DOOM: The Dark Ages - Super Shotgun

One of my many favorite assignments: Design a Dark Ages Super Shotgun!

How do you make a one handed double barrel shotgun that can reload itself? You science it out!
It was clear early on in the process we were going to most likely go with a flip-reload animation ala Terminator 2/
lever action reload. That informed some decisions early on such as not having a full tigger guard as well as inspiration
for the mechanical elements.
The challenge came with sciencing out the mechanics of how it would function. Since we're in video game land we didn't
need to adhear to all industrial design and practical use cases but I was able to dig in and design something that on a surface
level (in a game or a movie) is functionally a double barrel-lever action shotgun. There are 2 reloading ports on the underside of the
barrel (not that we have reload animations but it is important they are there).

Other fun elements; there are sword-like guards on either side of the main barrel in case of hand to hand combat in a sword battle to catch and hook an enemies weapon for control. In place of wood or leather on the grip, its custom chainmail because its fucking metal.

We also experimented with how a new kind of shell could work, in this case the explosive elements are on the outside of the shell and 'explode' in the closed chamber instead of having a pin in an internal mechanism. At one point, you can see in the various sketches, we had exposed shells were you'd see the explosion in front of the player.

As with all the weapons, once we got a good direction I modeled the concept in blender in close to game accurate first person view to make sure what we saw in the concept is close to what we got in the game. Final model PO over Jake's in game model for polish elements was one of the last steps.

Art Director: https://www.artstation.com/emersontung
Final Game asset modeled by : https://www.artstation.com/jakehdz

All Images © id Software, Zenimax Media Inc.