Behind the Scenes: Nessie April Fools Day Event
Probably the best April Fools Day Respawn has put out yet. For 3 days, you will see random eggs in different POIs accross the maps where if you destroy it, you'll get the Ol' Nessie gun. This gun will shoot out Nessies that follow or shoot at enemies for 12-19 damage. Prowlers in SP also turned into giant Nessies. Be sure to get the rare April Fools Badge since this will be one of the rarest badges in the game being available for only 3 days.
Developer Behind the Scenes:
Original Thread: https://twitter.com/IanHolstead/status/1510013164179509248?s=20&t=5VRFi4qoPc5MnhaYYThnsg
Ian Holstead is a gameplay prrogrammer at Respawn
"Glad to see everyone is enjoying the Nessies! As always, credit where credit is due, most of this was put together by Pat McDermott with Tyler Parsons doing the adorable nessie sounds and Melody Copeman creating the amazing April fools badge.
Ok, how did this happen? It actually came from a slack discussion about something unrelated that sort of spun out of control and somehow ended up pitching April fools ideas (it was a WILD ride to get there).
After a bunch of back and forth, Pat pointed out that Anthony Bruno, one of our weapon designers, had made a gun that shot spiders while learning how our weapon system works, and it could be a good April fools joke.
Pat got this all up and working, but it was missing something… However, Pat, being the legend that he is, came up with the brilliant idea to use a nessie instead! However, due to needing hitboxes and animation and everything, we couldn’t totally replace the spider with a nessie
Instead, he just made the spider invisible and attached the nessie to the neck of the spider, so when the spider moves and animates, the nessie sort of animates too! The nessie actually has 0 animations (the jiggly neck is just a physics joint)!
So yeah, the gun is still a gun that shoots spiders, they just look like nessies. Are you ready for nightmare fuel? This is what they actually look like if the spider is visible. Arachnophobia warning!!!
Pat originally made the gun create the NPC when shooting it, but it was having some edge case issues, so he made it use the grenade logic. So yeah, it's a Mozambique that shoots grenades that look like nessies and the explosion spawns a spider that looks like a nessie. Gamedev.
Aside from consulting with Pat to make sure that we don't blow the NPC budget with this, I also came in at the end and helped add a bit of polish. Originally the nessies were just the spiders from Storm Point, but I made nessie it's own NPC type so we could balance it.
Because our game is born from shooters, spiders use a gun to shoot webs at you (called npc_weapon_spider_jungle), so when splitting the nessie into it's own NPC, I made an npc_weapon_nessie file to make them do more damage and be more accurate.
I also did a bunch of little things like fixing the pings, making nessie damage count as player damage, making the damage in the death recap show up correctly, etc. For the death recap, it needed it's own damage type, so nessies do nessie_hug and nessie_kiss damage
We also ended up having a LOT of build issues at the last minute with this feature that almost caused it to be canceled, so I had a few stressful days trying to figure that out and fixing it (the first time we tested this with the whole team was 2 days before hard lock for 12.1).
This whole thing, from idea to final product needed to be put together in about a month due to our release schedule, which is CRAZY fast for a feature, but Pat did an amazing job, and a bunch of the team got on board to push it to the final product.
Finally, I wanted to say that this is just one of the many many reasons you should come work for Respawn! Everyone at the studio is so talented and Respawn puts so much trust in us to bring our visions to life. Come join us! https://www.respawn.com/careers "
If you are unable to play this weekend here are great clips of the April Fools Day event in Apex
