With the launch of Quake Reignited comes a brief downtime to kick back and relax, but there's always more to do. While I'm fairly happy with where it ended up, there's still a few quirks I'd like to iron out to really give it the shine it needs. Quake is a pretty hard game to balance, all things considered, since the weaponry is very samey and the enemies are designed to be spongy. Reignited's goal was never to be 100% faithful to the original which opens up a lot of room for creativity, creativity the will continue to get pushed further without losing that Quake feeling.
First, let's talk weapons. While I think they're in a solid spot, I do feel there's a few outliers that need to be touched up on. The shotguns, for instance, could use to have their damage window looked at further and be given a special model for their pellets. I'll also be looking into making the Super Nailgun's attack a bit fancier to better fit with the gun thematically. Also on the agenda is projectile speeds. Given the relative close range of Quake's combat I'm ok with their slow speeds, but certain weapons like the Nailgun and Rocket Launcher could use a second pass. While I won't be doing anything crazy, I do think some more oomph could be put into that area.
Next I'll be continuing to tweak the monsters. Shot leading will be given a larger range but have its accuracy fall off linearly to give a smoother experience on Nightmare. Enemies that account for gravity will also be given some inaccuracy at longer ranges to prevent them from being too good at sniping. While I'd like Ogres to remain a threat up to medium ranges, I think the current variation is maybe a bit extreme. Fiends could use some more pep in their step to make them scarier again on harder difficulties as right now they tend to take too long to start a leap. The Vore will also be getting a second attempt to better streamline its combat while keeping it as terrifying as the original.
There's a lot of ground to cover with enemies still, such as the Shambler, but for now I'd like to move on to the items. I'm happy with how armor turned out, but Quad Damage and the Megahealth are still two areas of concern. Quake loves to give the player health, maybe a bit too much which leads to some intense situations being too easy to walk away from. The same goes for Quad Damage. While nerfing it down to Tri Damage helped, it could probably be taken even further. With the stronger weapon arsenal a lot more emphasis should be put on the player themselves and not the items they're picking up, but they do still need to serve as an important reason to explore so they'll be looked at under a microscope.
Gibs. They're noticeably missing in a lot of cases. This is due to the way the damage mechanics work and how a few weapons fundamentally had their damage calculations changed. With the next update I'll be implementing a few measures to ensure all the gibitude is brought back, and even go a step further. While I enjoy the concept of dead enemies being able to body block shots, there's a lot of viscera missing from it in Quake. Seeing a bunch of gray particles pop out and eat everything isn't very satisfying, after all. Next update after an enemy is killed you'll be able to continue to shoot them briefly. If their health reaches low enough, they'll gib. Not only does this mean the grey particle and gib problems are fixed, but doing enough damage will allow follow up projectiles to keep traveling through, giving a solid middle ground between outright ignoring dead enemies and entirely having a shot eaten by them.
For the last thing I'd like to talk about, where's the Quake C source code? Well, funny story about that. While I had intended to release it alongside this project, I also started it with little to no experience with how Quake C worked. What I hadn't realized is that there may be some licensing issues with the base I was using when it comes to distributing the code itself. Oops. As a result I can't exactly release the source; however, I'll be switching over to Jason2Brownlee's fixed Quake C base. Not only is it based off the 1.01 update which was licensed under GPL2, it also includes fixes from the expansions and cleaned up code to make maintaining easier. This means I'll have to rewrite and transfer over Reignited's features which may take a bit, but while doing so I'll be fixing up the API for Reignited to make expanding on it far easier for anyone who wants to use it as a base.
Until next time, Rangers.
