Hello everyone,
Continuing right where we left off in Part 1:
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While pistols, revolvers, and rifles shoot your good ol’ regular bullets (albeit with different damage values due to caliber), other weapons carry more capable and specialized ammunition.
ROCKET LAUNCHERS
If there’s one thing that I feel is severely missing from this type of game, it’s the explosive volatility that comes with ridiculously powerful weapons. They often get discarded during the design phase or get nerfed into obscurity, deemed disruptive to the intended proper player progression. Sometimes they get thrown in as a fun one-off for a short while.
Steel Executor is all about the ridiculous and unlikely power fantasy scenarios. It’s entirely up to the player how they want to approach each level, stage, and encounter.
If you want to methodically stealth through the stage with melee or silenced weapons, that’s just fine.
If you want to literally break through (some of) the level walls and blow up every enemy with it, the game has the tools to achieve that.
It’s your choice how fast and how easy you want to make it for yourself. Plan, prepare, and execute. There is never “just one way” to beat a stage, or a way to softlock your progress because “you didn’t bring that one weapon with you”.
SNIPER RIFLES
I always thought there’s room to expand the concept of gunplay in a game of this type, and one of these aspects is introducing sniper rifles and sniper bullets – low ammo count, high damage, piercing cleanly through enemies and ballistic shields alike. Near-pinpoint accuracy (unless dual-wielded), but that goes without saying.
In a game filled with tight rooms and corridors, sometimes one well-placed shot is all you need. Make it count, sniper rifles’ low fire rate means you may not live long enough to take the next one.
SHOTGUNS
Being a long-time video game enthusiast, I fully understood the brevity of the task before me, that is “how to design good, satisfying shotgun mechanics”. This makes or breaks games. Doom 3’s legacy was “that Doom with a shitty shotgun” for the longest time, so a lot of deliberation is required.
A notable exception to the “3D cone bullet spread” rule in Steel Executor are shotguns.
Shotgun pellets, along with RPGs, are the only projectiles in the game snapped to a flat plane.
That’s because they look hella goofy otherwise, which wouldn’t be bad in itself, but when things become too hard to read visually – that’s where you have to draw the line between fun and functionality.
Steel Executor is a fast-paced game where certain visual gameplay elements need to be uniform and readable at a glance.
Satisfying video game shotguns need to strike a perfect balance between immense firepower, limited rate of fire, limited ammo capacity, crowd-controlling capabilities, the unique nature of shotgun pellets as projectiles, the limited range that stems from the pellets’ unique nature, and the audiovisual “oomph” associated with shooting and reloading shotguns.
A whole lot of things to consider, but I think I got it just right.
Shotguns in Steel Executor pack a mighty punch and coincidentally ended up becoming my personal favorite weapon type. Their ricocheting pellets progressively disappear with traveled distance to limit the weapon’s effective range, but most importantly, they greatly synergize with the tight and cramped level design. You can fill entire hallways with lead, or hit targets behind corners, or hit targets behind ballistic shields, or destroy doors in a timely fashion… or even combine everything just mentioned in a single shot. It’s an incredibly fun and versatile weapon type, although completely useless at long range.
But when you use it in close range, as intended, it shreds enemies into piles of…
GUTS
It takes more than bullet spread % values and unique projectile effects to make a fun top-down shooter with satisfying firearm mechanics.
After the gun’s barrel spits out a bullet, there’s also the question of “what happens to the hit target”. A one-and-done response would be “just turn on ragdolling”, but if you call it a day at that point, you’ll end up with an experience that doesn’t feel quite right. Usually when people get shot, they don’t just awkwardly flop their arms in the air standing still, then fall to the ground in a perfect split.
It’s definitely one of those things you don’t really notice when playing, but if they’re missing, you immediately realize how weak and strange the shooting feels. In your mind, you expect a certain reaction to your action.
Alright, so does that mean you have to go all out Quentin Tarantino and send everyone flying with a single revolver shot? Well, no, that’s not the takeaway. The takeaway is, it’s not enough to stick with one universal always-the-same hit feedback system.
If the enemy is running at you full speed with a baseball bat and you shoot them with a 9mm pistol, you expect them to fall flat on their face. If they’re standing still, you’d expect them to drop and slump to the side.
If you swap the 9mm for a shotgun, it’s definitely Tarantino time. The more pellets hit, the higher the force of impact, and the enemy body distance traveled. I don’t think there’s a better way to display the shotgun’s firepower in a top-down perspective setting.
But how do you communicate to the player just how powerful a close-distance gut shot is? Don’t send the enemy into the exosphere, rip them apart in a Doom-like fashion right where they’re standing. Realistically, they’d just have a giant hole in their stomach, but surely we can account for some power fantasy requirements in a video game!
Similarly, if an enemy gets shot with an LMG in close range, they shouldn’t *just* get shot. They should become ripped apart Swiss cheese, with the bullets flying cleanly through, still deadly to enemies behind the target. Of course, that’s just in close range, which coincidentally happens to be the case most of the game…
Hope you enjoyed this deep dive into the guns & guts of Steel Executor!
There’s still some stuff left to explore, such as burst-fire guns and silenced firearms. Perhaps we’ll return to this topic later on, but with most of the ground basics covered, I’d prefer you explore these intricacies for yourself in-game.
Be sure to add Steel Executor to your Steam wishlist if you haven’t already! Thanks!
Until next time!
– Peter
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