Build The Skill/Remake

Firearms Skill

Determines basic competence in the operation of firearms.

Combat Flow - Aiming and Firing

Handling your firearm comes in two distinct "modes": Neutral Mode and Aimed Mode, differentiated by whether the player is holding the Aim button. In Neutral mode, the player's movement speed is normal; they may walk and run unimpeded. In Aim mode, the player is readying the weapon to fire.

Neutral Mode

• Player's walk and run speed is 100% of normal.
• Pressing Fire discharges the weapon in roughly the direction they are facing, with a proportional accuracy penalty based on how fast they are moving. The player will generally not hit anything directly in front of them while running unless Firearms Skill has been sufficiently raised.
  • In Neutral Mode, the fire button is understood to be "jerked" instead of carefully squeezed, resulting in poor accuracy. This is primarily meant for "panic fire."
  • I may toy with the idea of making a very unskilled shooter (i.e. 0-10% Firearms Skill) have a very small chance of shooting themselves for minor damage if running while trying to shoot.

Aimed Mode

• Player's speed limited to walking unless Firearms Skill is sufficiently raised.
• Weapon aim starts out with maximum possible accuracy penalty (depicted by weapon shaking), and gradually narrows down. At low skills, the minimum penalty is still not perfectly dead-on, but would be sufficient to hit a target 20 feet away most of the time.
• Speed of aim-narrowing, maximum and minimum penalties are all affected by Firearms Skill.
• In Aimed Mode, the Fire button is understood to be squeezed carefully, and must be held for a time in order to fire the weapon. This will take roughly 1.5 seconds at lowest Firearms skill, and is among the last things to be improved as skill reaches 100%.

Medical Skill

Reflects the player character's ability to heal themselves. Over time, this results in a boost to damage reduction as well as time reduction for administering doses of medicine, and the effectiveness of said medicine.

• It is generally understood that, in the 22nd century, medicine is still administered via hypodermic needle. This does require the user to be able to find and correctly insert the needle into a vein, so the effectiveness of the same amount of dosage very much depends on how good the user is at doing so. It would also explain why it takes longer to administer a dose if the user is unskilled.
• I may see about making Medical Skills also increase the amount of medical supplies that can be carried - not from an actual capacity point of view, but to emphasize that it'll be more effective with more skill.
• In the proof-of-concept build, the Medical Supplies were a separate weapon. They might be moved to an off-hand button.

Athletics Skill

Affects the player's stamina while running, as well as the damage, cooldown, and push-back of melee attacks.

Melee Attacks

Melee is not generally intended for killing - it is meant to knock enemies down to buy time to get away.

• Pressing Melee swings an attack in the direction the player is facing. From the start, this comes out fast with little delay between pushing the button and connecting the hit.
• At first, a melee attack will result in a cooldown of roughly 2 seconds between uses, more if the attack has missed. During this cooldown, the player may not attempt to melee, or aim their weapon.
  • Firing a weapon in Neutral Mode during melee cooldown is possible but is subject to the same penalties as running.
• At low Athletics levels, enemies may not always be knocked down by melee.