Doom Eternal

The following mods were all created using id Studio, the official modding software for Doom Eternal. A lot of the ideas were concepts I had thought of for years while playing and speedrunning the game, so when official modding tools were announced I was beyond excited to use them. While I find the tools a little too limiting (lack of "scripting", some weird things missing such as first jump height but not second jump height, etc), I had a lot of fun playing with the tools and I hope that they refine them in the future, especially for gameplay mod focused creators.

This is one of many ideas I have had for redesigning and rebalancing Full Auto. My original was that when both weapon mods were mastered, you could then "merge" them together as a reward for mastering both. Unfortunately id Studio was somewhat limited regarding how weapon merging can be done, so instead I have it as one weapon mod that's obtained rather than 2 separate mods.

The actual implementation feels good and works well for what it is, and I do think there is or was design space for enabling this kind of functionality for all the weapons in some form or another. That said, I think this particular mod being a 1-to-1 "you have both mods at all times" does remove some interesting depth to the game, as the decision on which mod to equip or use is important to the game loop and this removes that aspect, in particular when it is immediately given to a player rather than earned through some long process.

All that said, the process of getting this mod to even function was arduous and taught me a lot about how id Studio works, so I'm grateful for all that I learned getting this to work, plus I did want to try all of my ideas for Full Auto rebalance and this was still one of them, even if it's the least interesting.

Precision Bolt/Micro Missiles Merged

This mod for Doom Eternal simply allows merging the Heavy Cannon mods to enable functionality similar to the glitch that did the same thing using the IDKFA glitch. Funnily enough, I discovered that the glitch would not have been useful had IDKFA kept all the upgrades for Heavy Cannon unlocked. Without making additional edits for the sake of the mod, if Precision Bolt is upgraded and then you merged the mods, the weapon will fire fully automatically, but at the fire rate of Precision Bolt's recharge timer rather than Micro Missiles. Changing some of the priority values fixed this, but it's interesting to show the butterfly effect that can happen when changing something so innocuous. 

Unmaykr Rebalanced

This mod served to increase the effectiveness of the Unmaykr, as it's no contest whether the BFG is better than the Unmaykr is almost every scenario. The design has the Unmaykr shoot 3 different projectiles: small 800 damage Dblade shots from bullets 1-7, medium 1600 damage from 8-14, and 15+ are large 2400 damage shots.

While this seems overpowered at a quick glance, the reason I did this was to keep the potential for high single target damage on the Unmaykr, while also enabling it to have some form of cleave damage. The BFG excels at clearing entire arenas, but it also deals extremely high damage on impact/splash, even to the highest health enemies. To combat this with Unmaykr, giving the projectiles a way to hit multiple targets (in this case, using Destroyer Blade style shots) gives the weapon more versatility than it had before, and now becomes much more competitive with BFG while adding more depth via player choice.

Normally the Unmaykr needs to carefully be aimed to use even somewhat effectively, as missing any of the bolts results in DPS lost. Compare this to the BFG where you can shoot it straight upward and still clear most arenas, and the skill to effectiveness ratio of the weapons was massively imbalanced. With this change, the Unmaykr is less reliant on aiming as if you accidentally hit an enemy you weren't aiming at, the shot will still go through and hit all the enemies. The scaling damage from 800 -> 2400 was added as a way to incentivize players to hold the trigger down when fighting high health enemies, as otherwise the weapon could simply be tap-fired and there would be little nuance to using it.