Melee Pack Mod for BONELAB
"Why are there so little melee weapons? Isn't this a fighting game?"
"I'm pretty sure this is an FPS..."
"Not for long."
What Is This?
For context, I have been playing a VR game called BONELAB for the past year. BONELAB is a beautiful combination of the puzzle, shooter, fighting, sandbox and storytelling video game genres. BONELAB was released in late September of 2022 as a sequel to the hit VR game Boneworks. Both of these games were made by Stress Level Zero, and they have very similar gameplay and mechanics. Most notably however, the physics engines of these games surpass that of every single other VR game in the history of VR games. BONELAB and Boneworks both allow you to physically interact with everything that regular VR games wouldn't usually allow for. You are given a full body that affects the world, and is also affected by the world. Your hands can't just pass through anything anymore. Your entire body is full of different colliders to maximize immersion. Your head, arms, legs, and torso can all interact with anything and everything now, whereas any other game would just slap on a simple capsule collider.
​
In short, BONELAB is the future of VR gaming software because its interaction engine, 1Marrow, is unrivaled in terms of providing incredible levels of immersion to players.
​
Now to why this page is here in the first place. To put it very specifically, the default arsenal of melee weapons the game gives the player seemed quite small to me. When it comes to VR, my absolute favorite thing is practicing close-combat with fists or weapons. Without a decent variety of melee weapons to attack any living thing with, fighting NPCs in close range becomes somewhat stale.
​
So, I took it upon myself to expand BONELAB's weaponry as much as humanly possible.
The first weapon I decided to make was a large, heavy hammer. I wasn't confident in my ability to make a model in Blender from scratch, so I used Roblox Studio to easily make a rough draft of the hammer that I could then import into Blender to add more details. On top is the draft in Roblox Studio, and on bottom is the imported model with some changes. After I'm satisfied with the design, I would export the model as an .fbx (Filmbox) file, and it's off to the next step.
To bring the hammer into BONELAB, I first import the model into the Unity game engine. This is where an SDK comes in by providing me with special tools and components that I can use to tell BONELAB how this weapon will behave. This is also where I can color the weapon to my preferences.
This is the hammer finally modded into BONELAB. The big, mean-looking cyborg is me dressed as Adam Smasher from Cyberpunk. The colors appear to be different from the Unity stage because this was an earlier picture I took before I recolored the hammer.
After creating a couple of other weapons, I decided to make my first avatar using these weapons as body parts. By having most of the pieces of the avatar already made, I essentially cheated the modeling process. This is where I learned to rig models with skeletons, assigning each weapon to a bone and being able to animate it.
This is an ongoing project. I plan to expand this mod to add as much content as possible as a way to constantly improve my content creation abilities as well as my fluency in Unity and Blender.
If you have BONELAB, download my mod now from mod.io using this link!