Mini dev. update: Guns, bullets, and explosions

Play Close Quarters here.

New weapons: A shotgun and a suppressed assault rifle:

In Close Quarters, because of the top-down perspective and delayed feedback due to bullet travel time, weapons have less of a “feel” than they do in first-person shooters, where recoil is tied to the camera orientation. Hence, it’s important that each weapon has a clear defining characteristic. The new shotgun fires five bullets at once and is deadly at close range but a mere annoyance at long range. The new suppressed assault rifle, on the other hand, is quieter than the other weapons. But because the advantage of muffled gunfire is small in a game wherein bullets themselves are visible and therefore give away the shooter’s position, the suppressed assault rifle has a secondary benefit: it muffles the sound of the player’s footsteps.

New damage model and communicating it to the player:

The introduction of the shotgun required a new damage model whereby bullets do less damage at a greater distance (depending on the weapon). The question is, how can we communicate this damage model to the player? I combined three solutions:

The first, and most subtle, is to make bullets more transparent as the damage they do declines.

The second is to fade the player’s aiming indicator as the damage his or her bullets would do at a given distance declines. The effect is most evident for the shotgun:

The third, and most overt, is to directly show players the damage model with a small graph when they select a weapon:

New explosions and muzzle flashes:

Explosions and muzzle flashes have been embellished with a sprite-based smoke effect to give guns and grenades a more powerful feel (see video above).