Margin Notes 9 : Foundations
- Daniel Langley
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
This month has been a roller coaster behind the scenes at Book 27 Games! From completely stalling out on trying to figure out some programming obstacles to making leaps of progress this month has seen the entire spectrum of productivity levels. Game mechanic foundations have been built, tools for playtesting have been put together, and concept art has been pushed into the third dimension. Let’s get into it.
~ LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS ~
This month has been focused on building out the weapons systems that will be duplicated across the entire sandbox. This means implementing shooting, reloading, an ammo system, ammo pick ups, weapon pick ups, firing projectiles (when applicable), shotgun spread, as well as weapon switching and dropping.
Getting this weapon system and all of its adjacent systems to work quickly humbled me in providing more than one roadblock. Specifically the ammo system gave me days of headache in trying to get it to function properly. In the end, I got the help from a more experienced programmer who was able to walk me through why my logic wasn’t working correctly and showed me a few tricks to help troubleshoot future code. Shoutout to Strawesome, hope that coffee tasted extra good!
With the ammo system finally behind me progress unfolded much faster in every other area, and I was able to use some of my new troubleshooting skills to iron out and clean up some of my older blueprints. Now, for the fun stuff.
NOTE: All assets in the videos below are placeholder meant for prototyping only. They are not representative of the final product.
~ THE BUILDING BLOCKS ~
In this section you’ll get to see what systems I’ve been able to build and what some of them look like. So let’s dive right in.Firstly, the dreaded ammo system (this system seriously gave me so much hell, I hate it). Ammo is represented in the top left of the screen with a very simple ammo counter showing how many bullets are in your weapon clip and how many bullets you have in reserve. These variables are transferred between the player and the weapon as you pick up new weapons and interact with ammo pickups. To test this feature I added in a little kiosk that spawns each ammo type, which you can see in the video below. Note the top left to see the ammo counter update with each pick up being collected.
Collecting ammo is a simple matter of walking over the pick up object. The ammo goes right into the players ammo storage variables which manages the ammo for each weapon throughout the game.
The next part of the weapon system is the heads up display widget indicating that you can pick up a gun. I took a lot of inspiration from Unreal II: The Awakening in how they highlight objectives and interactables in the world. My version of this HUD element is a bit simpler than theirs, but getting it to draw in the first place is the first step in being able to further customize it down the road to make it more dynamic.
Then there’s picking up and dropping the weapons! This system is one that I consider personally pretty important because I wanted to replicate a specific gameplay loop. So, when you pick up a gun it replaces the one in your hand and drops the one you were carrying on the ground. Pretty straight forward, but what is specific about it getting the weapons you drop to be “tossed” away from the player in the direction you are facing, like so:
The reason I wanted to implement this drop/toss system this way is because when playing Halo I would pick up and swap out a third weapon and move the third weapon across the map for specific encounters. An example would be on Assault on the Control Room when there are Hunters in the building that you can kill with a pistol but there is also a Rocket Launcher on the map that I want to use to take out the turrets, Ghosts, and Banshees that you encounter throughout. So, I would swap the Rocket Launcher and Pistol out with one another as I moved to move the third weapon across the map allowing me to use an Assault Rifle for general combat then the pistol for the hunters and the Rocket Launcher for vehicles.
Using the swap mechanic as a means to transport a third weapon became even more important on Legendary, which is usually when I did this process. So now ASSIAH has weapon tossing!
Weapons also now have the ability to eject shell casings when shooting. Getting this to work was really simple, you just spawn the shell actor off a socket on the weapon skeleton and give it a little impulse and rotation and voila, shell casings.
No arsenal is complete without grenades! As important as guns are the often unsung hero of most shooters is the trusty grenades.
A straightforward toss, a 3 second timer, and then it explodes. The frag grenade will act as the base grenade class that other grenades are built on top of with unique behaviors built into them individually.
On top of being a great way to kill multiple enemies at once the grenades will also propel the player!
The impulse added to the player may be a bit strong, nothing a little tuning can’t fix. The important thing is that you’ll be able to grenade jump so long as you have enough health to not die from the explosion.
On the note of dying I’ve also updated the healing effects adding a screen pulse indicating the player has been fully healed. This effect plays both in the healing volume and when picking up a health pack.
Another mechanic I was able to put together was the teleporter. A simple screen flash and world transform update put together to make the player teleport around wherever they need. It’s a nice and simple little pair of blueprints that makes this system work.
Speaking of simple mechanics, the flashlight. This one is about as straightforward as you can get, but I do quite enjoy the drag the light has as you turn.
I also added a pause menu to the game and gave it some flair. Each button leads to the corresponding menu page with animations. The design of the menu is subject to change pretty significantly but like everything shown so far this is an important building block. In these menus will live all the options and settings, objective information, the ability to save and load your game, and a few other things that I’m not ready to reveal just yet.
And last but certainly not least is the Test Dummy! Seen in the grenade video earlier these test dummies have a health variable and a damage variable that update as damage is applied to them making testing out the weapon sandbox more convenient. Also, they act as the foundation for the enemy classes that can now start being built. With the ability to detect the player, receive damage, and update their health variables the dummies are the base line that the enemy class will be built on top of.
~ THINGS THAT GO BANG ~
On top of building out those various systems we’ve also been modeling and texturing the weapons for the game. The textures aren’t finalized for the guns yet but progress is being made there too. A lot of these have already been showcased on Twitter but a couple are brand new to this post. You can see all the currently modeled weapons in the slideshow below.
More details on the weapons above will be revealed later on.
~ ASSIAH LORE ~
And finally, some lore. It's Friday, which means it's lore day. If you aren't on Twitter or Bluesky you likely don't get to see the lore posts when they are posted every Friday so I'm thinking of adding them to the Margin Notes posts as well when they come out, that way there's another place to see them. You can also see all previous lore posts in the Archives, so if you missed a week or haven't seen any of them yet there is all the lore for ASSIAH stored in one convenient place.
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Thanks for reading this month’s Margin Notes!
ASSIAH development continues bit by bit with everyday contributing that much further to the final goal. Next month will see the weapons get fleshed out even further with even more guns being modeled as well as textured and, if things stay on track, implemented in the engine as well. There are other things happening here at Book 27 Games other than ASSIAH, but nothing I can share info on quite yet. Soon though!
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Cheers!
-DannyMac
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