Headcrab Pie
Spy
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From "Dr.Awesome" of the Steam fourms.
Introduction: So you've decided to fail... now what?
Making very bad ideas for new unlockable weapons in TF2 is a popular pastime. Many players engage in it as a casual hobby, while others devote themselves to it as a full-time occupation. While failing at making good weapons can be a difficult challenge, it can also be very rewarding--many people take great satisfaction in their works of failure; this is where this guide comes in!
By reading this guide, you will be able to learn how to make terrible unlockable weapons like a pro! There is a multitude of ways to fail at making weapons, and this guide represents only one of them. Once you are comfortable with failure, you will be able to start exploring all new kinds of crapulence! Will you propose a cluster rocket for the engineer? A sticky bomb with a 120% crit rate? The sky's the limit!
Chapter 1: The Basics of Anger
Your first goal when proposing your weapon is to anger as many people as possible--people will recognize your weapon's failure more if they're angry. Depending on how you anger them, you might be able to bring out the more subtle flaws in your weapon. This can be a difficult process, so we will focus on just getting people mad in the first place.
Start by saying that your weapon is inspired by a gun from another popular First Person Shooter game (or FPS). As a rule of thumb, the more popular the game is, the louder its opponents will be, and they will be quick to anger if they see anyone trying to put one of those weapons in "their" game. This can be most effective if you reference a game that is considered mainstream, because these games' opponents find them particularly detestable for being "sellouts". A classic standby is the Halo series, but Counter-Strike or even Half-Life will do nicely.
If you can, try to come up for a "story" as to why the class in question has this particular item. This isn't always effective, and can be difficult if you have any creativity. It helps if you try to pick a premise that is completely out of character for the class. Bonus points if you have dialogue to accompany your story!
Don't forget about the standard rules of poor posting! Make sure your grammar is nonsensical, and avoid capitalizing anything unless it's a word you are trying to emphasize--you should emphasize words frequently. However, be careful not to rely too heavily on poor grammar and spelling--you want it to be just crappy enough to be offensive, but without inhibiting the reader's ability to understand your weapon--you want them to hate the whole post, not just how it's written.
Use punctuation sparingly--you want your readers to see that you know what punctuation is, but that you choose not to use it.
"LOL" wherever possible.
Once you have these steps down, you're well on your way to making a terrible unlock idea!
Chapter 2: The Mechanical Advantage
So, now you've goten your readers angry. They are furiously reading through the rest of your idea, eager to find flaws in it. If you want to hold their ire, the next step is to pick the mechanics and abilies of your failgun. This can be a difficult process, because there are many factors you must neglect, such as class role, functionality, sensibilty, and inter-class balance, to name a few. Let's start from the ground up:
Begin by proposing an ability for the weapon that makes it extremely effective against one particular class. This has the best results if the class you choose is one that is supposed to be at an advantage against the wielder. This thoughtless disregard for game balance and one-sided logic will ensure your readers see that you are serious about failure. A very simple way of approaching this mechanic is to simply have the weapon always deal critical hits against the chosen class; this allows you to appear ignorant of game balance without requiring any creativity!
However, the effectiveness of this tactic is affected by what class you pick. It will be at its maximum if you pick a class that is already not considered to be a high threat or is easy to dislike. The best candidate, then, is the Spy.
If you bothered to explain why the class has this particular weapon, tie that backstory to a few of its abilities--the more you have to strain this connection, the better, especially if it makes no thematic sense.
For each new ability you add to the weapon, make sure and include one or two utterly uncreative number-tweak effects--effects that are completely devoid of creativity or thought for player and writer alike. This can include dealing a certain percentage less damage or carrying less or more ammo than normal.
TIP! A save bet is to say that the weapon deals no normal critical hits--this minor tweak does almost nothing to affect normal gameplay, but sounds important, and coming across as clueless realy helps your idea look like the true loser you want it to be.
Perhaps the most crucial step, try to make sure the weapon either encourages a style of play that is contradictory to the class's normal role, overlaps with another class's role, or contradicts the core principles of playing the class--all three, if you can manage it.
Lastly, remember that while you can't really add too many abilities, there is a point where adding more can actually make your weapon seem less terrible. With too many ideas and effects, your worst ideas won't stand out as much, and as a result, people might not hate your weapon as much as they should. A few carefully-chosen awful ideas will generate a lot more hate than a mountain of only moderately bad ones.
After you've mastered these steps, you're ready to start making your failgun!
Chapter 3: Your First Idea
This chapter will serve as an example of the processes discussed previously in action. Let's begin by choosing a class. We will use the Heavy, since he's the most popular class to make suggestions for right now. His most interesting weapon is the minigun, so that's the one that will anger the most people to screw up.
For our weapon inspiration, we will look to Halo. We must ask ourselves: what gun is distinctive enough to be uniquely Halo, is large enough to be the right size for the Heavy, but would be the worst fit for the Heavy to actually use? The answer is, of course, the Spartan Laser. Aside from horrendous thematic conflicts, it also offers many mechanical ones, which we'll discuss later.
We now have to come up with a terrible name for this weapon. This can be tricky, because we must choose a name that's uncreative, but just creative enough that the reader will believe we genuinely think it is a good name.
The answer comes from one of the unique things about the Heavy: he has a personal relationship to his weapon--it's even named Sasha. Most readers find this relationship humorous and lovable, so ravaging it is the perfect way to ensure we incite the burning ire we need. Therefore, our weapon shall be called the Sasha Laser.
This leads us to choosing a backstory. This will again come back to the unique Sasha relationship, so we will say that the Heavy decided that he would modify Sasha to be an even bigger gun, because he "likes hes weemen beeg." He stole some of the Engineer's manuals, and managed to slap together a terrible contraption that somehow actually works.
Now, let's choose the mechanics. We'll start with the basics and say the weapon cannot get critical hits normally. Next, we'll look at the properties the Spartan Laser already has: it is very accurate at long range and can instantly kill anyone it hits, with a long charge-up time. We will carry over these mechanics, adding the justification that this charge-up time more than compensates for its completely unreasonable power. In addition, this has the added benefit of making crits completely pointless anyway, since it instantly kills anything with a normal shot.
Now that we've encroached on the Sniper's role as master of long-range combat, as well as contradicted the Heavy's normal lack of emphasis on accuracy, let's also encroach on one of the most feared classes on the battlefield: the Soldier. We will have the weapon deal splash damage around the area it hits, which will still be enough to kill virtually anything.
Finally, as the ultimate twist, we will add the thoroughly unbalanced, nonsensical, and needlessly complicated effect of it being able to kill ubercharged enemies, but only if you hit them in the head, but doing so deals 100 damage back to the Heavy, because of "energy feedback." Tying back to the original story to explain each effect is one of the many advanced tricks you will learn after getting comfortable with the basics.
After that, all we need is to add some pointless numerical tweaks, and our weapon is ready!
Chapter 4: Climax of Failure
Well, we've finally put together a weapon. Here's what our weapon would look like in an actual post:
"hey guys so heres my idea for teh heavy I got the idea from the spatan laser in halo, its really cool and a bad@$$ 1337 weapon. ok here goes LOL
[b ThE sAsHa LaSeR [/b>
ok so heres how it happened: heavy was tired of geting BOOM HEADSHOTTED all the time lol so he tried to come up with a way to beat them. but hes dumb so eh decides he just gonna make sasha bigger lol.
"I like beeg weemen!", heavy says.
so he gose and gets the engeer and says "let me use yor books, engineer!" and the engineer tels him "no, darnit you dont know how to use em" lol
but he takes them anyway an starts workuing on sasha. he finishes it and he looks at it and says "oh boy sasha is beeg now! we can crush leetle sniper and ALL his baby friends!"
ok so what teh gun does
>u charge it up for a long time, and it fires a big LAZZER! it blows up ANYTHING in one hit. but u gotta charge it up for a long time so its not borken or anythin
>it can shoot really far and it can blow up everythig around it take THAT snipers! lol
>it makes the heavy have 30 less health because its so heavy it makes him tired. it also makes the heavy run 10% slower but he runs 10$ faster while chargin it (kind of a tradeoff)
>it dosent get crits so its fair lol
>if u get a hedshot u can kill even ubercharged enemies but the feedback and the bad wires deals 100 damage back to the hevy if u do
plz rate but dont say im stupid im just makin ideas KTHXBAI."
That's pretty terrible, isn't it? You can see how all the basics we've covered are present, but I've included some more advanced tricks, as well. Can you spot them all? Here are a few:
Right off the bat, I incorporated an overplayed and unfunny meme directly into my initial reasoning for the weapon that is fundamentally based on an obvious frustration with the class's intended weakness--i.e., Snipers. The reader should now be immediately aware that I am merely a Heavy player that was recently dominated by a Sniper, which I arrogantly and self-servingly interpreted as an imbalance in gameplay, and am taking out my frustration in the form of a weapon unlock to "fix" this "problem".
The cultural reference helps this setup by also making the reader aware that I am a loathsome, obnoxious individual that thinks i'm the funniest thing since Family Guy made a Transformers reference. As you can see, a lot of meaning can come from just your introduction.
Next, I needlessly censored myself, in a visually obnoxious fashion, then followed up by calling something "1337" without doing so facetiously. The reader's anger should spike upon reading this, as they realize that I'm no mere idiot, I'm a complete ♥♥♥.
I messed up the html coding to bold the title. This is a great way of baiting in the more intelligent (and arrogant) readers that might normally ignore your topic.
I used alternating caps in the title, as well. This is a distracting technique that adds a subtle layer of frustration disguised as an attempt at style.
I used a trite, common intentional misspelling of the word "laser". This again makes your reader believe that you are a loathesome imbecile that genuinely believes he is funny.
I closed with "KTHXBAI", closing the post with a stinging slap to the reader's face.
These are just a few of the advanced techniques that you will discover as you begin making your own terrible weapons. Now that you've finished this guide, the sky's the limit! Feel free to experiment, and find new ways to suck--after all, this is merely a beginner's guide! And remember--with a little effort, anyone can fail!
Note: as some of you may have noticed, a colleague of mine named Meet the Troll recently posted this very idea in its own thread. About half of the viewers seemed to take it seriously, the rest found the humor. I think this proves that this is a rather efficient method, no?
