Is this ballanced

I am currently designing a first person shooter and want to know if these stats seem ballanced or if the should be modified. I am asking an open community because i would like to get honest open feedback. My co-developer thinks that all the damages should be more.

AmmoTypes["9mm"] = new Bullet(){
Velocity = 380,
headDamage = 100/6,
bodyDamage = 100/9,
};

AmmoTypes[".45 ACP"] = new Bullet(){
Velocity = 460,
headDamage = 100/5,
bodyDamage = 100/7,
};

AmmoTypes["5.56"] = new Bullet(){
Velocity = 992,
headDamage = 100/4,
bodyDamage = 100/6,
};

AmmoTypes["7.62"] = new Bullet(){
Velocity = 850,
headDamage = 100/3,
bodyDamage = 100/5,
};

AmmoTypes["12 Gauge"] = new Bullet(){
Velocity = 460,
headDamage = 100/2,
bodyDamage = 100/4,
};

AmmoTypes["20 Gauge"] = new Bullet(){
Velocity = 450,
headDamage = 100/3,
bodyDamage = 100/5,
}

 

First of all, this is no way to post.
the minimum you could do is post something like "9mm ammo - x head damage, y body damage"

second of all, this cannot be answer as the information is too lacking, what the hell is the game? the shooting mechanic? how does the characters look like(I assume humanoid..)?

and most importantly.. how does it feel? (what your buddy said, even if "on paper" it's perfect - if it doesn't feel right it ain't right)

 

Is it fun though?

 

At first I thought "what a silly question", because it shouldn't be possible to give you an answer at all just from looking at some numbers without knowing how it actually feels during gameplay. There are a ton of things that affect the answer, other then the damage. E.g. how accurate can you be and how fast can you shoot? How does it feel ingame? What are the enemies? 5 meter tall robots or a dude in a hoody? What are the average engagement ranges? How fast does everyone move? PVP multiplayer, or PVE coop, or singleplayer? Who are you and what's the core feeling/phantasy you want to deliver. No offense, but you don't seem to have a good grasp on the factors that matter here, or you're terrible at providing the info to properly answer your question.

Then I saw that you didn't even give us the health values of enemies. You seem to assume that we know - we don't. You're making bad assumptions. Based on this I would be inclined to agree with your co-developer without even looking at the actual numbers. I'm not trying to be in ass, but you just messed up asking us an important question in more than one way. If you can't even do that, how are you gonna ask yourself the right questions when designing a game? It's usually easier to ask others, because while writing/talking you're forced to think more clearly about a problem. Look at rubberduck debugging for reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

But I'll humor you, and I'll assume you mean every enemy is a regular human (because you seem to be thinking in terms of realistic real world weaponry and not alien rayguns) and has 100 health, and your idea was to write down damage as "how many hits does it take", which I will concede is at least the right direction to think about. But a) are those int values? Because if they are, not even that is working right and 100/3 will round down to 33 and you'll need 4 hits to kill a 100hp enemy instead of 3. I think you should calculate as "how many hits", but write proper numbers down to avoid any kind of ambiguity with data types.
Alright, down to the actual numbers... 3 headshots to kill with 7.62mm... are you crazy? If that's what you think is good design, I don't even need to play your game to know I don't like it one bit. You should listen to your co-developer more. Seriously!

Even better: decide on 1 game that nails the balance for the kind of game you two want to make and copy the damage values and damage model verbatim. If you can't agree on a game to take these from, maybe it's not a good idea to collaborate on this in the first place? I mean you're already at the stage where you seem inable to solve a conflict among yourselves without involving others, I think that's a pretty big red flag for a collab...

What kind of FPS games do you play and like? I can't think of a single one that is that bulletspongy. Or if there is one, I know I'd absolutely hate it and drop it faster than The Division.

9 body shots with 9mm, so you want a player with perfect aim to have to reload between killing the first and the second enemy with perfectly accurate center mass shots from a Beretta? Are you kidding me? If these are the kinds of things that you think are fun, I would strongly urge you to reconsider. With that balancing I'd trash talk, negatively review and refund any FPS on steam, even if it was as good looking and well polished as topshelf AAA games. As an avid (FPS) gamer I feel strongly about this (as if you couldn't tell already ). That bulletsponge enemy balancing is pure cancer, brought to the industry by terrible stat based looter shooters designed for consoles, that all have high ROF fullauto weapons with poor accuracy to enforce stat based progression and lower the skill ceiling to compensate for poor aim control with gamepads. There's absolutely no reason to copy that for any FPS!

If you're actually working with much smaller health pools than 100 hp on enemies, you still deserve the harsh comments for not giving us that info in your question, but based on your teammate arguing with you about this and the way you've notated the damage values I concluded that this is what we're talking about.

 

Test it... and literally check if this is desirable or if users that playtest it enjoy it.
I can safely say that these numbers are very high. It reminds me of Crysis where you get this super powered suit and still get 2 shot by peasants...

 

You haven't provided enough information. The damage numbers are irrelevant without information on health for example. But the whole question is a bit silly, as making a game completely balanced will mean the game is boring and none of your choices actually matter.

A lot of the fun in a game is figuring out how to min/max it. Try to get the most OP weapon or items. Sometimes it will be to try to win with the most under powered items for a higher challenge. Can't do any of that in a "balanced' game though.

 

How the guns work and are balanced depends on what the gameplay is. What’s the average time to kill? How fast does the player move? Are the levels cover based or arenas? How strong is the aim assist?

Sounds like your game might be balanced for a high twitch cover based slow moving shooter with very little aim assist.

Balance isn’t about guns, even a perfectly set up sandbox isn’t transplantable in other games. Halo CE, Doom II, and Perfect Dark have three of the best weapon sandboxes ever made. But try to imagine their weapons in each other’s gameplay. The slow, floaty masterchief vs a rocket launcher with no reload and a magazine of 50. Or trying to shoot a Doom marine with a Halo pistol while you’re both running at 90mph. The same gun in Joanna Dark’s hands though with her heavy aim assist would mean you’d start with the most lethal weapon. Imagine being able to throw a laptop gun on a wall in Halo CTF. Sounds terrible.

 

Play test, play test, play test. I first started putting all my weapons, damage, health in a spread sheet, as accurately as i could. Playing the game it just felt way off. you can't just post a number you have to play it in the game because there are so many thing that effect game play you do not notice. The only way to really get down is to play test over and over until you can balance it out.

 

@chosen_1
So how's your game going?
Did the advice, the guys gave you, help?