The "fancy green effect" is the Regicide armor effect. I created a hidden trait set which is set up to give you that effect, and the trait set gets applied for a short moment of time to create the flash. It's actually somewhere around 5 game ticks right now, but I'm having issues getting it to sync over the network sometimes, so I might just make it one second (if that still looks good).
Assassinations, beat downs, and stick kills demote the player you killed. Suicides also demote you. You get a Vengeance medal for demoting someone (because it sounds cool and can't normally be obtained in this gametype since ordnance is disabled), and there's a custom stat for how many vengeances a player earns. I've seen games where people have gotten as many as 7 vengeances; they make the game a lot tougher especially considering how easy it is to stick someone sometimes.
Players only get promoted if they get weapon kills or assassinate someone. This means that melees or grenade kills won't promote you.
There's a bug in the game engine apparently (as far as I can tell, at least) where Sticky Detonator kills from the grave don't register as being Sticky Detonator kills, so you don't get promoted for that (and it actually happens somewhat often). I'm still considering what I want to do about this, but I may just end up making all kills from the grave promote you if I can't find a decent workaround.
On the topic of bugs, I encountered a bug during testing where you can't drop someone's weapon in the middle of an assassination animation (when the kill event occurs). In order to get around this, I had to make it repeatedly try to drop your weapon and then check if it actually dropped before giving you your new one (with the exception of the Extractor and the Flagnum, there's no "replace weapon" feature in MegaloScript - you have to drop the player's old weapon and give them their new one).
The video doesn't show this because I added it after we made it, but if you're on level 0 and another player demotes you (meaning that you can't just suicide to get this), then you go to level -1 and get an Incineration Cannon as a handicap. (Just for fun.)
After you kill someone, there's a 1-second (and I'll probably make that customizable) "cooldown" period during which you still have your original weapon. The purpose of it is to prevent quick multikills from making you get promoted twice (so e.g. if you kill two people with one rocket, you only move up one level). There's a trait set called "Cooldown Traits" which is applied during that time period in order to block any extra damage or multikills, but you could edit it from the in-game menu to give the player a temporary radar, for example.
There's supposed to be an overtime system where you get 10 (again, this will be configurable) seconds to try and demote someone after they go through all 18 levels in case they got stuck with a plasma grenade or something (yes, it actually is possible to do, someone managed it in a real game once), but it's broken in the version that was shown in the video (you hear the announcer say "overtime" and then the round immediately ends...oops). There will be an "Overtime Leader Traits" trait set so you could stick a waypoint over the person.
There are three modes of weapon progression which can be set from the game options menu: Weak to Strong, Strong to Weak, and Random. The video shows the Random progression mode, where the weapon progression is randomized every game (everyone in the game gets weapons in the same order though, and each weapon still appears once). Random is generally the most fair way of playing, because with the Weak to Strong mode, for example, whoever can get kills the fastest gets a huge advantage over other players and you end up having games where someone just destroys everyone else. The Random mode also keeps things interesting because then you never know what weapon you're going to get next or what weapon someone who's ahead of you might have.
I'm not currently planning on adding any ability to customize the weapon progression beyond that because adding it in would be too complicated and the game limits you to only 16 custom menu options. As much as I would love to add this, I'm not sure how feasible it would be.
There's obviously the "development build" HUD widget, but if you look closely, the text changes to ">>> New Weapon Incoming <<<" during the cooldown period (this is actually a second widget). This will become much more apparent when the "development build" watermark is removed.
We found through testing that the gametype works best on a small map. Abandon, Adrift, Haven, and Solace work really well. If anyone would be interested in forging a map just for this gametype, I would be very excited. Remember that weapon pickup and vehicles are obviously disabled.
I went through the entire process of designing, creating, and testing an entirely new gametype. As an overall statement, gametype creation is actually a lot harder than it looks. I'm not even talking about the scripting part of it - in general, gametypes have to be tested extensively and have to constantly be modified in order to ensure that they're fun to play and that they're fair for everyone. The gametype you saw in the video is actually very different from what we originally had - the testers who played the original version had to completely re-adapt to it. I have an understanding now of the kind of crap that 343/CA has to go through to make these things, and it really gave me a different perspective on them and how hard they're working to improve this game. They pretty much put their testers through hell in order to make Dominion, and I couldn't even imagine how much testing they had to do with the weapon tuning in order to make sure that it actually improved things. I'm just gonna be straight up honest here, people really don't appreciate everything that 343 has been doing for this game, and I'm hoping that this will change things.
