These past couple of weeks has been very tubulent for the project. Two weeks ago now the programmers expressed a worry that they've not made enough headway in learning the unreal engine. After spending three weeks in the engine we felt we hit some hurdles that was difficult to get over. The reasons for chosing Unreal Engine was based on two assumptions:
Unreal is the FPS engine that gives us the most content for free to get us going.
Unreal could not be so hard to use, given the popularity of the engine.
The problem is that the programmers didn't get profficient fast enough. So we had a discussion about switching to Unity, three weeks into a nine week project. We weighed the options and projected results, we have one graphical artist that's extremely proffiecient in UE4, and a few members that's well oriented in Unity, two of them being programmers. We reasoned that two programmers knowing the engine well outweighs the graphical artist being profficient in unreal. Also
So we made a switch to unity! The fact being that we lost a decent chunk of time due to an engine change meant that we should also scope down a little bit. What we realized from the unreal prototype is that a systematic weapon is extremely difficult to balance, and would require more time than we now have. So that is gone from now on. So now the weapon has a premade stock gun, the player can then use than gun to shoot & kill enemies that might drop weapon mods. Those mods are also premade, not systematic in any capacity as they don't affect each other anymore. When the player shoots with mods attached, both the stock weapon and the weapon mod fires at the same time. The player can hold 4 of these mods, and loses the oldest once the player takes damage.
Not upgrading the weapon systematically anymore also means that we have no use for upgrade stations anymore. So we got rid of those! And since we don't upgrade between each round anymore we also got rid of rounds, instead focusing on an endless survival shooter based on highscore.