WarpWalker, a new mech mod

[Monkooky]

So I felt the urge to design a mech.
Obviously, designing the mech isn't much good, so I tried to mod in the mech.
Turns out doing strange and complicated things for your first mod is KINDA HARD.

So here's the basic mech design, everything subject to tweaks:
Teleblaster
Generally average stats, save maybe having 2 shield?
As a passive, all primary weapons have reduced range but increased power
Starts with Splatter Shot, boring old missile launcher, and a secondary weapon which teleports you to wherever the bullet dies.

I have no idea how to do the teleport- looking through the existing modifiers it seems to be impossible.
Anybody have any idea how it might be done?

[ptarth]

So I felt the urge to design a mech.
Obviously, designing the mech isn't much good, so I tried to mod in the mech.
Turns out doing strange and complicated things for your first mod is KINDA HARD.

So here's the basic mech design, everything subject to tweaks:
Teleblaster
Generally average stats, save maybe having 2 shield?
As a passive, all primary weapons have reduced range but increased power
Starts with Splatter Shot, boring old missile launcher, and a secondary weapon which teleports you to wherever the bullet dies.

I have no idea how to do the teleport- looking through the existing modifiers it seems to be impossible.
Anybody have any idea how it might be done?

I can't really spend time to do the testing and make a long answer, but here is some direction.

I haven't tried it myself, but the wiki suggests it should work. Just add it as a modifier to the system, take a look at the Lucky Minigun or The Bouncy Minigun for some basic examples. I think they are in DaytonPlayerWeapons.xml or CMPPlayerWeapons.xml. Although, the modifier may not actually work. I would also suggest setting up something that allows you to grep the files to find things you are looking for, doing so by hand is a nightmare.

Reduced range is generally a bad idea due to the locations of safe spots in patterns. The closer you are to a boss, the fewer they are. You are also going to be in weird situations with the teleporter moving you directly into bullets or into places were you can't take damage. As an alternative look at the BatteringRam weapon for a different spin on the same idea.

[Monkooky]

Modified battering ram works, thanks for the suggestion.
It's not quite what I'd like, but I can't see a way to move the player to a bullet- and superfast movement works well enough.

As for the passive -range, I'm going to try it anyways- ideally the teleporter will allow you to get close and get to safety, but we shall see.

[ptarth]

(I really should not be checking on this, but, eh... )

The tag I was thinking of was:
shots_hitting_player_warp_responsible_entity_to_parent_entity (bool)
if a shot from this system hits the player, then the parent entity of this system is destroyed and the entity which spawned that parent entity (if any) instantly teleports to its location

Which is retrospect is not what we want. I don't think there is a way to do the effect directly within the engine currently, it would require source changes. We could spawn a new player instance, but I don't think it would be updated like the player. Although, there might be a possibility of having clones... Although it would... hm....but then....

Anyway, glad it worked out to a degree. The range modifiers should be straight forward.

I'd make a counter suggestion of seeing what you can come up with the opposite sort of design. What style of mech would be interesting with 0 shields?

Cheers and good luck with things.

[Draco18s]

I did something like this in the scrolling shooter I'm working on.
One of the safeguards I put in was a short bullet-clearing burst when the player was teleported, so that it would clear out any stray enemy bullets at the destination.

[Monkooky]

All right, we're done! Doneish anyways! Uploaded it in the top post.

Range reduction doesn't seem too crippling- I was able to beat Warden on Hard with this mech.
I've dealt with the teleporter moving you into bullets by giving brief phasing after the teleport, but I might change this into bullet clearing instead.

Visuals, obviously, are placeholders.
Names are something I'm not good at, and are therefor placeholders.
The perk could possibly use some fiddling- it's more or less Redshift's perk tree ATM.

The Warp Cannon probably needs tweaks to energy cost, distance and fire rate.
For some reason, you occaisionally rocket off to the corner of the map when teleporting. I can't be buggered to fix this when ideally the entire teleport mechanic will get swapped out.

Gotta say, I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. The warp cannon is quite fun to use, and the mech feels very unique to play.

[ptarth]

It's been an ongoing bug. Under some circumstances the location of the target doesn't come through to the code that does movement. The default position turns out to be the top left corner, so when that happens the shots appear there or are aimed there.

[Pepisolo]

Sounds awesome, gonna check this out soon, Logo's mechs too. Probably after we get Raptor released.

[Logorouge]

Pretty cool mech you got there. I'm looking forward to testing it when I come back from my obligatory break of SR.
But I have to say, -20% speed and -25% range? You're pretty harsh.

By the way, if you want unique graphics for your mech, don't forget Chris gave us access to the art directory for the game.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/410820/discussions/0/451852118779831043/

Anyway, thanks for sharing!

[Pepisolo]

Just tested this a little, seems like a pretty cool secondary weapon idea. It'd be cool if you had more control over the teleport distance, though. Seems like this would be a good charge weapon -- if the charge stuff in the engine worked better. I could then hold the button and warp to the other sides of bosses and stuff. Or to the other side of a room if things were getting particularly heated.  Other than that maybe the mech could have more cool warpyiness about it. Maybe some inherent ability or different missile system or alternate sprint function....I dunno, just something to bring out the teleporty nature a bit more.

[Monkooky]

Thanks for the feedback!

A charged warpcannon I think would be very very difficult to use. I will try it, but I'm not very optimistic.
My original intent was to make it warp you to the cursor, but I'm not sure that's possible.
I could probably make the warp effect continuous, so while you hold the cursor down you are warping. I think this might lose something- I'll also play around with this one.

As for other things, here's an idea list, and you can tell me what sounds appealing.
Missile Launcher variants:
Warps to cursor (Maybe cannot do)
On explosion, warps enemies away from blast zone.
On explosion, warps enemies towards blast zone. (Kinda dubious about these two, I feel like both are fairly abusable)
Warps directly hit enemy closer, and possibly stuns?

Sprint
Not sure what sorts of warpy things I could put here.
I could, in theory, move the secondary to the sprint- so instead of normal sprinting you warp. This may be irritating in terms of getting around.
Some ideas that I'm not happy with:
Phase after sufficient time sprinting without shooting
Jaywalking type passive while sprinting

Strange passives:
When you hit sufficiently distant enemies with shots (primary or otherwise), they are warped closer
Other things?

[Pepisolo]

A charged warpcannon I think would be very very difficult to use. I will try it, but I'm not very optimistic.

Yeah, you could be right.

My original intent was to make it warp you to the cursor, but I'm not sure that's possible.

One other problem with this is that this type of control method doesn't work with joypads. We used to have a few items like this that were reticule based, but they had to be removed since they were half-broken for joypad users.

I could probably make the warp effect continuous, so while you hold the cursor down you are warping. I think this might lose something- I'll also play around with this one.

Sounds like an interesting experiment.

On explosion, warps enemies away from blast zone.
On explosion, warps enemies towards blast zone. (Kinda dubious about these two, I feel like both are fairly abusable)
Warps directly hit enemy closer, and possibly stuns?

Hmmm, not sure. The third one could possibly work if the mech had an innate ability to do more damage to enemies at close range. Then that's maybe pushing the mech into different territory a bit, though, more that of a brawler mech.

Phase after sufficient time sprinting without shooting

Sounds interesting, but might be difficult to get right aesthetically and mechanically. Very tricky.

Jaywalking type passive while sprinting

I've actually experimented with something like this in the past when I was trying to make a ghost/phantom mech. I started out wanting the ability to go through actual walls -- way broken -- then through missile breakable blocks which was also a bit broken. In the end being able to phase into shootables and maybe jaywalker blocks is the most I could push it. At that point, the mech didn't seem as cool, though.