Thoughts on dangerous weapons in an FPS?

I’m working on a physics heavy FPS with a lot of fast movement and I’m thinking I want to make one particular weapon very dangerous to the player to use incorrectly.

Specifically I have a flame thrower and I want the player to realize it’s not a weapon to fire and run into.

It’s not like it’s the only close range weapon, so they have options of weapons that are not dangerous to use while running forward.

The idea of dance of the weapon is to move in fast, then stop and open fire.

Shotguns are a burst that encourages constant movement.

Then I have a katana not unlike the Halo energy sword that zips the player around.

So it seems mechanically I’d want an entirely different dance for the flame thrower.

One weapon helps you close distances (katana), one weapon has you constantly move (shotgun), and then one weapon has you move in and then plant your feet (flame thrower).

To me this makes perfect sense.

I can especially see a natural synergy of doing flying leaps with the katana, then switching to the flame thrower and finishing the job. Sounds fun to me.

But I also know that some people freak out about guns that require caution, like with the lightning gun in OG quake.

An alternative I can do is to slow the player while using the flame thrower, but at the same time I kind of want players to have to use caution and be thoughtful with it.

Thoughts?

I say let 'em burn, ungrateful sh*ts XD

JK!

Well, you could always add it and take it out if it’s not fun. Just gotta balance the ammount of time you put into a system you’re unsure of. You can get a rough implementation in, upload a video and ask for feedback on how it’s currently working.

Maybe you can find a happy medium. Kinda like rocket jumping, with how you could just recklessly fire a rocket at a nearby enemy and kill yourself, but you could also launch it nearby and give your jumps a boost.

So what if when you set yourself on fire you could run around and create trails of fire that last a bit?

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I would experiment giving the flamethrower a pushback, effectively slowing down forward movement of the player while firing. Ah okay you said this at the end. :slight_smile:

Also worth noting that games often make those flamethrower projectiles velocity faaaar too slow (or the player moving toooooo fast). If you check a real-world flamethrower it’s closer to how a super soaker (water gun) fires it’s stream. You can’t outrun (aka run into) that stream. Not even if you were Michael Jordan.

If you check games that did flamethrowers really well, you’ll notice they also won’t enable you to run into the stream. I do remember that one of the old post-Doom multiplayer Wolfensteins had one of the best, if not the best altogether, flamethrower of all times even to this day.

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I agree that flame throwers in other games are way too slow.

In fact they out right suck.

I have 8 weapons and 4 of them are supposed to be work horses while the other 4 are over powered.

The flame thrower is over powered.

So I’m all for it being brutal and doing massive damage.

That said, Michael Jordon never went 300 mph. My player controller does (under the right circumstances).

I think adding a temperature indicator would be a good idea. If the player gets too hot, they die. When they use the flamethrower, their temperature will rise. Maybe this idea could work for your game concept—just a thought I had!

I’m not too crazy about adding to the HUD.

I’m already stripping out features in order to make it Less cluttered.

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Yeah, flamethrowers in alot of games are slow. Such a strange game design.

Anyways, since you don’t want to add, too many things to the HUD, how about anytime you fire the flamethrower, a countdown number appears, to show you how much ammo/fuel you have in your flamethrower. And when you stop firing, the countdown number disappears, until you fire it again.

I don’t know if reloading and pausing is what I want for this particular game.

I very much want an aggressive scramble that has the player rapidly changing approaches and doesn’t have a “correct” answer all the time.

The core of this game is “I hate doom 2016”.

I’m not even kidding.

I’m taking the core concepts they had to start of push forward combat, orthogonal enemy and inventory, and super chunky.

But going different directions with everything I hate about it like arenas over and over again, abstract concepts like chainsaws make ammo, constant flow interruptions like glory kills, one at a time enemy attacks, and constant pandering and cheats for the player.

But mostly not artificial and controlled.

It feels like a series of qte’s and constrained at every step. Every action is an animation that snaps rather than be allowed to be messy.

And I want that to be brought to the flame thrower.

Messy and dangerous.