Combat & Weapon Balance Design

RELAPSE

A free-to-play parkour FPS built around fluid movement and gunplay. I led combat balancing for the game's weapon systems — three distinct weapon types, each tuned around its own playstyle and progression tiers, refined through data-driven iteration and hands-on playtesting.

Weapon Balance Time-to-Kill Design Itemization Playtesting

View on Steam Balancing Process ↓

// The Brief

Three Weapons, Three Playstyles

Relapse's gunplay is built around movement — wall running, wall climbing, sliding through combat at speed. The weapon roster had to hold up under that constraint: each of the three weapon types was designed around a distinct playstyle, with several progression tiers layered on top. My job was making sure every tier felt right in the hands of a player actually moving the way the game wants them to move, not just correct on paper.

Semi-Auto Pistol

Precision-oriented. Rewards landing headshots over volume of fire — high damage per shot, low fire rate, built for players who aim rather than spray.

Full-Auto Pistol

High fire rate, heavy recoil. A spray-and-control weapon that rewards aggressive movement and punishes standing still.

Shotgun

Up-close and lethal. Built around short engagement windows — parkour into range, blast, move on.

// The Process

Data First, Then Hands on the Controller

I built a balancing spreadsheet tracking recoil, fire rate, bullet damage, magazine size, and time-to-kill against different enemy types for every weapon at every tier. To set targets, I benchmarked TTK breakpoints against other movement shooters in the genre — both under perfect accuracy and under realistic accuracy accounting for recoil — then adjusted for our goals: a shorter TTK to match the fast, high-mobility feel.

Numbers on a spreadsheet don't guarantee a weapon feels right, so every tier of every weapon got played in its intended playstyle before it shipped. Reload speed factored into the same tradeoff math — a weapon's real output is DPS sustained across a full fight, dead time included.

Benchmark

Set TTK targets from genre reference points and design goals.

Model

Tune recoil, fire rate, damage, magazine size, and reload in the spreadsheet.

Playtest

Play every tier in its intended playstyle against real enemies.

Adjust

Compare actual feel to target TTK and re-tune the levers.

// The Archetypes

Three Weapons, Three Bets

Exact numeric values are covered under NDA, so here's the shape of how each weapon was positioned rather than the underlying figures.

The Semi-Auto Pistol sits at the precision end: low fire rate, low recoil, high per-shot damage, and a fast reload to keep a small magazine from feeling punishing. Its TTK lives or dies on whether the player lands headshots.

The Full-Auto Pistol is the opposite bet: high fire rate and a large magazine, but heavy recoil that climbs the longer the trigger stays down. Its kill speed is fastest right as an engagement opens and degrades as recoil takes over.

The Shotgun is the short-range spike: very high damage, a small magazine, a slow reload, and an effective range that drops off a cliff. Built around parkouring into range for a near-instant kill and moving on.