Forge Upgrades

Design document for the NRR forge upgrade system within the shop

Info

To come full circle on the experimental weapons and provide players with a system that can take the normal weapons that can be found around the map into different variants, We have designed this forge upgrade system. It works similarly to the normal weapon upgrades however only gives the player a choice of one that can't be changed after making it more of a skill tree option.

After fully upgrading a weapon which is 4 level unlocks and 32 upgrades the player will be presented with a choice of two weapons they can "Forge" their current one into. When this is done the original type of weapon is changed throughout the game.

We have had the forge weapons in the game for quite a while however the upgrade system wasn't in place to get them. So instead and in the meantime they have been included in the main weapon pools you can randomly get from weapon plinths, just to show off the variety of the game and let people test out the exciting weapons while at shows when they don't have the time to earn all the coins needed to purchase them.

Available Upgrades

Lazor

• Sausage Lazor: Fires sausage pucks that increase damage, speed and size on each bounce

• Quick Lazor: Fires an extremely quick Lazor projectile that can bounce off walls

SMG

• Seek SMG: Shoots out bullets that will target enemies and move towards them

• Burst SMG: Fires a burst of bullet rounds, slow recharge but very high damage

Shotgun

• Double Shot: Fires two rounds of shotgun blasts, large knockback

• Pump Shot: Fires explosive shotgun round, low damage but can damage multiple quickly

Rockit

Awaiting Forge Weapons

Grenade Launcher

• Scatter Launcher: Fires grenades that scatter into smaller grenades that damage in a larger area

• Lock Launcher: Fires a grenade that splits into tiny homing missiles

LMG

Awaiting Forge Weapons

Pincer

Awaiting Forge Weapons

Sword

Awaiting Forge Weapon

Methodology

The Forge system works with the weapon upgrade singleton which we use for all of the weapon stats and upgrade stats. So that we can change stats easily of all the weapons the forge weapons are connected to the same object meaning all weapons can be edited from one place. When it comes to the information about what the player has upgraded, this is stored in the player state singleton which holds nearly everything we need to keep between an in-game run. This means these changes will affect the player's stats throughout the game.

The more long-winded part of this system would be making it change out the old weapons for the new forged weapons. For this to work the system takes all of the previous weapon connections and replaces them with the new ones - this meant changing all of the weapon plinths and spawns to all link to our proc gen system which holds a base blueprint of each type of weapon. Doing it this way also means we can easily add more forge weapon choices per type.