Christopher G Daniel​

1. Spread Gun: Half Contra Spread Gun, half Dead Space Line gun. Used for clearing large groups of enemies

2. Land Shark: Designed to hit enemies hiding behind cover this weapon climbs over any terrain in a straight line and blows up when near proximity of the enemy

3. Flak Cannon: Made a replace as a cheaper alternative to an over-powered, rapid-fire shotgun this weapon uses hit-scanning with proximity detection to create a weapon ideal for taking out hordes of flying enemies with minimal impact on performance.

Modern Hand Motion Controllers only have a little bit of jitter which is acceptable when you are not aiming at a target 500M+ away. I developed a predictive smoothing algorithm for sniping that took raw hand controller data and massaged the data to make it smooth and snappy so the player has no idea that their data is even being massaged.

I wanted the shotgun to fire a series of raytraces in a uniform distribution (this avoids issues where a direct hit could mostly miss), but I wanted the rotation of each trace to appear random. I could have used a grid, or a hex grid pattern, but those would be obvious patterns so I decided to use a spiral pattern. Based on how many “pellets” I needed in the shotgun blast I calculated the radius of my attack in pellet units Radius = SQRT(Total Pellets/Pi), Once I have the area I can find the normalized position of each “pellet” target along a spiral over the interval 0 <= t <= 1 where t is all values

1. Based on the random starting angle I move the offset over some so that Offset = (-0.5/Radius) * FVector2D(cos(Angle), sin(Angle)) so that the spiral is centered as much as possible

2. X = sqrt(t)

3. Angle = random_start_angle + random_direction * (x) * Radius * 2 * pi

4. Target_Position[i] = FVector2D(cos(Angle), sin(Angle)) * (x)  + Offset

5. Once I have the normalized positions on the spiral I add a little jitter to each point

6. Target_Position[i] += FVector2D(cos(rand_angle), sin(rand_angle)) + (rand_0_to_1^2 * max_jitter/Radius)

7. Once we have the target positions it’s simple trig to convert the target positions to rotations offset from the gun’s forward vector and you have a random but uniform distribution of shotgun shots.

Design wanted Electrical Transformers that the player could blow up that would visibly shock a radius near the transformer causing AoE damage over time. Damage over time was trivial, but to get the electric arcs to look good I implemented a system that would use a curve over time to determine how many electrical arcs should appear. Whenever there was a deficiency of electric arcs the transformer would loop through all enemies in the affected area and see if they had the desired number of electric arcs drawing on them, if not I would go through their main bones and find the nearest bone to attach to. If I did NOT find any enemies with a deficiency I would pick random points within the affected radius and use a raycast to find a nearby piece of static geometry. I would then raytrace to the desired point (whether it was on an enemy or a piece of static geo) if it passed the test I would draw the arc.

Damaged Core's Electric Gun is one of the top animating fantasy guns in video games (right up there with Metro 2033 and Syndicate). The Electric Gun has a spinning “generator”, the more ammo in the gun the faster the generator spins, the generator also spins quicker while the gun is being charged. During a charge, the two trays in front of the gun separate and electric arcs start forming between the contacts on each side.

Reloading is done when the generator pops out and the model punches the generator back in and then rolls its fingers across the side to quickly start speeding up the generator.

The Damaged Core shotgun uses a revolver clip that empties as the gun fires (ejecting shells into the air.) Once the player reloads their character pulls out the revolver clip, throws it to the ground (where it becomes a physics object and bounces off the ground) and is replaced with a new full clip.

Production wanted the death of the flying enemy gunboat enemies to be spectacular, but our animators had an impossible time making canned animations that would look good in every situation so they put me in charge of devising and implementing a dynamic death sequence that would always look good. I devised a multi-part death sequence that made each Valkyrie death memorable.

1. When a Valkyrie dies (and isn’t immediately disintegrated) it will first enter a stagger state where the AI is turned off, as the Valkyrie recoils from the last hit while ragdolling while electric discharges and the engine sputters

2. After a small random amount of time (up to about 0.5 seconds) the Valkyrie suffers from a minor explosion (with VFX/SFX and starts to quickly fall)

3. While the Valkyrie random “limbs” sheer off and fall separately from the main body

4. If at this point (or any point earlier) the main body hits the ground the Valkyrie suffers a major explosion (with VFX/SFX), all remaining “limbs” comb flying off and the Valkyrie’s body mesh is replaced with a broken mesh body.

5. After about 5 seconds the Valkyrie’s corpse disintegrates

I had to track dozens of combinations of stats along with running totals of all combinations, and different versions of these stats for the session for persistent and saved values.

For example, the system had to keep a running tally of all possible stat combinations so that we could quickly award achievements for stats like killing 20 deconstructors with a shotgun in level 1, beating the game using less than 100 hacks, or killing  100 of any combination of the 3 different vanguard enemies.

I also needed to make sure that the stats got saved and loaded correctly.