City of Steam Design Dev Journal - Upgrade Complete!? news

This is a repost from CIty of Steam Design Dev Journal

Mwahahahaharrrr!

That’s the kind of maniacal laugh you’ll make when you hold the perfectly upgraded Vorpal Blade!

My insanity aside, I’d like to tell you all about the near-complete upgrading system in City of Steam. I could spend hours on the things we tried that really didn’t work out, but nah, that’s boring. I’m cutting straight to the more interesting stuff.

As previously noted, the upgrading of weapons in City of Steam gives massive flexibility and a lot of choices. Any single weapon model could be upgraded in many ways, producing somewhere around 10,000 possible combinations per weapon… and there are around 200 weapons in the game. So, yeah, lots of choices.

The coolest thing about our weapon upgrading system is that the outside appearance of a weapon changes according to the choices you make. When another player looks at your weapons in the game and sees the modules and modifications you’ve made, they can instantly tell “that’s a fast weapon” or “that weapon is going to crit” or “that weapon sunders armor”! So every weapon tells a story of how it punishes your enemies.

Again… Behold my splendor! Mwahaharrr!

As a comparison, compare these basic weapons:

…to these upgraded ones.

Right now, we are still considering the rendering cost of special glowing effects on high level weapons. It would be cool to have them, but not if it slows down your framerate.

Upgradability

Different weapons, pieces of armor, rings and other accessories have variable amounts of upgradability. Currently, only your weapon models will change when you upgrade. After the Alpha test, we will have more data to tell us if we should do armor as well –it’s a question of rendering speed mostly. If we do it, some people might not be able to play because of the CPU & GPU draw required to render each character (assembling weapons and armor from components like we do is very taxing on your hardware).

The number of upgrades a certain type of item can take can varies from item to item. Mostly this is for game balance. Have a look at how the improvement to weapon quality increases the number of upgrade slots you have.

NOTE: A quality 10 weapon is purely theoretical at this stage. They really only go up to 5 or 6 in the Alpha.

Lastly, the upgrades to your weapons also have levels, ranging from one to ten, so some components are more powerful than others. Of course, these high level upgrades also look a lot cooler than the low level ones. You can scrap low level upgrades to produce higher level ones if you like.

In-game Screenshots

So, what do these upgrades look like in the game? Well, have a look at these screenshots we mocked-up below. They are so very sexy!

Get thrilled about these upgrades? Go to the Forum and discuss.