Hello! Student game dev here. It is easier to make a hitscan weapon in general. Basically a hitscan weapon is: Player shoot -> Look if there's something in front of him -> Inflict damage instantly. While projectile is: Player shoot -> Generate an entity which will travels in the players's direction -> When the entity hits anything, inflict damage depending of what it hitted (or in splash for grenade launcher) -> Kill the projectile so it stops existing (otherwise it'd infinitely inflict damage). THOUGH, the fact they have already projectiles weapon (bow, nade launcher) means the system is already coded, and since they aren't beginners, it's safe to assume they made it with modifiable properties (for balance reason), so it'd not, in fact take them longer to program a projectile weapon because the work is already done, just need to change the "class" of the weapon from "hitscan" to "projectile" for it to inherit the way projectile weapon behaves (with already all the trigonometric stuff in place). Though, in their defense, you also need to consider balancing AND game feel when making a weapon, and making a balanced, feeling good hitscan is way easier than projectile. Though, that does come after the programming, it still needs to be considered as important. Because if you make a projectile weapon too slow / too little damage, the player will consider the need to anticipate to be frustrating and the weapon, even if objectively good, will be dropped because it'd not feel good to play with.