There are a few rules;
1) Keep the weapons simple in function. I'm no coding guru. I might be able to hack together functionality from other weapons such as the repeater shot rate increase or area-effect explosions, but no promises.
Acceptable; a cannon that shoots shells that explode on impact OR a gatling gun that spins up like the repeater
Unacceptable; a cannon that shoots green energy balls that zap anything they travel past with lightning whilst homing on a specific target.
1a) Multi-barrel weapons will have their shots behave as a single projectile. I'm not leet enough for that yet.
2) You provide the sprites. The turret should be less than or equal to 50x50 with a black 1px border. You can use colours other than white and grey if you desire, but white/grey/black is preferred.
Ex 1;
2a) Firing animations are an added bonus. Each frame of the animation should be a seperate file, numbered on it's sequence. Thus, you have an idle frame, and however many frames of firing animation. Make note; the turret's overall size should take into account firing animation. If, for example, you have recoiling barrels on a twin cannon, make sure you account for this in the idle frame and all other frames.
2b) If the turret has a slow reload, you may wish to provide re-idle frames that display the weapon's barrel(s) returning to idle position.
2c) There is no frame delay in terms of the shot launching and the animation playing. You should aim to display muzzle flashes as soon in the sequence as possible.
3) You also provide the projectile/beam image. It should be no more than about 20-30 pixels long for projectiles, 15-20 pixels for beams and 20-30 pixels wide. Exceptions can be made for double or triple shots. The same rule for turrets applies; have a black background and 1px black border please.
Ex 2;
3a) You may also wish to provide a greyscaled image of the projectile or beam. If you don't, I will simply run it through a greyscale filterer on Irfanview or Paint.net, which may not yield the best results.
3b) If it is a beam, I strongly recommend supplying an additional alpha file. These allow you to more accurately control beam brightness indepentant of the beam sprite itself. The alpha should be greyscale. White is most visible, black is invisible.
3c) Shots may be animated. As with projectile animations, each alternate file should be seperate and numbered appropriately.
4) If you wish, you may also provide a sound effect (wav or ogg preferred) but this is optional. If not, I will use what sounds I have at my disposal. I have quite a few scifi weapon effects on hand, but I'm no sound-meister, so don't expect anything hand-crafted.
5) All sprites should ideally be in .png format. .jpg is shoddy, and .gif has colour problems if you have too many colours in the file.
6) Please provide some basic stats for the weapon that are vaguely in line with stock balance. All weapons accept modifiable values in the editor, so don't worry too much - you can uberwank edit them later!
7) Semirandom Turrets; by adapting part of the Blaster code I can make BSF randomly choose between one or more variants of a turret design. All of these variants share the exact same stats and behaviour as their parent object, they just look slightly different.
It looks great, but it far exceeds the technical maxsize. Also, I think the bullet sprite should be a shell with a trail.
