SYSTEMS AND GAMEPLAY DESIGN - IN PROGRESS - FALL 2020 TO PRESENT

Final Round is a remake of the student project Savior of Nothing, produced both to be a comfortable playground for me to get back into the swing of game development and also a place to push my design skills. It aims to solve two key flaws with Savior's original gun systems, as well as add a variety of broad improvements to the experience. You can find the original project here.

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First, Savior's gun stats were percentage-based additive values. Each gun part would modify the flat value of related stats by increasing it a relative amount - such as a 20% increase to fire rate. While these values were not multiplicative, the drastic changes created by specific part combinations as well as the lack of minute control over how these changes affected gun behavior weren't ideal. While this system allowed for a small number of base guns, it didn't give enough control for more polished design choices.

To prevent this issue, in Final Round, weapons define both base values and a minimum and maximum. Gun parts then define where within this range the final value falls. In this new system, rather than a percentage increase to fire rate, the weapon would be 20% closer to it's maximum possible fire rate. While this creates a need for many more base guns, it makes fine tuning each weapon much more reasonable.

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Second, Savior's gun parts only rarely changed fundamental mechanics. While each part usually changed behavior enough to matter, only "Trigger" type parts and a few others actually made the gun behave completely differently. This meant that parts were primarily defined by their stat combination, and only their stat combination. In Final Round, 3 out of the 5 gun parts directly define some of each weapon's functionality; the receiver determines how the gun fires, the core determines what it shoots, and the scope determines the zoom and what kind of aim-down sights the weapon has.

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Final Round is also an attempt to improve and expand on the original overall - from rebuilding the AI from the ground up by taking influence from F.E.A.R's Planning pattern AI, to adding and expanding to the variables each gun can use, to implementing custom animation rigs and model changes for each gun part. The project is intentionally ambitious, to challenge me and force me to learn new and challenging things even as I explore a familiar space.

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Final Round is a personal project in the early prototype phase, and as such, is not currently available. If you would like more information, feel free to contact me!