First Ideas
Bombshell’s world consisted of alien landscapes, and we had been tasked with providing something much more “real world” and grounded. In 2016 3D Realms gave the team permission to reconceptualize the game world and character for the Ion Fury version of the universe, barring a few key appearance markers for Shelly.


Game Loops Cereal
We worked tightly as a team to come up with the right balance of game systems. When designing the gameplay I placed a focus on consistency, believability, and multiple interacting learnable systems. This made things natural, flexible and fun for players, and gave mappers a clear way to communicate their intent.Bullet Ballet
Since it’s a large part of the gameplay, first we had to determine the flow of combat. This went through tons of iterations. Originally enemies had more health, and more “smart” tactics (like flanking and circle strafing), and combat was closer to a game like F.E.A.R. After lots of testing and experimentation we settled on a different goal: Shelly would be a “glass cannon”. Incredibly agile and powerful, but unable to take much direct damage. Players would need to actively avoid taking hits in order to win. To accommodate this, enemies were given distinct styles, attacks, sounds, and animation tells that make it easy to see a threat in advance. Each distinct cue gives a different warning, letting you know what kind of attack is coming to plan ahead for. Projectiles of all types could then be dodged and hits maneuvered around.



Health Booster Boogie
To balance health we decided to have both instant use Medpaks and carriable Medkits. Mappers were told to restock the player in the next area after major combat (or long string of fights), and sparsely around the edges of those combat areas. Shelly’s health declines rapidly when not successfully dodging hits, so the combination makes players feel like they are living on a knife’s edge but still able to recover from mistakes. A late game addition was the occasionally spawning Emergency Syringe to help stay alive, as some players felt slightly too punished in close fights. To keep balance there’s an actual check for your current health, and the number and frequency spawned depends on difficulty.
Shards, Shards Everywhere!
Armor became integral to balancing the gameplay. Keeping up your armor keeps you alive twice as long, so from the early days we included three sizes of armor suit (Light, Medium, Heavy). To make things feel more predictable, unlike games such as Duke Nukem 3D, there was no randomizer on armor’s usefulness — the same size hit will always give the same size protection letting you soak damage and survive impossible feats. The Hazard Suit was planned early on not just to give protection from environmental damage but against all kinds of acid, gas, or “nuke” attacks that enemies might fire your way, giving you a hidden advantage.


Ammo/Weapon Placement
Weapons aren’t just for making things go boom. Where, when, and how you actually receive weapons is an important step in the game’s overarching design. Your arsenal is spread out over the entire game in stages to bring a stronger feeling of accomplishment, and to give the player time to become experienced with the new weapon they’ve just been given. The early zones feature Disperser (Shotgun) and Bowling Bombs alongside the occasional SMG. By the midpoint you start to see the Minigun and Ion Bow, and late-game focuses on giving a twist and a refresh to the game with things such as the Disperser Grenades. By this point you’ve also seen the Cluster Puck sprinkled throughout the entire campaign, meaning that the levels can act more as a test of the skills you’ve mastered.

