A stronger pistol

The smallest useful pack: the starting pistol hits harder, fires faster and its bolts fly further. No code. About five minutes.

Open or make a project

Any project works, even one with no levels: weapon values apply everywhere while the pack is loaded.

Open the Weapons window

It’s a tab on the right (or Window › Weapons). Each weapon has a section; Weapon 0 is the pistol.

The Weapons window with Weapon 0 open — Tick a field to change it in this pack; unticked fields keep the game's value.

Change three fields

Open Weapon 0 and tick:

Field	Value	Effect
damage	12	Each bolt hits harder
delay	6	Fewer frames between shots: faster fire
lifetime	40	Bolts live longer: more range

The section title gets “(changed)”.

Save and play

Save weapons (or Ctrl+S), then Play. Fire away.

The player’s own F9 Weapons tab wins over a pack: if they ticked “Modify” for the pistol there, they see their values, not yours.

Which numbers to try

Field	Range	Notes
damage	0–255	0 hits for nothing
delay	0–255	Frames at 30 fps between shots
throw_delay	1–127	Thrown weapons only
lifetime	1–255	Laser bolts live lifetime × 6 frames
spread_x, spread_y	0–8192	65536 is a full turn; 0 is dead accurate
speed	0.1–2000	Projectile speed

Not every weapon uses every field: see the table on Weapons API.

The same in Lua

Studio turns the Weapons window into a script for you. Written by hand it’s:

scripts/weapons.lua


jfg.weapon(0, { damage = 12, delay = 6, lifetime = 40 })   -- the pistol
jfg.weapon(5, { spread_x = 0, spread_y = 0 })              -- a dead-accurate Tri-Rocket Launcher

Lua lets you change weapons as the game goes: say, a faster gun only in one level.


jfg.on("level", function(level)
  if level == jfg.level_id("level_landing") then
    jfg.weapon(0, { delay = 4 })
  else
    jfg.weapon(0, { delay = 8 })
  end
end)