Thrown Weapon UX | Patreon Weekly #318

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to go over some UX considerations I’ve had for thrown weapon sets.

Thrown Weapon UX Tweaks

I’ve spent some time finally actually implementing new thrown weapons, and have all the base functionality working, but have run into a little kink. My original design heavily leaned into ‘sets’ both in terms of gameplay logic and visuals, changing up how thrown weapons functioned in a few key ways:

• Thrown weapons now work in ‘sets’, with an internal charge system very similar to wands. Sets are upgraded as one unit, 3 at a time. Upgrading replenishes durability completely, including fixing broken items in the set. Sets can also be unidentified, cursed, enchanted, etc.

• Picking up thrown weapons is still necessary, but the item being picked up is not actually a thrown weapons and basically only exists to re-charge the set it belongs to.

• Darts would not use this system, they would still behave like they do currently.

• Because of using ‘charges’, thrown weapon sets would stick around when being reduced to 0, though the player can always drop them if they’re done with them.

I’ve begun to worry this makes them a little too ‘wand-like’ in their functionality though, plus several aspects of this are awkward and inconsistent with how throwing every other item works.

Because of this I’m now considering a different UX that’s almost functionally identical, but behaves a lot more like the current system:

• Thrown weapons still spawn and work in sets that behave just like above, except they work on quantity again just like they used to.

• Throwing and picking up will work the same as currently, but there will be a silent tracker to prevent exploits involving splitting up sets before upgrading them, which would otherwise allow duplication.

• Darts can work perfectly in this new system, they’ll just all be part of the same ‘set’.

• Because of the quantity system, sets will disappear when reaching 0 quantity just like now. If it ends up being needed I can add a warning before the player breaks the last of a set.

This ends up needing less changing internally, and I think should work better for player expectations of how thrown weapons work too. People will get upgradeable and enchantable thrown weapon sets either way.