Open Beta Ultimate

Previously: "...from past experience I know that creating another special infected without overlapping or obsoleting existing ones is hard..."

That's right, less than ten posts in and we've started getting flashbacks! Soon there's going to alternate continuities and retcons (if there aren't already; after all I can just go and edit previous posts like some sort of small scale blogging George Lucas, only without all the money, fans etc).

Back on topic I'll be explaining that thought process of my failed attempt to create a clever, useful, and fundamentally different special infected for Left 4 Dead.

The 'Strikebreaker' (as I came to think of it) was birthed from two grievances in Left 4 Dead coming together:

-when the winning team would hide in a corner, overlapping and meleeing, which made it virtually impossible for the losing team, which naturally I was apart of, to harm them;

-general boredom at playing the same three classes of infected and a desire for a new playstyle.

The combined conclusion I came to was an idea that no doubt other Left 4 Dead players have had cross their minds: a ranged infected.

"But Lysander-you-brilliant-and-handsome-individual in your infinite wisdom you forgot about the smoker's tongue and the boomer's vomit," points out sycophantic reader number one.
"And the tank's rock throw," adds adequate reader number two.
"Yeah," chimes in redundant reader number three.

While it is true that all of the playable infected bar one do have some form of ranged attack there is a catch in all of them. The boomer's vomit is more of an AoE spray, which is rather buggy (or I'm just really bad at it (or both)) and the tank's rock throw is a secondary ability that is there for when the primary means of attack (punching people till they disconnect) is ineffective. This still leaves the the smoker's tongue which (while it is a primary ranged attack) functions more along the lines as a hunter on a string as opposed to direct projectile.

And so direct projectiles were the Strikebreaker's primary attack. Balancing this was where everything turned overly elaborate. Since a good team can theoretically defend against special infected without getting harmed there had to be something that prevented undefendable projectile spamming. Apart from an obvious cooldown of a few seconds, the spit attack (by the way the projectile is poisonous spit) did temporary damage which the survivor's will slowly recover from (essentially the complete opposite of temporary health from pain pills). To further combat spamming and to find the happy medium between 'too weak to be useful' and 'gamebreakingly powerful' I decided that the spit would build up in time, so the higher the charge the more (temporary) damage and the greater range (it's a parabola projectile). So essentially , the less frequently you fired, the more potent the attack.

Awkward to explain, less awkward in practice. Too bad that's not it. You could also hold down the fire button to prepare a barb. While the barb is being charged up the Strikebreaker makes a distinctive sound, moves at a decreased rate and can't jump. If you fire prematurely the barb is lost and the attack is just a (relatively) regular spit shot. If you do however finish preparing the barb you would get a damaging, almost linear projectile, plus all the spit that has managed to build up as well.
While the barb would do some actual permanent damage, its main feature would be the capability to pin a survivor to either the wall behind them or possibly the ground beneath. This would immobilise the victim until the the barb was removed by another teammate or by the survivor them self at the cost of some more health.

Here's roughly what the ranged attack interface would have to look like:


Bear in mind that all other infected are simple enough to have a single circle.

Since this post has already become a daunting mass of text, I'll leave the rest (yes there's more) for a later date.