Hi survivors, today another dev story at the campfire. In the process of changing the game significantly (see our other posts) we are also changing the weapon system. Today we want to explain how this system will look in the future, but let’s start with what was wrong in the previous system.

What was wrong in the previous system?

In the previous system a weapon drop was a normal ability and weapons were destroyed after the clip was empty. What the player normally did was spamming huge amounts at the beginning of a day around the map so characters can easily pick up new weapons. Since we think abilities should be something that you can use often with fun during the game the weapon drops are misrepresented as normal abilities. Another problem was the progression of weapons. When you upgraded the weapon crate you unlocked new weapon types and later on stronger versions of these weapons. But you could never have a sniper quite at the beginning, since it was a linear upgrade path.

How does the new system work?

We explicitly shifted the weapon stuff in front of sending your survivors to the city. So you equip your survivors individually with a chosen weapon prior to that. But where do weapons come from? You find them while looting the city or in special events and can assign them to your survivors in the next night. But prior to equipping new weapons you have to “repair” them. And now comes the interesting part.

Different weapon rarities and modifiers

Weapons can be found in different rarities, e.g. a pistol can be found in “common”, “enhanced” and “rare” versions. The rarity determines how many modifiers will be applied to these weapons. What is a modifier? It can be as simple as boosting the damage stat. It could also be a rare effect modification that gives your weapon some special ability, like instantly reloading as soon as the survivor killed someone or piercing enemies with your bullets. These modifiers are rolled (chosen) randomly as soon as you “repair” a weapon. There might also appear occasions where you can re-roll weapons in an special event. Here you can see how the UI for equipping and repairing weapons works:
Comparing weapons looks like the following:

What is coming next?

In the next posts we’ll talk about:
• New ability and special power system
• New item system (which replaces base upgrades)
• Map generation and selection

We still don’t have an ETA for the big update yet, but we are eagerly working on it! We’d love to hear your feedback to our plans. Feel free to leave us a comment or join our Discord and discuss with us: https://discord.gg/4KCf5zt - Your Deadly Days Team