Weapons
Player experience
You bring two weapons into a life and switch between them. Automatics pour out damage. Semi-autos control the crowd. Learning a pair is the skill.
The weapon you learn first is an automatic: Stream, Flood, Chopper, Conduit, and Obliviator. The one beside it is a semi-auto: Shotgun, Halo, Lobber, and Rocket.
Product goal
Two live weapons, so the shop can pour upgrades into that pair instead of everything you own. The slots stay untyped. The pairing is something you learn.
Open
Two weapons at a time is the primary option. The shop can then concentrate upgrade odds on the two weapons in the live kit, instead of spreading them across all nine.
The main slot is Automatic fire and offers heavily concentrated fire for maximum damage - Stream, Flood, Chopper, Conduit, and Obliviator
The secondary slot is Semi-Auto fire and trades lower damage for maximum crowd control - Shotgun, Halo, Lobber, and Rocket
These slot rules don't need to be enforced - but learning how an Automatic pairs with a Semi-Auto is essential
Two active slots is a strong tool for narrowing the shop pool each round - 2 weapons x 4 upgrade types per weapon.
We could go all-in on Boomer Shooters and do away with "two slots" all together. We would let the player carry every unlocked weapon, and equip any of them at any time. But 9 x 4 upgrade types in the shop means a low chance of focusing your upgrades into a single weapon, so we'd want to consider that.
The weapons
Stream
Auto
Bare Minimum - Blood / Fire Red - a.k.a Stream, this automatic "SMG" shoots a thin stream.
Unique identity: fire red spread, blood-sucking heal effect
Flood
Flood
Essential Rifle - Ice White - heavier and a bit slower than Auto, like a highly-reliable AR.
Unique identity - chance to freeze, "flooding water" effects
Shotgun
Shotgun
The Doom classic. A basic spread of pellets, unlocked early, and the first semi-auto you pair with Stream. Dragon's Breath sets the cone on fire. Hits can chain, pull the swarm into gravity crumbs, or bore a tight group when you aim down the middle.
Chopper
Chopper
Heavy duty, blood red. The heaviest of the basic rifles, an LMG with slow fire and heavy knockback. Hold the trigger and the belt feeds itself. Slugs crack apart on impact. Tracers punch through. A kill collapses nearby enemies into the corpse.
Halo
Halo
The holy shotgun. White and gold, closer to a super shotgun than a second basic spread, though the base tier is modest. Upgraded, it sprays a precise pattern of holy white shards. Holy Water leaves a pool where they land.
Lobber
Lobber
Classic grenade launcher, and upgrades into a blackhole bomber. You lob the shot in an arc instead of firing a straight rocket, and it explodes on impact. The upgrades are gravity bombs: a pull, a burning puddle, a wider core, a ring of bomblets.
Rocket
Rocket
Crowd control. A standard rocket that detonates on impact, then grows into a weave of rockets for a large swarm. The blast can drag enemies down a vacuum corridor, stun a boss, and collapse the wake into the crater.
Conduit
Conduit
The electricity rifle, electric yellow. Damage per hit stays low. The shot chains through the swarm and turns into a cloud of electric death. Hold the trigger and the coil charges a longer chain. The arc forks. A chain that kills everything it touches pays the energy back.
Obliviator
Maelstrom
Interdimensional assault. The colors keep changing. A Cthulhu gauntlet fires a complex pattern of circling shards, and the damage is very high. Hold still and the storm tightens. The helix reverses and cuts back across the angles it left empty.
As built
The player fires the equipped gauntlet. Weapon ids in this build are WeaponId: None, Gauntlet, Auto, Shotgun, Rocket, Maelstrom, Halo, Chopper, Lobber, Conduit, Flood.
As-built enums. Damage, energy, fire cadence, and projectile profiles are on the WeaponDefinition assets in as-built assets. Upgrade text below is the asset description; ranks and tuning stay on the stackable assets in the run readout.
What the player can do
IGauntletLoadout is the two slots for the life. The active slot is the weapon that fires. GauntletController switches on FireMode. A shot spends energy, then spawns shards until the pool is full. Hits resolve through IHitRegistry and IHitVolumeQuery. Attract wells pull enemies when a weapon defines one.
The shop can put a gauntlet into the live kit during the life. The profile loadout is what the next life resolves.
What ends it
A weapon stops firing when the life ends, the slot is empty, or energy does not allow the shot. A shard ends when its range, pierce, bounces, fuse, or chain jumps run out.
What is saved
Owned weapons and the equipped slots are inventory. Energy and the live shot are not saved.
How a weapon enters the shop
CollectionCatalog.GateForWeapon is the round after which a gauntlet card can unlock. Auto and Flood are open from round 0. Shotgun is 2, Chopper 4, Halo 6, Lobber 8, Rocket 10, Conduit 12, Maelstrom 15. WeaponId.None and WeaponId.Gauntlet are not shop weapons.
Stackable offers for a weapon come from CollectionCatalog only when the card's StackableAbilityType requires that WeaponId and the live kit has the weapon. Two Auto and Rocket abilities still run in GauntletController and are absent from that shop list. They are called out on those weapons.