the hard part about damage types is that they're a pretty arbitrary decision to make about a video game that can affect a lot of the decision-making process of other vital aspects of the game. i think technically i could retroactively add or remove damage types later without a significant amount of issue, if i'm clever about the implementation.

my thought is that damage types should be related first to the functionality of the weapon while still being vague enough to capture all of the weapons i want to make later. this is actually really difficult because the differences between melee weapons in video games is not the same kind of difference as between ranged weapons. like melee weapons can be blades and blunt weapons while ranged weapons can't easily also be blades and blunt weapons.

i haven't completed my thoughts tonight but i think one of the damage types will be POWER. this contains weapons that are focused on a single heavy hit, like a hammer or a shotgun. it captures the "Crushing" subcategory of melee weapons and the "Burst" subcategory of ranged weapons, but it might be useful to just think of POWER as separate from those subcategory since... maybe some other kinds of weapon will also deal POWER. and i want that flexibility to exist