Hey Everyone, 

Welcome to the first dev blog for our next update, Grim Protocols. Today, we’re talking about weapons. This dev blog will give you more of a behind the scenes look at creating these weapons for Grim Protocols. We’ll include more information about their special attacks work and in-game information in the patch notes at release.

We’ve got 3 brand new weapons coming to you with this update:

• Two-Handed Power Sword (2 Marks) - Zealot
• Munitorum Mk X Relic Blade
• Munitorum Mk II Relic Blade
• Two-Handed Force Sword (2 Marks) - Psyker
  
• Covenant Mk VI Blaze Force Greatsword
• Covenant Mk VIII Blaze Force Greatsword
• Heavy Stubber (3 Marks) - Ogryn
  
• Krourk Mk IIa Heavy Stubber
• Gorgonum Mk IIIa Heavy Stubber
• Achlys Mk II Heavy Stubber

Remember the Itemization trailer? 😉

For this dev blog, we’re going to talk to some devs about the general design direction, creating the animations, formulating the sounds, and bringing them to live through visual effects.

General Design Direction

For the design direction of these weapons, we spoke to Matteo A., Game Designer on Darktide, who worked on them.

What is the design target for the Heavy Stubbers? Was it difficult to place when the Twin Stubber already existed?

The design intent for the heavy stubbers was to give Ogryns some more precise long-range capabilities. Since we already had the Twin Linked Stubbers, it didn’t sound super interesting to only make them a less rapid fire version. Instead, we went with another approach.

Ogryns being Ogryns, we imagined them using the Heavy Stubber as a sort of DMR (marksman rifle) weapon. This would allow them to lay down supportive fire with the primary fire and be very precise with the alternative fire. This broadens the Ogryn player's toolkit, enabling them to take on a wider variety of roles within the team.

We’ve also added a flashlight to the Heavy Stubbers for the big guys, because they’ve been in the dark too long.

Why is the Two-Handed Power Sword on the Zealot, when the Veteran already has the One Handed Power Sword?

The Two-Handed Power Sword is a giant greatsword with barely contained energy: its huge, sweeping swings and a unique sprinting Heavy stab attack, it just asks to get stuck in melee while frantically lobbing off the heretics' heads.

The weapon also sports a new bespoke activation mechanic: instead of having a fixed, stable amount of empowered swings (more appropriate to the ex-Guard regimented Veteran), a Heat gauge will increase while the weapon is activated. Upon reaching the Heat limit, the weapon will overheat and lock the player out of the Special activate for a short period.

Controlling the rising Heat while engaged in the thick of combat felt very much suited to the playstyle and fantasy of the Zealot: melee-focused, unbridled and overwhelming power.

I’ve noticed Veterans haven’t received a weapon this patch. Will we be left hungry?

Veterans won’t be left out for too long. They’ll be receiving more next year.

What about the Force Swords? 

> Drops a video of the Force Greatsword special attack

> Refuses to elaborate further
> Leaves

Animation

Next up to speak about animation for the new weapons is Jonas B., one of our Gameplay Animators.

What was the process like to animate the two-handed swords compared to the other swords in game? 

It was quite a similar process actually! Although this time around, I had to think more about weight shifting and gripping both hands instead of just one. Especially since they're, you know, pretty big. Usually, when I animate new weapons, I try to re-use and adjust some of the old animations if they’re similar or fitting enough to be something new. This time around it wasn’t the case, though.

In the very beginning, I collected some references of HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) / Sword dueling videos. I also looked a bit into sword stances to gather inspiration. In the end, a lot of these inspirations were a bit subdued, or they were changed a bit for the sake of highlighting the personalities of the Psyker and Zealot. But changes were also made to make the weapons unique and fun with the weapon specials in mind.

Specifically, the Two-Handed Power Sword is more forceful, reckless and heavy (Emperor guide my path!). Conversely, the Two-Handed Force Sword has more “flowy” finesse and flair to its movements, which  showcases Psykers using psi-assisted techniques instead of proper training.

In other words, you could find me posing and swinging around prop swords sometimes at my office desk or in the animation room to get a feeling of how to animate and handle the swords. (I'd like to think I looked pretty cool acting as a reckless and fervent Zealot, but it was probably quite silly. Maybe you can bribe StrawHat to show it to you one day.)

(NOTE: Also I want to shout out Oliviero M., for making an awesome solid groundwork for the Two-Handed Force Sword.)

How long have you been working on these weapons?

Hard to say to be honest. All the weapons have been in varying stages for a long time. Some were more functional than others. I think animation-wise the new Heavy Stubbers have been in a good place for a while. (Note: This only refers to animation-wise. We still needed to do testing and tweak numbers to make sure they felt right in-game.)

I started working on the Two-Handed Force Sword full-time a few months ago. It had quite a lot of solid groundwork done during the prototyping stage and functional stage. I think the groundwork was done earlier.

The Two-Handed Power Sword had its very basic groundwork a while back, but we wanted to focus on other weapons first. Coincidentally, I started working on the Two-Handed Power Sword roughly at the same time as the Two-Handed Force Sword.

In general, these weapons have been worked on bit by bit. It’s taken time, because they’ve both gone through quite a lot of reworks and iterations. We’ve changed how the weapon special attacks worked. We began taking a new approach by adding unique conditional actions that lead to different attacks depending on whether a player is running, sprinting or sliding. This meant I had to return and change some animations and transitions on these weapons to make sure they worked as intended.

What were some of the challenges you faced while working on the animations?

The biggest challenge this time around was probably making sure the Two-Handed Power Sword Weapon Special did not feel disruptive in the attack chain flow, yet still be visible enough for activating and deactivating. Considering how the activation system works for the Two-Handed Power Sword, it meant that the weapon needed an activate/deactivate animation for most cases after swings (left-side, right-side, idle, sprint).

But it also needed support for activate/deactivate when sprinting due to being able to start attacks while in a sprint. There were quite a few custom animation transitions made for the activate/deactivate animation to make sure it could blend into the action from any point in the gameplay, such as hitstops, shield-hitstops, blocks, etc.

Another challenge for both the swords was that we allowed them to be able to start charging a heavy attack while being in a sprinting state. This itself is not a very large deal, but this change caused a lot of unexpected animation bugs leading into attack chains, which needed to be addressed.

Any comments or thoughts on what it was like to animate the Ogryn stubbers?

It’s always a treat to animate Ogryns. There’s something magical about them when it comes to animating them. I think it might be because they’re such brutes that allow you to animate ridiculous, but lovable actions. You’ll see an example of this when you turn on the flashlight for the heavy stubbers. Most of their problems are usually solved by brute force or heavy firepower.

That said, it was very satisfying to animate a weapon that is quite heavy and powerful in fire-power and brutish in handling such a weapon.

Are there any fun bits of trivia?

In the very beginning the Two-Handed Power Sword was known as the “Ogryn Jousting weapon” amongst some of the animators of Fatshark. This is mostly because the unique sprinting pose very much resembled someone charging forward ready to strike. We joked around about how the humans were piggy-riding on Ogryns with the swords pointed forward, in a joust-like fashion.

Also, the sprint stab animation (Sprint > Heavy Stab attack) on Two-Handed Power Swords was just a fun prototype thingy, which kinda led us to add conditional attacks for the weapons, things such as attacks made from equip, slide and such.

Sounds

Our next section is about building the sounds for the new weapons. For this, we have Jonas H. entering the blog!

What was it like designing the sound for the new Power Sword and Force Sword? Did you do anything to make them distinct? What was your thought process?

My first focus was to make both two-handed swords feel heavy, so I needed to make foley* and hit sounds that gave that feeling.

(* You might be asking what foley means: Foley is the sound for handling the weapon. It’s all about the small details: like touching and grabbing the sword, the small clinks and clanks when you walk, etc.)

For the Two-Handed Power Sword special attacks, I wanted it to still feel like it was in the same family as the 1H counterpart, but I tried to embrace the fantasy that when activated it should both feel and sound cool when hitting enemies. And as the window of the activation was fairly short, I could make the hits a bit louder, while not making it tiresome in the long run.

The Two-Handed Force Sword took the longest to make because the way the special worked was changed a lot during development (like the other Jonas mentioned above). I wanted the wave and the explosive hits on the enemies to also feel satisfying, so it took some time to find a good balance. It was also important to me to make the warp sound design surrounding this weapon to feel connected to its sibling, the 1H Force Sword. A lot of experimentation was done to find the right vibe in swings and activation information for this weapon.

When it comes to designing guns for Ogryns, are there any differences compared to designing the sounds for the human classes?

Compared to the swords, the stubbers are more grounded.  I tried to make them feel different from the faster Twin Stubbers. I did this by making more mechanical sounds in the background while shooting, and adding another flavor to the shots. They are slower and heavy, and that was the goal sound wise, as well.

Visual Effects

To round this BTS dev blog off, we’ve got Felicia K., one of our VFX Artists, to talk to you about her process.

Hi everyone, I’m Felicia and I work with visual effects (VFX) for Darktide. To start off, for those who don’t know what a Visual Effect Artist does at a game studio, I create effects for both environment and combat. For the environment, it can be things like rain, fire, dust, smoke, steam and much more. For combat, it’s more muzzle flashes for guns, impact effects on enemies like blood and explosions, the list goes on. I work very closely with a lot of different roles at the studio. Most of the time my role comes in later in the process, since I need to know what is happening in the levels or the combat to be able to brainstorm my part of the process.

When I started to work on the new swords I was very hyped. I knew that these weapons would be a little bit different from what I’ve worked on before, especially the Two-Handed Force Sword.

Two-Handed Force Sword

I heard from the combat designers that the Two-Handed Force Sword would have a force cleave coming out of the sword that you would charge up. Almost like a wind slash in some other games. But of course we would need it to look much more brutal and more Warhammer 40,000.

From here, the brainstorming begins for me. How does the effect feel? How does it behave? What is it? What is the style for this effect? So this is what I wrote down as the description:

Style/Mood: Wispy/Souls to separate the Force Sword from the Power Sword that already has lightning. The Power Sword feels a lot more “rough” than the Force Sword. Make it “Wispy” in the effects as a whole.

I wanted the Two-Handed Force Sword to be soft and smooth but still feel very powerful. It has 3 different stages on the cleave depending on how powerful the charge is. To show this visually, I made them different sizes and added some extra effects on the most powerful one, like smoke and sparks.

After the cleave was done, I worked on the charge that you do on the sword itself before you can shoot the cleave. There was some back and forth on how it should look. We knew it should indicate that you can have enough power to charge up the cleave, and to make that clear I created a screen space effect (AKA an effect that spawns on the screen). I also added a small blue fire-like effect that would spawn on the sword when you have enough power.

It’s always a challenge when working with visual effects to make sure you as a player understand what is happening, but not take over and be too much, so you can focus on your gameplay. It needs to be balanced. You don’t want effects all over your screen just to indicate something. But you still need to see the effects enough, so you can understand “oh I have enough power to charge my forcesword” even in the middle of an intense combat fight.

My own beautiful (not so beautiful) sketch of the indicator of when you have reached a certain charge. It turned out a little bit different when I actually started to work on it, but it’s always good to go back to your mood board/description to not lose track of what you’re aiming for, because you can easily forget along the way.

Two-Handed Power Sword

So if the Two-Handed Force Sword would feel smooth and powerful, I wanted the Two-Handed Power Sword to feel more rock ‘n’ roll. I wanted this sword to feel more rough when it comes to the effects. To accomplish this, the lightning is spawning and it is pretty big when you activate the weapon.

You also have a time limit before it overcharges. For this, I thought it should look/feel like an engine on a car that’s failing and there’s smoke coming out of it to indicate “you should probably de-activate so it doesn't break”.

This is another example of a sketch I did. It’s for when you’ve reached the overcharged.

Heavy Stubbers

But hey, let’s not forget the new Heavy Stubbers! As a hardcore Ogryn player, I was super happy to get some more ranged weapons for the Ogryn, and even more happy to be able to work on them.

First of all, when you work as a visual effect artist, you have a lot of odd search history. I look at a lot of military videos as reference when working with guns, and also explosions. The Heavy Stubbers are big and powerful, and like I’ve written before, I need to decide: how do the effects feel? How do they act? How much of the effects do you see when you shoot?

When researching for the Heavy Stubbers I looked at a lot of 50.cal weapons, like in this video: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFB7-bvVKs8

When you look at the video, the gun is so powerful that you can almost only see smoke, almost no muzzle flash at all. But since this is a video game, we need some more feedback than just smoke when shooting. For this, I added a very small muzzle flash and smoke for the heavy stubbers to indicate that this weapon has such force when shooting, that you can’t see a lot of fire like when shooting a shotgun (and shotguns also have more spread when shooting in general).

Hope that you find this interesting and that you like the new weapons, it was a blast to work on them!

Alright, that’s our BTS dev blog on the making of the new weapons coming to Grim Protocols on December 3, 2024.

On release, we’ll include more information about how the weapons work in-game and their special activations.

Let us know if you have any questions for the team in the comments below!

– The Darktide Team