(First post, yay!)
I’d like to present two weapon ideas that I was focusing on for the last few days.
1. Pulse Cannon.
When I was trying to think up some weapon concepts I realized that the game still lacks one thing: a big cannon.
The weapon fires a high-speed projectile which continues to accelerate until it reaches it’s target, at which point it creates an explosion (similar to that of the Mine Bomb, but not delayed) that deals a high amount of damage to all enemies caught in the blast radius.
The Cannon has a fire rate of 1 shot per second consistent across all power levels. The size of the projectile doesn’t change between 0-10, instead the speed of the projectile is affected creating a larger explosion and increasing the damage.
The weapon deals 300 damage at 1 and around 2000 damage at 10.
A major change occurs at 20. The projectile is now supercharged, it becomes larger and it’s hue becomes more reddish. The damage is increased by 1000 and the explosion is around twice as large as at power 10. The speed of the projectile doesn’t increase.
The weapon should be able to fire around 10 continuous shots before overheating.
The Pulse Cannon’s gift would be pink with a white ribbon.
The projectile:
The impact flare/spark/thing:
The shockwave/explosion:
And the supercharged versions:
EDIT: There is, unfortunately, an issue regarding balancing the Pulse Cannon. In it’s current state it has a purely rubbish damage per second of 3000 at 20 (over 2x less than Vulcan Chaingun). On normal waves this is countered by the AoE effect of the weapon. However, there is a problem with bosses. Since, for the most part, there is only one enemy per wave, the explosion doesn’t help at all. Which means that this weapon would be severely underpowered against most bosses.
I guess it could be worse, at least it still deals damage. But the fights would be rather long.
I have no idea how to fix this so if you have any ideas, I’m open to suggestions.
EDIT2: So @anon27929001 had a simple solution which I’d (obviously) completely overlooked.
What’s changed: we get extra damage on impact. At 10 the weapon would deal 3500 damage on impact (so only to the target it directly hits), while the explosion would deal 2000 damage (or something like that) to all other enemies caught in the explosion. That bumps up the damage done to bosses while not making the weapon overly OP.
At 20 damage would be 5000 on impact (making it just bearable to be used on a theoretical boss with 1 million hp) and 3000 for the explosion. Not really sure about the numbers for lower levels but I might think about that later.
So yeah, I think that might just work.
2. Krypton Phaser
This one was created because we just don’t have enough green weapons.
The weapon is fully automatic, like the Boron Railgun, but fires rather slowly in exchange for more damaging projectiles and slow overheat. The weapon can be fired for ~10 seconds before overheating. The projectiles would be just slightly slower than the Vulcan Chaingun’s.
It has another peculiar characteristic: unlike other automatic weapons it never fires all of the active weapon pods at once (except for 0). Furthermore, the order of the weapon pods is random, creating random firing patterns.
I finished reworking all power levels today, since the previous version was very underpowered. The current setup should have (for the most part) a slightly lower damage per second than the Boron Railgun.
The image below shows all active weapon pods for every level, and whether the pod fires a weak (short) or strong (long) projectile (225 and 400 damage respectively).
Of course these are not actual firing patterns, as the number of projectiles fired at once is limited.
The firing patterns would be as follows:
0: Fires 1 projectile at 2 shots/s
1, 2: Fires 1 projectile at 3/s
3, 4, 5 : Fires 2 projectiles at 4/s
6: Fires 2 projectiles at 4.5/s
7, 8: Fires 2 projectiles at 5/s
9: Fires 2 projectiles at 5.5/s
10: Fires 2 projectiles at 6/s
20: Fires 3 projectiles at 6/s
The Krypton Phaser’s gift would be green/blue with a light blue ribbon.
Weak bolt:
Strong bolt:
I’ve also made some sound effects that could be used for these weapons. All of them were made from scratch in Audacity (don’t expect much, it was mostly improvisation by a guy without any previous experience in making any sounds whatsoever): so0000unds - Google Drive
I’d like to hear your opinion on these weapons and any ideas that could help balance them better.