Defeat your enemies with the power of *~LOVE~* Firepower, that is!!!
It’s Jane, the lead developer at Funny Fintan Softworks, and it’s time for our October…
✨Dev Storytime✨
Today, I’m going to be talking about all of the wonderful weapons in Don’t Stop, Girlypop! and how we went about making them.
To start with, let’s talk about how we decided which weapons we wanted to include in the game and how we wanted them to work.
While I wanted Don’t Stop, Girlypop! to be stylistically different from other first-person shooters, I wanted to make sure that the archetypal guns of the genre were still represented and were as impactful as possible. The Magic Wand, for example, was inspired by the Gravity Gun archetype that’s present in shooters like Half Life 2. I used to spend a lot of time in Half Life 2 Deathmatch and Gary’s Mod just like flinging toilets and bits of wall at people using the Gravity Gun and I thought it was just so much fun, so I had to include something like it in Don’t Stop, Girlypop!
In terms of its base fire, the Bubblegun follows the machine gun archetype, but its base fire was actually inspired by It Takes Two! There’s a level in that game where one player has this waxy stuff that they can shoot out and the other player has a match stick, so one player sets up all of the wax and the other player detonates it. I realised you could combine both of these functions into one awesome gun, so the alt-fire creates sticky bubble grenades and the base fire can explode them for you.
The Nailgun is a classic archetype that I knew we needed to have in the game, because sticking an enemy to a wall is really fun. It shows up in a lot of first-person shooters, like recently in DOOM: The Dark Ages.
Similarly, I knew we couldn’t make a first-person shooter without a Shotgun. I wanted the Shotgun’s alt-fire to be a little different though, since so many FPS games go down the route of having a shotgun alt-fire that’s just a more powerful single shot, which can be useful but a bit boring. I kept thinking about the coin from ULTRAKILL and asked myself, what would be the next step up from the coin? How about a turret that shoots a lot of shots but doesn’t always hit the target? I felt like it needed to be more chaotic than the coin, so that’s how we ended up with the alt-fire being an unstable ball of portals that replicates whatever you shoot into it in a bunch of different directions.
The Railgun is another classic archetype that I knew we had to include. It’s just really satisfying to have something that does a sh❤t load of damage, but you have to wait a really long time to reload.
There is one more weapon in the game that I won’t mention here because we haven’t revealed what that is yet. No spoilers, girlypops!
When it came to the designs for the guns, we actually started out with the designs for 3 of them back when I started development almost 4 years ago! All of the guns were very different looking back then though. For example, the Railgun used to have all of these weird chemicals going into it and it had this mad scientist vibe. I decided I wanted to make the designs more unified, but that created another design problem because they ended up all being the same colour!
When I went to GDC in 2024, I met with Chris Murphy, who’s really well known online for his Unreal tutorial videos and is an expert in Unreal Engine. After playing through the demo we had for Don’t Stop, Girlypop! at the time, he mentioned that he couldn’t tell the difference between the guns at a glance. I mentioned about how we’d made sure the silhouettes of each gun were different, but he said that people generally don’t perceive shape in their peripheral vision, you mainly perceive colour. This completely changed the way that I approached gun design.
With FPS games generally, you work on silhouettes for things like enemies, items, etc., but you can’t rely on that with guns. You need that light colour change that registers in the player’s peripheral vision, because players aren’t staring at the bottom right corner of the screen where the gun is and getting a full view of the silhouette, they’re staring at the cross-hair. This obviously isn’t a concrete rule, but more of a design philosophy that Chris shared with me and that I decided to incorporate into Don’t Stop, Girlypop! This is the reason why none of the guns are the same colour and why you can’t apply the same colour to different guns in the dress-up game.
During that same chat with Chris, he also brought up the issue of having the damage multiplier being represented by a number onscreen. In that original build, your speed and damage multiplier were only shown through the numbers in the top right hand corner of the screen. He said that, as a game designer, he could tell he was doing more damage as he was moving faster, but the average player probably wouldn’t be able to. All the player can see is a number going up, so it doesn’t feel real or impactful. You need to add some visual cue to give a sense that you’re doing more damage, so that’s where I got the idea of adding more barrels to the gun as the player starts going faster. This added a lot more tactility to the movement and damage mechanic.
Alongside these design challenges, there were certain weapons that presented technical challenges that we had to overcome. In particular, the Magic Wand, you can tell it was definitely an art person decision and not a programmer decision! From a technical and mechanical perspective, it works completely differently from all of the other weapons. It doesn’t reload and it doesn’t have ammo. We had to create an entirely new physics system within the game and then put props throughout all of the levels so you always had things to throw at enemies. After testing out the prototype, I found it so much fun that I knew we had to add it! Altogether, the system took about a month to create, but I think it was worth it.
The Bubblegun was another challenging one. Creating the geometry for the sticky bubbles and having that geometry mould together was very complicated. I’ll admit, this was another crazy art request from me, which has made our programmer’s life much harder! Most of our creative process is me walking in naively thinking about how cool an idea will be while our programmer has to do all of the heavy lifting to make it a reality.
Another fun weapon-related fact is that the filigree VFX effect you see around the screen when you wave-hop was originally made for the Magic Wand. You still see a bit of them when you use the Magic Wand as well. I love this effect and it’s so beautiful, but it wasn’t easy to make at all. It took a lot longer than you might expect!
When it comes to my experience of the game, I don’t want to choose favourites because I love all of the weapons, but I have to admit that I find it really satisfying using the Magic Wand to whack enemies with crates and watch them explode. It just has so much oomph! My favourite alt-fires are probably the Shotgun Portal Ball or the Bubblegun’s Bubbles. The Portal Ball is cool because of all of the combinations and interactions you can have with it, while the Bubbles just feel super impactful! We actually tuned them down for the demo and we might have tuned them down too far, so we’ll be looking at balancing that in the final game.
My favourite combination though has to be the Shotgun alt-fire plus the Railgun because it is absolutely ridiculous. We’ve put it in a few of our trailers because of how cool it looks. You get this insane effect where like one million bright pink lights are coming out of the portal and doing stupid damage to everything around them.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this month’s dev diary and I hope you all enjoyed it!!! Next month, I’ll be talking more about how we came up with the idea for the dress-up game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2610650/Dont_Stop_Girlypop/
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