Silly upgradeable Weapons
Uzi Jungle
Genre: FPS
Played: 360,000 Times
Published: 2016
My first foray into making a semi commercial game
The premise was simple: run around a jungle and collect gems. When you collected enough gems you could upgrade your weapon. When you upgraded your weapon you would get to pick from two options, each one of them branching into two other options and so on. With over 130 Uzis stacking 6 branching layers deep there was always something you hadn’t seen.
Fresh of the accidental success of my previous game “Gun Game” I wanted to see if I could replicate the popularity with a more polished and progression based game. So my freshman year of college I recruited two of my good friends to help me make the map and model the silly weapons and we set out.
Little did we know that lighting is not so easy to catch in a bottle. Especially when none of you have ever actually done any real game design.
We spent far to much time creating some of the coolest weapons ever set to voxels, and far too little time playtesting and making sure it was actually fun. This resulted in a wildly imaginative and unique game that was just no fun to play.
130 imaginative weapons, including one branch of the tree that was just a bunch of animals that shot bullets
A learning experience
Although the game we created fell far short of our ambitious expectations, I was able to learn a lot from it’s failures. There were 2 primary issues, one with game design, and one technical.
From a game design side the issues was this: because the game revolved around collecting gems there was very little incentive to fight with players. Why would I take a fight that could potentially end with me dying, when I could just make for it and live to steel the gem?
This could have been fixed by making the player get kills to upgrade their weapon, but we didn’t balance them with that in mind, so players could have gotten stuck on sub-par Uzis. The other issue was that it would disincentivize exploring the map we had spent to much time adding detailed locations too.
The second issue is that with a more progression based game the rewards for cheating go up.
This was my first time programming an FPS at scale, and I had underestimated how big of an issue cheating would be. Even if I had understood how much of a risk it posed to the enjoyment of the game, at the time I didn’t have the first idea how to defensively program my game. This resulted in the server trusting the clients account of events all the time, even if the client was teleporting around the map attacking players.
Within a few days of release it was clear that the only way to curb the problem would be to rewrite pretty much all of the games networking systems.
