Dev-Blog #2: Evolution of Weapons

Welcome to our second INDUSTRIA Dev-Blog! Lets start right away:

As you probably know, INDUSTRIA is a first-person shooter, and for a first-person shooter you need weapons. Idealy, a few of them. When we started the project, INDUSTRIA was not even a FPS. It was only 1 year after the development started, when we decided that INDUSTRIA needs weaopons, needs a way to fight back the enemies. Our modeling and animation skills were obviously not very far developed back then and as you can imagine, the visual quality changed dramatically over the last 2 years. Lets have a look at the very first iteration of weapons in INDUSTRIA, from january 2018:

Plain weapons without textures, slow fire animation, double handed, huge particle effects, a free placeholder sound and a block out rifle model. Thats about it. It looks pretty terrible. Lets take a look at the next version, 8 months later, in september 2018:

Well, quite a big leap. We now have the rifle fully modeled out, a new weapon, the smg added and all textured, all with proper reload animations. I remember being very proud of the reload animations I did back then (never did anything like this before). But they still dont feel very responsive. The rifle is a lever rifle, with a bullet after bullet reload animation the player was able to interrupt. Pretty cool (but also very buggy sometimes). Lets jump 2 months further into november 2018:

Wow! Bullet casings! And all new positions and scaling! Also, screen shake added! Oh, but something is missing- all reload animations are gone. I remember looking at BF1 weapon positioning, you can see that on the slightly left angled SMG. Still the shitty and very loud placeholder sounds. Lets move on quickly, it hurts to look at this mess. Now, 1 month later, december 2018:

Ahaaaa! The first open cummunity Alpha we did with the Discord server members. Beautiful and exciting houres and days when we let hundreds of people play INDUSTRIA for the first time.We have better idle animations on the pistol now. Rifle still lacks any animations. But the SMG feels pretty solid now. Not much to say to this so lets make a big jump, half a year later, to june 2019:

Oh, but what is that? An Axe? This was the second public Alpha we run with the community. In these last months we tweaked quite alot things with the gunplay. We removed the silly particle effects and added proper smoke particles (too much and bright ones, but mor about that later). All animations are a bit more snappy and short. I made a few new sounds that are less annoying and more satisfying. But most importantly, we added the melee weapon (it was there before but not very defined). It now features 3 different hit animations, and 3 different miss animations (when the player just hits into the air). Animation inspiration was, of course, Half-Life 2's crowbar. I literally watched Valves animations over and over again in slow motion, trying to figure out why it feels so good. Whatever, another 6 months on top, january 2020:

Again, new positions, closer to camera. Also, new weapon change animations and raise and lower animations. The Axe is now two handed instead of the crowbar like one handed. All animations have been retouched by our animator to get rid of the hard keyframe animations I did (I did not know how to use the animation curves in Blender so I literally hard key framed every move with the standard linear interpolation. The outcome is alot of work for alot of problems). Also: New sounds again. This time, I sat down, listened to the new CoD: MW's gun sounds and rebuilt all of them from scratch with new samples I bought from the FMOD library (wonderful and easy to use sound library btw). We are nearly there, so lets make another 4 month jump to the current look and feel:

So, this is how the weapons look right now. We got rid of the rifle and built a new one. No lever action, but single shot bolt action (mainly a gameplay reason). Also, I retextured all 4 weapons with Substance painter and a proper High-Lowpoly bakes. Again, animations retouched to be more snappy. And most importantly: Iron sights. INDUSTRIA only ever had hipfire available. Right click is lowering and raising the weapons. Right click is now the standard iron sights, which slows the game down dramatically from the arcade feeling to a tactical, imersive shooter (best decision ever). Finaly we tweaked the annoying way to bright smoke particles, so that they are darker and a bit more subtle.

Now, thats it. I am still not happy with the gun visuals. Their textures and normals are still work in progress, and we are still missing a few sounds. But we are getting there. Never stop improving is probably one of the biggest takeaways here. Its a wonderful example for how the developers skills change over the development cycle, replacing content over and over again.. Someone told me once a wise thing: Dont be frustrated to redo things, as your second try will always be better.

Thanks for stopping by and see you next time!

Best wishes and stay healthy, David

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