Tips and what not to do's for an aspiring weapon maker?

[monkeybtm6]

As the topic says, having a lot of fun messing around with gameplay wads but a issue i run into is populating my wads with guns, it just never seems...right. I'm not talking sprites here, but speaking in terms of decorate use here.

[Arctangent]

Based on how completely vague this is, I'm more inclined that this is an issue of sound, not code.

And potentially also sprites, depending.

Do your weapons actually sound as powerful as they are? Does the muzzle climb and recoil properly show in your animations? Do your weapons have proper weight to them?

Code is rarely an issue when it comes to the feel of this kind of thing - typically, it's pretty exclusive to the audiovisual side of things.

[monkeybtm6]

i know sounds important, its an area i put a lot of attention into though do struggle to find stock sources for them. it might just be me.
im not much of a spriter so i use many of the stock sprites that are rather overused, or i just do superficial edits to vanilla sprites.
i know theres many tricks one can use in decorate to add to the animations, offsets, pitching the screen slightly, radius quake effects. its more i'm not entirely sure how to use those tricks to their best potential.

[Skwirl]

http://gunlabs.blogspot.com/2011/01/tutorials.html

This site, by WildWeasel here, got myself off the ground with modding and enhancing weapons in the game. This helped me figure out how to do reloads. IRC chats helped me figure out how to do inventory/state jumps, and one other user showed me how to make weapons have more than two alternate firing modes. And a little creative work, I found out how to get ammo between weapon chamber and ammo reserve, as well as remembering what setting I have the weapon on before it's put away.

Learn the DECORATE tai-chi, see how it does what it does, what frames it calls for, how many tics each frame is displayed for, the different A_ actions that do things, etc.

[Matt]

Make the stupidest, most overwrought thing you possibly can, then throw it away.

Then try to do something absurd and impossible.

[Nevander]

My best tip is always make your weapons feel responsive. The firing action should happen the very moment you press fire, unless the point of the gun is to have a charge up before firing. Normal bullet weapons should ALWAYS fire the moment you pull the trigger. Tiny delays are noticeable and annoy me often. I expect a gun to fire as soon as I press mouse1.

[Matt]

I remember this great video I saw once that dissected how violence worked in different movies. Basically, you've got two kinds: the sort like the gunfire in a superhero movie that just sets the scene, and the sort like someone getting shot in a crime drama where the entire movie takes new direction and energy energy from a singular, devastating, scene- if not plot-changing event. [EDIT: consider: the impact of a single punch in Dragon Ball versus that in One Punch Man.]

The best Doom weapons do the latter.

Failing that, though, there should still always be some meaningful immediate gameplay effect any time your gun hits a target. Simply spawning a blood actor and invisibly making a number go down just doesn't cut it anymore. Pain state, stun, knockback, lighting, throwing off the target's aim (which is a lot easier to do with ZScript), immolation,... or even negative feedback things like drawing aggro from other monsters or making the target attack faster or leaving lasting damaging areas that you can't maneuver into (flaming debris, radioactive scorch, etc.). Lots of options to play with.

[monkeybtm6]

http://gunlabs.blogspot.com/2011/01/tutorials.html

This site, by WildWeasel here, got myself off the ground with modding and enhancing weapons in the game. This helped me figure out how to do reloads. IRC chats helped me figure out how to do inventory/state jumps, and one other user showed me how to make weapons have more than two alternate firing modes. And a little creative work, I found out how to get ammo between weapon chamber and ammo reserve, as well as remembering what setting I have the weapon on before it's put away.

Learn the DECORATE tai-chi, see how it does what it does, what frames it calls for, how many tics each frame is displayed for, the different A_ actions that do things, etc.

Yeah that guide has helped me a lot in the past.

My best tip is always make your weapons feel responsive. The firing action should happen the very moment you press fire, unless the point of the gun is to have a charge up before firing. Normal bullet weapons should ALWAYS fire the moment you pull the trigger. Tiny delays are noticeable and annoy me often. I expect a gun to fire as soon as I press mouse1.

Gotta make the weapons snappy, the action is brief and instant when a guns fired, its all in the reaction.

I remember this great video I saw once that dissected how violence worked in different movies. Basically, you've got two kinds: the sort like the gunfire in a superhero movie that just sets the scene, and the sort like someone getting shot in a crime drama where the entire movie takes new direction and energy energy from a singular, devastating, scene- if not plot-changing event. [EDIT: consider: the impact of a single punch in Dragon Ball versus that in One Punch Man.]

The best Doom weapons do the latter.

Failing that, though, there should still always be some meaningful immediate gameplay effect any time your gun hits a target. Simply spawning a blood actor and invisibly making a number go down just doesn't cut it anymore. Pain state, stun, knockback, lighting, throwing off the target's aim (which is a lot easier to do with ZScript), immolation,... or even negative feedback things like drawing aggro from other monsters or making the target attack faster or leaving lasting damaging areas that you can't maneuver into (flaming debris, radioactive scorch, etc.). Lots of options to play with.

Zscript is honestly looking great, im just waiting on it to be better documented and widespread, i try to keep zandronum compatibility but i hear zans getting Zscript too, helping it be more up to date with the rest of Zdoom. its mostly i need my hand held to learn new things, the existing decorate documentation on the zdoom wiki is how i learned it, same goes for ACS.

Really appreciate all the advice, think i may have been doing a better job with my weapons than i thought.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a source of weapon sounds i can use?

[RockstarRaccoon]

People are going to hate me for this one, but...

Pull up Brutal Doom, play for a bit, and really understand the difference between the Assault Rifle he replaced the pistol with and the new chaingun he replaced the old one with. He turned the pistol, which is a throw-away weapon, into something useful later in the game, and the chaingun into something that's so unwieldly you wouldn't use it in a normal situation. That's nuance. It's probably unintended, seeing as he also thought the ability to middle finger demons as they cry about their organs falling out was a useful addition, but it's something you should strive for. (For the record, over-the-top edgy is over-done, and only works as parody nowadays)

Other than that... Make them balanced, make them fun to fire, and make them complete: reloading, kickback, mass, flashiness... all of these are important. Look at the Russian Overkill stuff. You should never make any weapons that powerful unless you intend to make the Real Icon of Sin a standard enemy, but he has some awesome ideas there, and his other mods, like Guncaster, also feature some fun stuff. If you want an easy way to know what to do, take a page out of Metroid Dreadnought's book and look at a more modern FPS's guns, and put them in. On the note of the Metroid stuff, I think weapons which have some alternate, cool effect to them, are under-done. Heretic and Hexen did that well too.

[monkeybtm6]

ive actually opened up a lot of mods and peeked at their decorate code, get ideas, learn from example and such. noticed how BD was put together, ive even tried the method it used for weapon recoil. it basically increases the FOV slightly for a fraction of a second, find the effect nice on some of the meatier weapons like the super shotgun and BFG. find the effect a little too much for weaker weapons though....doesnt feel right with em

[Matt]

There are multiple implementations of recoil in my view, from weakest to strongest and usually to be used in combinations:

- sprite animation showing recoil
- jolting the weapon offset for a split second
- altering fov for a split second
- losing the crosshair for a split second
- altering pitch and having it drift back over the course of a second or a half
- altering pitch without resetting
- brief black overlay and player going into pain
- playerpawn actually being moved backwards

[monkeybtm6]

Did a little video showing what ive got done so far. Excuse the placeholder hud and the bad video quality.

[Matt]

Looking pretty good!

Those casings do seem to move a bit oddly though... like they're forcing themselves to follow a path rather than just being flung out of the gun.

[DoomRater]

You know what's weird? I'm sick of weapons that do direct damage and are clearly optimized to do that and only that.

I want to see weapons that are more area of denial weaponry. Something designed not to shove out tons of damage, but force everything in the area to take damage if they stick around and genreally be annoying on the recieving end. The Spread gun in Contra is a nice example, but I think we can make these more annoying, like Spear of Destiny imagining in Samsara annoying, but without the superweapon tier damage. Maybe like a tomed acid bomb.

I also want to see some quirky projectiles. Something that instead of flying in a straight target, and hitting anything you point it at without any thought, perhaps some sort of homing attack that requires an open area to unleash. Or maybe more ground hugging area denial attacks. Shootable projectiles, so they can absorb attacks as they make their way to the target. (maybe even make them deduct from total damage as they absorb, as I bet you can do now.) Frost Shards was a wonky as anything, dealing crap damage up close and spreading out too much at long distances.

[monkeybtm6]

You know what's weird? I'm sick of weapons that do direct damage and are clearly optimized to do that and only that.

I want to see weapons that are more area of denial weaponry. Something designed not to shove out tons of damage, but force everything in the area to take damage if they stick around and genreally be annoying on the recieving end. The Spread gun in Contra is a nice example, but I think we can make these more annoying, like Spear of Destiny imagining in Samsara annoying, but without the superweapon tier damage. Maybe like a tomed acid bomb.

I also want to see some quirky projectiles. Something that instead of flying in a straight target, and hitting anything you point it at without any thought, perhaps some sort of homing attack that requires an open area to unleash. Or maybe more ground hugging area denial attacks. Shootable projectiles, so they can absorb attacks as they make their way to the target. (maybe even make them deduct from total damage as they absorb, as I bet you can do now.) Frost Shards was a wonky as anything, dealing crap damage up close and spreading out too much at long distances.

well the acid vials in hexen are an area denial weapon for a specific class