in for me. Weapons are crucial in this game. Selaco is all about firepower and feeling like an action hero, so we need something that looks powerful. Given how strong the Nailgun was going to be, we had to properly reflect this. What I wanted was a hybrid between c2 and c3. So that’s what we started working with from that point on. Try to merge the two together and come up with different designs that resemble it closely.



Now we are getting somewhere! All of these guns look great and making a decision did not get any easier. I felt drawn to C2, but felt it was too beefy. So we took that design and started sketching.

Now I started to feel like it was becoming too small and compact, so I asked Silvia for a quick perspective view of the weapon to give me a better idea of how the gun might end up looking when you see it in 3D space. This made a huge difference for me, the thing was beefier than I thought and I loved it!



A huge part of the identity of a weapon is the color it is using. Most of our weapon roster ranges from black to grey because most of them are branded from a fictional weapons company named ‘EXON’. The Nail Gun on the other hand, is a heavily modified construction tool from Sal. We needed the weapon to have a completely different color palette to reflect that. The Nailgun gets acquired later in the game, so the sudden jump in color might be appealing. It feels fresh. The choice to go for Yellow was quickly made. It gives the weapon that construction tool feeling, wouldn’t you agree?

With a color in place, we start making the final few touches of the sketch. This is where we start to lock-in an actual design and start polishing it up.

And now the Nail Gun is taking shape! The design is mostly final and from here on out we start making tiny tweaks until it is perfect.



Here, Silvia is going to create a quick reference model. These are made to get a good idea of the proportions. This model is also used by our 3D Artist, John Lloyd, who uses this model to ensure that all the details are correct when making the polished 3D model that is used ingame.



We take this render and start drawing on top of it.



Polish it up and do a cleanup.

Add the details



And here it is! The final iteration of the weapon. Complete and ready to be modelled properly. Now we send everything we have to our 3D Artist, John Lloyd, and start turning it into an actual gun that can be used in the game.



With the 3D model made, we start adding it into Blender, pose it, animate it (see the Animation blog post for how we do that!) and add it into the game. 



And that’s how the nailgun is made! I cannot understate the importance of a concept artist. Being able to bounce ideas back and forth to come up with something awesome is a very fun, collaborative process. This is the first weapon we made using this approach and I think it shows. It quickly became a favorite for many of us and for a good reason. It packs a punch, it looks cool and it has a clear purpose to exist within the player’s arsenal; a damage dealer that requires mastering in order to be effective because enemies will try their hardest to not get shot by projectiles!

We hope you enjoyed this blog post about weapon design. Wrapping these weapon projects up is always a highlight for me when working on this game. It is one huge collaborative effort and the quality at the end speaks for itself, I think. As someone who is not easily pleased when it comes to adding stuff to Selaco, new weapons constantly fill me with joy.

Currently, we are working on a Modular Grenade Launcher (MGL!). We will show you that as soon as we can!

With the month almost being over, we hope to see you again next month. If not, thank you so much for pledging and supporting our work <3

Wesley de Waart