Designing Lethality, Part 2
Hey everyone. Kiefen here again to talk about the weapons in Beacon!
In this blog post I’m going to go through the general design mantras I follow while we brainstorm weapons for Beacon, then we’ll go through a few of the starting weapons in the game based on Freja’s faction.
The one goal I have when designing a weapon for Beacon is for it to feel completely different than every other weapon in the game. Being that the player can only carry one weapon at a time, I aim to have each one to feel completely unique and change the way the game plays. Each weapon is designed to have one unique function that it performs well, whether it’s a rapid fire assault rifle or a severed witch’s head that fires explosive homing projectiles.
Our current approach to weapon design offers a bit less randomization than roguelikes like Binding of Isaac in that we don’t have dozens of mods that apply to every weapon. That’s not to say that we don’t have weapon mods that apply to all weapons, but it’s not a main focus for us right now to come up with dozens of mods that all work seamlessly with dozens of weapons due to the amount of time it takes to make sure every interaction between mods works seamlessly.
An example of this is that instead of providing a weapon mod that adds penetrating shots to whatever weapon you happen to be using, most of the Prism weapons will have penetrating shots as a unique property only found in weapons belonging to that faction. Other than saving on development time, we believe this also helps each faction’s weapons feel more unique and helps theme them more strongly to the faction outside of just having matching models and particle effects.
Now I’ll go into detail on a few of the starting weapons in Beacon that originate from Freja’s ship.
Ship Weapons
In the Beacon Universe, the most well known military weapons manufacturer is Kaiser-Schmid. With Freja being highly paid employee of a private military operation, all of the weapons originating from crashed pieces of Freja’s ship are manufactured by them. They are generally the weakest weapons in the game, and will often be available in the first level or two as a quick upgrade over the plasma pistol. Their functions are simple and they are quite easy to handle.
Click on the weapon names to load a gif of them in action also!
Being the starting weapon in Beacon, the Plasma Pistol doesn’t pack much of a punch, but you can make use of the semi-automatic firing mechanism to fire off shots as quickly as you can click. Even though it’s just the basic starting weapon, if you can get the muscle memory to fire quick enough it’s quite powerful.
The Assault Rifle is the first automatic weapon you’re likely to run into in Beacon. It sacrifices accuracy for the ability to consistently spray over an area with a barrage of plasma rounds. It’s very good against larger groups or large single targets, but individual enemies can become difficult hit precisely.
A solid early upgrade over the Plasma Pistol, the Riot Shotgun fires a wave of plasma projectiles, giving you a wide area of weaker damage at range or a heavy burst of damage on a single target from close up. Being one of the first weapons to drop in the game I expect people to spend a lot of time with it. It was one of the first weapons we put into the game, but it’s still one of my favorites as it gives you the chance to feel very powerful early by being able to one shot lower tier enemies with good positioning. It also is the first weapon we implemented that has a unique reload mechanic, reloading one shell at a time instead of with a magazine.
One of the most powerful Ship weapons, it fires off high impact grenades that deal heavy damage in a small AoE. The high damage output comes at the price of it being a Heavy weapon, removing the Freja’s ability to Sprint while wielding it. It will be interesting to see how many people will favor its killing power over the ability to sprint. If you mutate your Speed statistic down though I’d definitely avoid picking it up.
In the future we’ll go through a few of each of the other Faction’s weapons, where things start to get a lot more interesting. That’s all for now though! Check back soon for another blog post. We’ve had some pretty big developments with the game the last couple months that we haven’t had a chance to post about much yet.
