Devlog #27 | Digging Deeper: Unearthed Weapons, Bots, and Tech in Latest Update!

01 Mar 2024Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

Another monthly Dev Log! Let's jump right into it:

Weapon System

The weapon system has been improved upon by adding a ton of enhancement options. You can increase various stats for all weapons using gun parts to increase individual stats.

There is also an experience system with each gun, so the more you use a gun the more familiar you get with it allowing for additional abilities and modifications. Leveling up a weapon will have automatic perks such as increased reload speed and accuracy, while unlocking different abilities at milestone levels. Each weapon will have an ability tree that the player can customize to their choosing. Want to focus on dealing damage to the most bots possible? You can do that, or focus on single target damage for the larger bots, up to you. Each weapon will have its own unique abilities to unlock.

Passthrough bullets penetrate bots so multiple can be hit with the same shot while exploding bullets deal massive damage to a target with splash damage to nearby bots. But why stop at a single ability? Why not both passthrough and exploding bullets:

Want 10 barrels on an SMG? Anything less doesn’t even make sense:

The uses are endless, be creative! Wondering if it would be a good idea to shoot explosive bullets on the ground underneath yourself? We may never know:

There are tons more abilities waiting to be tested on ridiculous amounts of enemies.

Turret Upgrades

How do you know when you have too many upgrades? That’s the wrong question, the correct question is: How do we add more upgrades? Here’s how:

Turrets have single stats that can be upgraded by spending AI Cores, which have a low chance of dropping when defeating almost any type of bot. Increase the damage, range, and rate of fire, you pick, so that your turrets can be effective in the situation that it is used.

You can also now calibrate your turrets to either deal more damage or shoot faster.

Attack Budget System

We want massive amounts of enemies, each being capable of attacking the player. This can make balancing them challenging as we'd want an encounter to require fighting even with only ~10 enemies, but it's possible to be surrounded by 100 of them at once which would then be completely impossible to even survive from.

That's where the "Attack budget" comes in, each enemy taps into this budget to execute their attacks, and enemies that are well positioned get to consume it in priority, but once the budget is depleted no more enemies can attack during this frame. Difficult enemies consume more of the budget at once, while ones that can be mostly ignored would drain only a very small amount.

This system allows balancing enemies independently from one another based on a "normal difficulty" budget depending on how much of the player's attention/skills they require to be dealt with. Yet it still adapts to any combination or quantity of enemies.

It also provides a great way for us to manipulate how difficult the game is by tweaking the total budget, even while the game is running.

Companion Bots

One of the ways the player will progress in the game will be via these companion bots. They can be equipped and they follow the player around, automating tasks the player would've had to manually do before or providing convenience such as more inventory space.

Player Abilities

More than a year ago (in Devlog #20) we worked on backpacks the player could equip to gain abilities, basically equivalent to a class system, except the player can swap classes at any time (provided they have unlocked the associated backpack).

We've been updating them to work with all of the new systems as most of everything changed since then.