Militias! Welcome back to the third devlog for Only Lead Can Stop Them.
We just got back from a local event in Gothenburg where we let a few local game devs
commenting on the current state of our game and bounce a few ideas over some upcoming
features that’s in the pipeline. We where happy to hear about how some commented on
improved game feel and specially how some weapons feels very satisfying. Several of these
game devs have tried a couple of versions of the game and can compare their early game
test two years ago and one of the recuring comment was that the rifle had gone from being
forgettable to becoming their favorite weapon to use. It prompted me to want to share
some of the development history for the rifle.
In the early days of the game development it was decided that a game that takes place in the
Spanish Civil War needs to have a focus on a rifle for one of the main weapons. Rifles was a
very common weapon at the time making up the bulk of the arsenal of the worlds armies.
When the war broke out both sides of the conflict sought to arm themselves by
supplementing the divided arsenal with guns imported from abroad. As such there were
plenty of different rifles used during the war.
The rifle that is featured in the game is based on a variant of the French Lebel 1886 rifle
model. Of the more than a dozen rifle models used during the war several had been
designed to use the 8 mm Lebel rifle cartridge which makes the Lebel a good representation
of the standard rifle at the time.
When designing a weapon for a game there are a couple of different aspects to consider.
One of these is the need to have weapon stand out from the rest and for it to offer a unique
experience compared to the rest of the arsenal. Since we wanted there to be fast shooting
weapons in the game like the sub-machine gun and the heavy machinegun we wanted the
rifle to differ by having a slower rate of fire. This also serves as realism and immersion in the
time period since a bolt action rifle wasn’t easy to operate at a fast pace with any
meaningful accuracy.
The graphical artist Johannes Broman got to work and made the design with the detailed
animation of the player handling the action of bolt and raising the gun to take aim. The
shooting animation showed a very powerful punch and it all came together for a very nice
visual delight. Early on it reminded me to some extent of the very iconic weapons animation
of the shotgun in the original Doom.
The rifle was later developed further to also be featured with different animation with the
rifle grenade weapon.
What few people know however is that the rifle weapon was originally imagined having a
bayonet that could be fitted at the end. Animations was made for this, and the idea was that
the player would be able to alternate between having the bayonet on or off and would use a
secondary fire key to do melee attacks. There had even been the idea that the rifle could be
stuck in wooden walls at a missed strike and an animation for pulling the rifle out was made.
This could have been a neat feature but in the end this feature was scrapped for two
reasons. Main reason is that it made the controls more complex than we wanted to. The
second reason is that the knife looked better when animated and we didn’t want it to lose
its usefulness.
The rifle had a slow rate of fire but was one of the deadliest guns in the game. That is to say
if you were able to aim with it. The earliest iterations of the game had a delay of more than
one second from when the player clicked to fire to when the gun actually went. Many times,
the enemy had time to move out of the way. This was due to the detailed animation of the
player lifting the rifle and carefully aiming. To some this made the gun feel different and
some even liked the additional challenge that the rifle offered. Many players however
couldn’t be bothered with the hassle and opted to fire many bullet from the smg instead.
It was obvious that we had a problem here. One of the weapons we hoped would be a
center piece of the game was being passed over, so we had to fix it. We started by testing a
faster animation pace. The faster switch between sprites looked out of place however. The
next thing we did was to drop frames from the animation removing most of the lifting and
aiming of the gun. Now the gun instantly fired when the player pressed the button. And with
a few tweaks further the animation had a different feel. The more sudden raising of the gun,
when removing the gradual raising at aiming, created a feeling of the rifle having a more
powerful knock back.
In the end we kept most of the animation that made the rifle a slow paced weapon since the
animation of the bolt action between shots still slows it down. We had however balanced
the need for graphical impressiveness with the players need for responsive controls and as a
result the rifle had become one of the best looking weapons and one of the best sources of
game feel.
Until Next Time
I hope you enjoyed this little story of how the games rifle came to be. We hope to give you
more exciting stories down the line of current and upcoming features.
I’ll see you in the next devlog
- Dan Pettersson, creative director and tech artist
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1909100/Only_Lead_Can_Stop_Them/