The Artillery Titan: Thunder

Applications: Google Sheets, Affinity Designer, Unreal Engine
Summary: A personal design for a titan I would add to Titanfall 2. I created a design document for laying out the new titan's abilities, a stat sheet for exact (my best guess) values for everything related to the titan's weapons and abilities, and a prototype of what the abilities would look like in action.

Shoulder Cannon Reference from XCOM 2

Mortar Ability Reference from Gears of War 2

Inspirations: Titanfall 2 already has an enemy NPC in Frontier Defense (Co-op) that shoots mortars, but they're very stationary and don't look fun play. Players can already play as Northstar for long-range combat, but I thought it would be fun to come up with a playable titan that focused on bombardment, was mobile, and could be a bit of long-range zone control. The mortar I imagined would always be mounted on the shoulder of Thunder, like the Advent Mec from XCOM 2, and the mortar would drop explosives like the mortar from Gears or War 2.

Design Doc Page 1

Design Doc Page 2

Design Doc Page 3

Design Doc Page 4

Design Doc Page 5

Values Spreadsheet

Thunderstruck: When I start thinking of new titans, or classes for any game, I look at what is already in the game and what is missing. In Titanfall 2, there is Ronin with close-range melee,  Northstar is long-range sniping, Scorch has a little bit of close range zone control, and so on. If I were to add a mortar titan, that could add long-range zone control by dropping explosives from far away. With their offensive ability and titan core focusing on launching explosives for far away, a player using Thunder can provide support or offensive moves by just making it rain.

Balancing Out The Rest: Outside of bombardment, equipping Thunder with a Burst rifle gives him the ability to engage other enemies at close to medium range. The adhesive trap is also unique to Thunder as it allows him to set up traps to slow down enemies and force them to use up a dash to get out of it, or risk getting hit by mortars. This also helps teammates engaging enemy titans slowed down by Thunder's trap.

What I Learned: When adding a new gameplay option like a titan, you have to consider what it does to EVERYTHING. I had an original idea that I realized would have been unfair against pilots, and I feel like that helped me in designing Thunder. It helped me keep everything in mind whenever I came up with an ability or weapon and I asked "How does 'x' react to this?" and so on. I also used switch statements in Unreal blueprints for the first time! Yay!