Fallout 4: Nuka-World...Paddle Ball
Ever since I saw in SPECIAL videos we put out to promote Fallout 4 tell you not to use a paddle ball I had the plan to put a paddle ball weapon into the game. Luckily for me I was made art lead for the 5 the DLC and I was able to make my dream come true.
Once a crazy idea starts rolling around in my head I begin thinking of ways to make it happen. As soon as we made the plan for the DLC to be in a theme park I knew my idea could fit but I still needed to see if it would work. I made a temp projectile that animated out and back in as my 5 min POC.
From there it mostly went into the hands of Jeremy Bryant and Charles Kim to animate, model, and implement the base paddling functionality. There was a point in time where the first model came back as a ping pong paddle due to a little confusion but we got it sorted out without much waste since it was a simple model.
Once the real model came back and we could paddle with it Jon Paul Duvall started implementing the design. As a base weapon he had the idea of giving it low damage but a high chance to stagger. Not super useful until modded but it made sense for the weapon. Andrew Langlois was building out the Nuka-Cade so we decided it should come as a prize from there.
From there we needed to give the player a reason to use it. I had a plan for a series of mods that took it from spiked, to elemental, to explosive. I pointed Charles to the correct files so he could “remix” some meshes we had with some new modeling and get the melee and elemental mods. I added some FX to them.
The exploding version was little more difficult to wrap my head around. As it turns out the answer was developed as part of Nuka-World as we went: weaponized Nuka Cola.
The three levels of weaponized Nuka Cola are regular, Cherry, and Quantum. We used the weaponized quantum bottle are to constantly fill sponges fixed to the with the explosive cola. The sponges stop the ball from exploding on the bounce off of the player.....video games!
Once we had the mod art for the nuka versions Liz Rapp ported over her FX from the Thirst Zapper for the 3 levels of cola destruction.
There were a few times along the way I thought it wouldn’t happen but thanks t a lot of hard work and help (special shout to Jeremy and Charles who kept it alive when I was doubting) we got it in.
