Combat
Weapons and projectiles
Guns, rockets, beams, grenades and melee swings: how a weapon fires, what it fires, and what that does in flight.
- Sheet
- 8 of 18
- Latest release
- v0.42
- As of
- 2026-10-22
The engine has no guns of its own. It has the parts that guns are made from: triggers, firing patterns, rounds that arrive instantly or fly through the air, and rules for what those rounds do when they meet a wall, a body or a pool of water. A game assembles its arsenal from these parts and tunes it with numbers.
How a weapon is put together
Pulling the trigger
A pull is not yet a shot. Each tick the weapon asks a short list of questions in a fixed order, and the first refusal decides what you feel: a silent nothing, or the dry click of an empty or overheated gun.
- Allowed?Not hidden away, not limited to melee by an effect
- Ready?Not overheated, barrel spun up, off cooldown
- PaidAmmo from the magazine, or a reload starts
- FiredRounds leave, then recoil, heat and spread
Around that core, a trigger can behave in many ways. Every kind below is a setting on the trigger, so a game turns them on and tunes them rather than writing them.
| Kind | What the player feels |
|---|---|
| Single, automatic, fire modes | One shot per pull, a stream while held, or a switch between the two |
| Cook | A grenade's fuse burns in your hand; hold too long and it goes off there |
| Charge | Hold to power the shot up; let go to fire |
| Build-up | A barrel that spins up, or a short pause before the round leaves or the blade connects |
| Heat | Fire too long and the gun locks out until it cools; a holstered gun cools too |
| Magazine | Reload all at once, or a shell at a time that a pull can interrupt |
| Alt-fire | Zoom, a toggle such as a suppressor (less damage, harder for enemies to hear), a lunge, or the next fire mode |
Enemies fire through exactly the same machinery. A pull decided by an enemy's brain goes through the same checks, pays the same ammo and makes the same noise as yours, so a weapon behaves the same in either hand.
Where a shot starts
A body can fire from its eye, which is the classic way, or from the weapon itself. A body that names muzzles fires from the barrel, and the round is steered so it still lands on whatever the crosshair is on. A gun held at the hip in third person can be told to fire from the eye line instead, so knee-high cover does not eat shots the crosshair clears.
A weapon can have several muzzles that take turns or fire all at once, and a body can hold a weapon made of several parts, which is how two pistols are carried akimbo, each kicking on its own rounds. A creature can even carry several live weapons at once on mounts of its own, grouped so it fires a main gun and a suppressing gun side by side. Every shot also widens the spread if the weapon blooms, pushes the shooter back if it recoils, and makes a noise that enemies can hear.
Safety nets: shooting next to a wall
Firing from the barrel has one awkward side. The barrel sits a little in front of and below the eye, so near a wall the two can end up on different sides of it. A model can be half inside a wall while the first-person view looks clear. The engine settles this with one principle: a shot can only reach what the eye can see. Before every round leaves a barrel, the simulation draws a line from the eye to that barrel. If the line is clear, nothing changes. If something is in the way, one of the safety nets below decides where the round starts.
Case 1: the barrel pokes through, the eye does not
Case 2: the eye sees the target, the barrel is buried
| Situation | What the engine notices | Where the round starts |
|---|---|---|
| Barrel and eye both clear | Nothing in the way | At the barrel, steered onto the crosshair |
| Barrel pokes through a wall, eye behind it (case 1) | The eye-to-barrel line is blocked | At the eye, down the crosshair: it meets the wall |
| Instant round, barrel only a little way inside cover (case 2) | Blocked, but the barrel is buried no deeper than half a metre and the way out is clear | Just past the far side of the cover, heading for the crosshair |
| Barrel deeper inside, or any travelling round such as a rocket (case 2) | Blocked, and no short way out | At the eye, down the crosshair |
| Barrel clear, but round a corner the eye cannot see past | The barrel's line would hit something the eye cannot see | At the eye, down the crosshair |
| Rocket or grenade with the eye close to a wall | The eye faces a wall within a metre, and the round would get past it | At the eye, so it meets that wall |
| Barrel below a low wall the crosshair clears, but not inside it | The barrel's line hits the wall, which the eye can see | At the barrel: the round hits the low wall |
So the eye always has the last word in both directions. You cannot reach past a wall the eye is behind, and a barrel buried in the cover you are hugging does not stop you hitting what you see. The last row is the one case the nets leave alone, because nothing there is hidden from the eye. It is why a game can tell a gun held low in third person to fire from the eye line instead.
The same checks run for enemies, so an enemy pressed against a wall cannot shoot you through it either. A game can tune the half metre and the metre per weapon, or switch the nets off for a weapon. With them off, the weapon's own rule decides a blocked shot: it hits whatever is in the way, or it leaves the eye. Swings and grappling ropes always follow that rule, and a body that fires from its eye has no barrel to check.
What a pull fires
A pattern's behaviour decides when and how many. The engine ships six, each of which works with instant or travelling rounds where that makes sense; a game can register more of its own.
| Behaviour | Instant round | Travelling round |
|---|---|---|
| Single | One line that arrives instantly | One rocket, grenade or bolt |
| Pellet burst | A scatter of lines (a shotgun) | A volley of rounds |
| Stream | A line on every shot of a held trigger | A stream of falling blobs (a flamethrower) |
| Continuous | A held beam that bites at its own rhythm | A steady flow of rounds while held |
| Melee | A swing that sweeps an arc; no round at all | |
| Grapple | Fires an anchor on a rope; press again to let go | |
A round in flight
A travelling round has a speed, may fall under gravity, and may run out of time. What it does when it meets something is a set of independent choices rather than a fixed list of weapons, so a sticky grenade, a bouncing bomb, a laid mine and a rocket that flies through walls are all the same machinery with different settings.
| Question | Answers |
|---|---|
| On meeting a surface | bounce, explode, stick, or fly straight through |
| When it goes off | on contact, when a fuse lit at the barrel runs out, or on a fuse its first contact lights |
| On entering a liquid | carry on, fizzle out, explode, or slow down (flames die in water) |
| On meeting bodies | stop at the first, or pass through a set number of them |
| In flight | fly straight, fall, or turn towards a target (homing) |
A round that sticks remembers what it stuck to: a wall, a moving lift, a door, a crate, or a person if the weapon allows it, and it decides what to do when its host dies. A mine is a sticking round that waits until someone comes near; a bounding mine leaps at whoever woke it. A round can leave a short-lived hazard on the ground where it lands, such as a patch of fire. A blast reaches only what it can see from where it went off, so a wall shelters you and a crowd of bodies does not. By default a round in flight does not strike the person who fired it, unless it has been turned back first (what comes back at you is yours), though its blast can still catch you. Some rounds can themselves be shot down.
Rays, ricochets and swings
An instant round is a line drawn the moment the trigger goes. It stops at the first body, or carries on through a set number of bodies like a rail gun; it passes through portals and keeps going from the far side. A surface can let a round skip off it, and the bounces are capped, so a beam between two mirrors still ends: never more than sixteen bounces for a single ray. A beam is a line fired every tick while the trigger is held.
A swing sweeps one or more cones in front of the attacker; two claws are two cones. A target caught in both is struck once, and the weapon says how many bodies one swing may cleave through. Knockback is applied beside the damage and never counts as damage itself. What the hit then costs its victim is settled by the damage door.
The arsenal
A carrier holds its weapons in groups, each group sharing one select key, and pressing the key again cycles inside it. Switching lowers one weapon and raises the next, and anything the old one was doing (a charge, a reload, a steered rocket) ends. A game can refuse switches to an empty weapon, or switch away by itself when the last round is spent.
Some weapons sit outside the carried set: one that is always worn and fires on its own button, such as a kick; one that is its ammo, like a hand grenade, which you carry by owning grenades; and one a lasting effect hands you while it runs, while your other weapons are put out of reach. A weapon can be dropped on the floor with its share of the ammo, keeping its magazine and its heat.
- 0
- weapons the engine ships: every one is the game's
- 6
- firing behaviours built in
- 4
- things a round can do on meeting a surface
- 16
- bounces at most for one ray
As of 2026-10-22.
Related sheets
- Life of a shotOne bullet from the trigger to the wall behind the target.
- DamageWhat a hit costs whoever it reaches.
- Statuses, factions and pickupsAmmo and guns on the floor, and effects that hand you a weapon.
- How enemies decideWhen an enemy chooses to pull its trigger.
- Tuning and content plug-insHow a game brings its own weapons.