Autofire or not to fire

Let’s discuss game mechanics.

It’s a shooter game. Ammo is infinite (right?). So why would anyone ever release the trigger? Why make the player press the trigger at all?

The way I see it there are 2 options.

1. Player has infinite ammo, Autofire on at all times. This is common among 1942 style scrolling shooter games.
2. Some cost involved (cooldown, limited ammo, …), Gun fired manually

I like to pull the trigger myself, but at no cost it’s less gratifying. In the original Blue Max game the trigger had to be pulled manually. I suppose we didn’t think about the pointlessness of withholding fire back then.

I got some great feedback from the Bluesky gamedev community about this. For that I am grateful. 🙏

In the end I decided to go for a gun overheat/cooldown mechanism. Gun stops firing when overheated. In reality this means slower rate of fire after firing continuously for 2-3 seconds.

I keep the max heat and cooldown rate generous. It should be OK to be trigger happy, only a mild penalty for wasting bullets. 😄

So what’s new?

Only after implementing the gun overheat mechanism did I realize that there actually already is a cost to firing continuously. Descending while firing drops a bomb and bombs is a limited resource.

So perhaps I implemented an extra feature for nothing. 🤷