Hi, as you know I'm developing a game, but there is some area in which I am completely clueless.

In my European, socialist, shitty country(filled with submissive socialist zombies) weapons are completely forbidden, so I never held a firearm of any kind in my life. I have a very shallow knowledge about them.

So, a question for the lucky Americans who still have enough freedom for this basic human right, which kind of ammo would fall into these 3 categories of ammo: light, medium, heavy?

Remember, this is for a game, not real-life, but be as realistic as possible.

4 minutes ago, swiftcoder said:

Ammo doesn't really fall into such nice categories in the real world. Weight of ammo isn't necessarily as important as how fast it is travelling, or how it behaves when it hits something. 

No, I mean it in a completely different way, not weight but their destructive power.

2 minutes ago, ByteTroll said:

I would estimate .22 is light, 9mm is medium and .50 is heavy.  

Yes, that's what I was looking for.

What other kinds of ammo would fall into the 3 categories. I need at least 3 per category.

1 minute ago, ByteTroll said:

For example, .22 is light and does little damage.  .22 hollow point is still light, but does far more impact damage that standard .22.  

Hm, but wouldn't such type have overall decreased range and velocity, which would be sufficient to put it into a category of light?

8 minutes ago, Hodgman said:

Velocity and mass tell you momentum, which tell you impact force.

Can one extrapolate this value from barrel length and caliber of the projectile alone?

3 hours ago, Armantium said:

Hm, but wouldn't such type have overall decreased range and velocity, which would be sufficient to put it into a category of light?

You're thinking in terms of videogame tradeoffs ("If it's more powerful, it must travel a shorter distance"). But it's more often just a real-life money tradeoff ("Just doing target practice? Don't waste the expensive bullets.").

This can also have interesting gameplay ramifications - if different types of bullets cost more in-game, players might want to reserve their more powerful ones. Or, if players find ammo instead of buying it, provide less of the more powerful ammo, so players conserve those more. That reminds me of the gameplay of the N64 Turok game, where you got shotgun shells and explosive shotgun shells. Explosive shotgun shells were always better, you just didn't find them as often and so had to conserve them more.

At some point though - varying per game - reality needs to take a backseat to gameplay. If you want different bullets to have genuine tradeoffs unrelated to cost, that's so common in games that I doubt it'll break immersion, even for gun experts.