Dev Log 8: Weapons and Trash

Hi guys,

We've been busy working on Infusion and we have some stuff to show you.

Firstly, we implemented basic crafting for two melee weapons types - sledgehammers and combat knives.

Currently, for both of these weapons, we only have basic metal variations - steel, tichrome and tungsten. We have the model done for a special "flame sledgehammer", but the mechanics are not there yet.

Sledgehammers are crafted from two components - the head and the handle. The type, material and quality of the head is what has the most influence on the resulting sledgehammer. Handle can affect ergonomics which is a special stat that affects various other stats, but we're going to leave that one for a later dev log.

My idea with sledgehammers is that, outside of energy weapons and explosives, they are probably going to be the most powerful damage-wise, but the trade-off is going to be clunkiness, which makes the weapon impractical in many cases compared to more traditional melee weapons, such as knives, swords and mace-like weapons. Sledgehammers are going to be easier to dodge because of slow swing speed and due to their heaviness they will require you to spend a lot of stamina, especially if you're going to use the powerful overhead slam attack. However, if you are Chad who invests in strength, you'll probably be able to pull some crazy damage numbers, especially with the larger heads.

This brings me to the concept of innate weapon-specific attacks - that is, each weapon will have a number of different attack types, these are available by just having the weapon, without requiring a feat. If they have no cooldown or special condition, which will usually be the case, they can be toggled to be used as an auto-attack when you click an enemy. Well, actually, there is no such thing as an auto-attack anymore, every attack is some specific attack type of your current weapon.

For example, in case of Sledgehammers these would be: swing, overhead slam and pummel. You can imaging how these different attacks work and their different properties. I will not go into it right now, except to say that the pummel takes advantage of a new engine mechanics which allows weapon items to have sub-weapons nested in them. That is, when you attack with the handle of the sledgehammer, it's a completely different weapon with its own stats. This feature is going to come handy when we start implementing all sorts of unique, makeshift and hybrid weapons that can be used in different ways.

* * * * * * * * * *

Next, we implemented the basic combat knife variations. Here, crafting is a bit more interesting because of the number of different handles, guards and pommels.

Knives have two basic attacks: swing and stab. The former being an easier, faster attack, while the latter being a bit slower and more stamina draining but having bonus armor penetration. Depending on the type of knife blade, these attacks can have wildly different effectiveness, especially when it comes to the amount of armor penetration the stab attack will grant.

All these numbers are just my initial estimates of how these blades should work. They will be adjusted through testing and spreadsheet number crunching.

* * * * * * * * * *

We've also implemented assault rifle crafting. We only have a single frame type, but a lot of different attachments. I'm going to showcase it in a separate dev log at a later time, because there's a lot to be said. We've went quite deep when it comes to firearm customization as you might have seen from my past activity on Twitter/X.

* * * * * * * * * *

Lastly, here's a couple of environment screenshots of Infusion's sewers. These are all WIP and not actual areas that are going to be in the game, but they do a good job of demonstrating our visual style. Our lead environment artist MacOrion has been hard at work on producing grime and trash as it's very important to use that the game's visuals properly convey one of the central themes of the setting - which is infrastructural collapse and decay.

* * * * * * * * * *

We continue to work towards our next immediate milestone, which is, as I mentioned before, getting the game into a state where we can produce a short video demonstrating some exploration and combat.

That's it for now. In the next dev log, I'm probably going to be showcasing leather armor, which is in the works right now.

Follow me on Twitter, where I post smaller tidbits occasionally.

Cheers.