For a while I’ve been seeing and hearing about a problem with a core gameplay mechanic: the ammo system. Initially it was designed to solve a few core problems, some of these are specific to this game but a lot are just general game design challenges that come with the genre. Those problems are:
- Give players a reason to be active while playing rather than passively trying to shoot enemies from max range.
- Give player autonomy with how their weapons work (by moving rather than sitting still).
- Give players a risk/reward calculation with each shot. Shots missed should mean you lose something and making that mistake repeatedly shouldn’t be rewarded.
- Give players in-run power progression.
Those where the primary goals but it didn’t quite hit the mark for all of them. Lets break them down and see how successful it was in each area:
Give players a reason to be active while playing rather than passively trying to shoot enemies from max range.
Give player autonomy with how their weapons work (by moving rather than sitting still).
It didn’t quite work out that way. I saw a lot of people just not understanding the underlying mechanics and getting frustrated at the reload rate. Which, by itself, would be solvable without a rework but that’s not the only thing I saw and heard. Even when folks did know about the speed mechanic they would do things that felt inorganic to “overcome” it. Like flying in loops just to reload which wasn’t quite my intention.
This broke down further because about half the game is running around gathering resources and it doesn’t feel particularly good to be forced to move when mining asteroids.
Give players a risk/reward calculation with each shot. Shots missed should mean you lose something and making that mistake repeatedly shouldn’t be rewarded.
This was pretty successful. Every shot felt very consequential. Missing shots repeatedly or destroying the wrong target would result in more damage to planets or yourself.
Give players in-run power progression.
This worked… decently, but only in the scope of the current demo. After players hit a threshold of around 15-20 max ammo it was pretty hard to run out with almost any weapon and that progression lost a lot of meaning. For a longer game I’d need to make adjustments, to either turn ammo into a currency for another, better power gain or reduce the rate you could acquire it.
Another behavior that I saw was when players found a weapon they considered “good” they would just stick with that weapon for the rest of the run. The game has and will have a large variety of weapons, getting a good weapon early on meant you played exactly the same the rest of the run. I tried to remedy this a bit with creating weapons that were excelled at a niche (i.e. Homing Missiles are better against fast moving enemies vs Chunk weapons are really good against large high armor targets) but it wasn’t enough to make the decision interesting.
Ultimately it felt like folks were playing the game despite most not really liking or understanding how this system worked. I can do better. I wanted to make a system that fits within the game rather than one that feels like it’s hindering it.
The New System
I’ve tried a handful of new ideas over the life of the game to solve these problems but in the last few weeks I’ve decided to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it.
What I came out with is not revolutionary but I believe it’s a system that fits the rest of the game much better. Here’s the basics:
- Weapons have a much larger ammo pool (Instead of 10 you start with 200 ammo of your main weapon).
- Weapons have a specific ammo type and can only use ammo of that type (Types are: Light, Heavy, Explosive and Energy).
- When you run out of ammo for a weapon you can still use that weapon but it’s fire rate is drastically reduced until you can find more ammo of that type.
Additional ammo can be obtained in a variety of ways:
- Enemies have a chance to drop them.
- Item containers have a chance to drop them (in addition to other loot).
- Some upgrades will help out here.
So how does this new system hope to address the initial problems? Lets take a look:
Give players a reason to be active while playing rather than passively trying to shoot enemies from max range.
I’m throwing this one out or at least relegating it to be solved in a different way. I am fairly confident in enemy mechanics being a better way to play with this. If I see a lot of behavior where folks sitting around firing at something with little to no movement I’ll design some enemies that really punish that. In fact I already have some I’m working on right now. I’m okay with players occasionally “turreting” but I just don’t want it to be an optimal way to play.
Give player autonomy with how their weapons work.
This one I’m a little hesitant to say this system solves fully but I believe it’ll come down to balance. Balance of how many weapon options you have available and how much ammo you can find to keep yourself stocked. I don’t know if I’m there yet, but I’ll continue tweaking this as I receive feedback.
Give players a risk/reward calculation with each shot. Shots missed should mean you lose something and making that mistake repeatedly shouldn’t be rewarded.
This is still in play in my opinion. Missing shots means you are less likely to retain full power before you get your next ammo refill and could lead to a bit of a “death spiral” so to speak.
Give players in-run power progression.
While this portion is a little weaker in this system I want to rely on the upgrades to give real power spikes. You’ll still be able to breakdown weapons to get more max ammo (for a type of weapon) but that is significantly less meaningful than the previous system. I’ve got some ideas for how to make this feel more meaningful in a longer run game I’ll talk about those when I have something implemented.
I put out a test version for folks in discord to try out and it’s been received fairly positively there so I went ahead and put in the work to get the whole game refreshed with this new system. I’m quite pleased with the result so far but I’d love to hear what you’ll think when I release an updated version of the demo (Should be not too long after this post goes up). So keep an eye out for the next update and let me know if you like the new system or not.