Mandible Games

I'm trying to come up with a few more Exotic weapons for D-Net. After some terrible ideas I came up with the concept of having half a dozen little drones following the player around, shooting at enemy tanks with rifles. It's a cool idea. I'm not yet sure how it will work, but I do like the idea.

The problem is that I already have a weapon class called "drones". They were originally called "rockets", but they also did exotic damage and rockets sound explosive. Now I needed a new exotic weapon name. Argh.

I eventually settled on Automaton. That sounds neat. I can live with Automaton. I'm certain I'm going to regret this decision eventually when I want to call something else "automaton", but hey! At least I have a name.

Now I'm trying to figure out what to do with Beam. I've got two weapons called Conversion Beam, one being a satellite weapon and one being a normal energy weapon. I guess I could rename the satellite version "Conversion Satellite", but it's part of a larger group which is all satellites, and there's no way I'm renaming them all "Satellite". On top of that, one of those subcategories – the Mines From Space – isn't consistent either – every other weapon type is "Variant Type", like "Heavy Railgun" or "Eliminator Drone", and mines are sometimes swapped.

So I either need to come up with a new term for "awesome-sounding laser weapon", or I need to come up with a new term for "lasers fired from space", and in any case I need to come up with three more terms for awesome mines from space. To say nothing of another half-dozen exotic and trap weapons I need to come up with, and another three or four special-purpose kinetic, energy, and explosive weapons.

I dunno, maybe Automatons should be trap weapons. I am considering having them hang around the area, even though there isn't much of a surprise component in them.

Argh.