My First Ranged Weapon

Jesus Silva

2/9/23

The Issue

My job on this game's production is to make most of the Equipment for our game and ensure they function as intended. So far, I've only had to create melee weapons like the sword, hammer, and Shield. However, this week I was tasked with making a shotgun weapon which was a new challenge because it's a new weapon type to me. Initially, it wasn't too difficult to make the base projectile for a single bullet shot, but the difficulty quickly came from how I wanted to make the shotgun function for our game in a way that felt good for our arcade style of gameplay. Making a system that shot multiple bullets made it feel a bit inconsistent with damage which could lead to frustration in the game which I don't want to have.  With this new issue, I turned back to some of my previous experiences and tried to apply something I had done before.

The Solution

The solution I came up with to make the shotgun still feel like a shotgun was to make use of one of my melee collision boxes instead this time. since the shotgun is a mid-ranged weapon with a lot of cone-based hit detection, I decided to make use of a cone collider to deal damage to enemies consistently. This is admittedly an unconventional solution to my problem, but I believe that in the heat of the moment fast gameplay, it should feel good to use this kind of hit detection with the weapon. This also makes it just a little more optimized than if I were to spawn and destroy a lot of little bullets all of the time with this kind of weapon.