Hell to pay

Prototyping/pitching

• To begin we had a choice of two projects to present and the lecturer had to decide on which one would be made by the team. I created two demos to showcase the two different ideas. One was my idea of a temple run style game but with puzzle elements and wall running to keep it fresh and more interesting. The other was a turn based RPG with the ability to use different party members and attacks. For the former I put together a short level to showcase the mechanics, art style and general feel of the game for the presentation and also to give the whole team to an idea of what the game would look like and how it would play

• I also draw out a concept of the puzzle rooms with which the player needed to quickly solve a puzzle before running into the next corridor:

Overall I think this was a great little demo to show what we were going for and personally I would have preferred to make this rather than the other project due to its simplicity and our strict timeline. 

• For the next pitch the team wanted to create a turn based RPG style game, with a lot of different ideas flying around as to what that actually meant. We managed to whittle it down to focus on a turn based battle system with the ability to shop at a store in between battles. Despite my hesitation I knew I wanted to give as much effort and motivation as I could to make the project a success so I began by making the next prototype/pitch for this idea.

• Since I had a lot less experience in the programming side of things for an RPG I went about creating the shop section instead of the battle segments. I including the ability to move around freely in the shopping area as to give a bit more diversity for the player in between battles. In the end I managed to get a fully working inventory section, with a shop and the ability to buy potions using gold accumulated from the battle segments. The player could also buy magic abilities and then use them once purchased, the video below shows this with the player using an ability where rain comes from the sky and a healing circle:

• The RPG was ultimately given the green light by the lecturers and so I began by designing a quick gameplay loop for everyone to see how the game would flow:

Documentation

• As the project continued, I managed to get the potions working in the battle system where the player could refill their health or mana respectively. Unfortunately as the project went on the team decided that we should cut the ability to move around freely and it should be a static menu. Luckily it wasn’t too difficult to replace my pawn and get the system working in static menus. Towards the end of the project I found out that all of the work that I had done for this shop section had been deleted and redone (in an admittedly better way) but it was still disappointing to find out. 

Visual Effects

• After this I had to think about my next skill set which is in design specifically the documentation. This had already been assigned by other team members so I had to go back to the drawing board and think about what would be important to the game which didn’t require programming since that slot had been taken over by someone more competent. It occurred to me that the game would need some creative visual effects to stop the player from being bored e.g cool attack/magic spells etc. To do this I used Unreal Engine’s Niagara system. 
  I started by collaborating with the art team so my VFX would match the project’s theme (hell). The game was originally supposed to have four extra party members for the player to choose from to battle by their side. These were to be the four horsemen of the apocalypse, War, Famine, Death and Conquest (artwork not by me but our concept artist):
• With keeping the projects theme in mind (hell) the game was originally supposed to have four extra party members for the player to choose from to battle by their side. These were to be the four horsemen of the apocalypse, War, Famine, Death and Conquest (artwork not by me but our concept artist):

• Based on the designs given I set out to make some cool magic effects for the player to cast, I had to think about the timing and theme of the game whilst doing this, here are the designs and end products I made with the Niagara system in the Unreal Engine and then added to the game documents:

This is the first iteration of the character “Death”, it started off fairly simple and this VFX slowly became more complicated, I designed the circle which is meant to represent life and death:

• The team decided that the horsemen should have two attacks and death should be taking health from the enemy and giving it back to the player, so I came up with the idea below. Here the graves rise up from the ground along with skulls that fire at the enemy then return to the player. I had to ask a member of the art team to make me some gravestones but I was able to find my own model for the skulls:

Here, a circle with a symbol of war spawns underneath the enemy, spears rise from the ground and then fireballs fall from the sky. I was inspired by over the top spells from JRPGs like the Final Fantasy series

For the second attack I wanted to make a crazy explosion that covered the screen:

• During this time the animation team needed to create some animations via mocap. Having never done this before I thought it would be really fun to volunteer to do it. We spent an entire day in the motion capture room with myself acting out all of the animations for the game, attacks, magic spells, deaths, enemies, battle stances and victory poses.

Design & Visual Effects continued

• For this task I had to name the enemies and also come up with their attacks, this meant designing them visually, programming them and naming them. Once again I tried to keep in line with the theme and the designs of the models (based on concept art at this point). This was something that was constantly changing due to what was being modelled and put into the game within the timeframe. This caused a knock on effect where characters were changing roles within the game due to lack of models being ready, for example War was moved to be a general enemy and renamed as Bloodshed. This meant changing the VFX due to timings and making them less extravagant since they would be used as normal attacks and not epic attacks ala Final Fantasy summons.

With this in mind I had to constantly keep changing the game documentation for which characters/enemies were in the game on a regular basis. Here is an example of one iteration that I would post out to the team:

• Going back to the design and implementation of enemy attacks via visual effects, I created the following:

Tragic Slime/Upset Tummy attack – Originally had a larger area of impact and produced more particles, this was changed due to worries with the framerate

• The final version of the slime attack was the same but with a lot less particles being spawned (from 1000 to around 100) this was to speed up the attack and cut down on the processing.

Pitiful Slime – Runny Ears – This attack is exactly the same as the Upset Tummy but the material has been changed to give off that authentic earwax look. This was to save time and re-use what I’d already created but with a different look:

Corrupt Fiend – Chaos – This attack was originally the attack for War, after a reshuffle in character roles I decided to use this for the corrupt fiend, he looks mischievous so I named this attack Chaos, shortened the sequence, turned down the particles spawned and changed the colours to match the style and characteristics of the enemy:

LoudMouth – Echo Scream – For this enemy I wanted to project a sound wave from it’s large mouth, luckily this VFX did not need to be changed late in development and worked well for the timings and framerate:

Foul Fowl – A Flock of Friends – I assigned one of death’s attacks to the Foul Fowl since Death had at this point become a boss enemy with only one attack. Since this guy was a bird like creature it made the most sense to use the crow attack. In this version I had to tweak the amount of crows spawned and the timings once again to fall in line with the timings for a general enemy attack, I also removed the circle that would be spawned:

Once the basic enemies were finished I looked into doing attacks for the boss characters. The boss characters were constantly being reshuffled and changed later on through production in terms of models and role. One of these changes was a new character which I named “emperor Slime”. I had to make a few of my own materials to use in the VFXs for example the emperor slime’s attack required me to create my own slime texture in photoshop and was used as waterfall/slimefall attack:

Emperor Slime – Fetid Flush – I wanted this to be a cool combination of the Tragic and Pathetic Slime attacks but with a different animation:

Reaper of Souls – Undead Arise – This was originally used for the Death character but that character had now been promoted to a boss enemy and the name changed to Reaper of Souls. Since the VFX looked as though they could be used as an offensive attack as well as the originally planned healing attack I didn’t need to do much tweaking but due to the attack now being a general attack I needed to cut down the time. This meant cutting out the part where the graves arise. I had also added souls rising from the ground at this point, made by the concept artist which also had to go. Below is the art that was originally used for the souls that would float out of the ground with the grave stones:

User Interface

• At this point the game’s turn based battles were in place and some kind of prompt was needed in-between the shop stage and the battles to make the game more fluid as well as the store screen itself. To tackle this I thought about using a begin battle screen that would appear at the beginning of a battle and slide off from the screen a few seconds later. A win/victory screen would also work in the same way but at the end of the battle. To do this I created a simple widget with an animation along with a rough sketch of the shop screen then asked the concept artist to sketch me up with something to replace the placeholder with which can be seen below:

Balancing

• Myself and another team member were given the task of balancing the game. This meant gathering all of the enemies, placing them into categories, giving them official names, working out their stats and what damage they would inflict (this was an equation in engine via blueprints), putting their stats against the player’s stats keeping in mind the ability for the player to become stronger and then working out how many enemies of that type would be on each floor. Again this was a very difficult process as team members were changing the enemies and their roles in the game constantly which meant having to rebalance this spread sheet on a weekly basis.

We created an excel sheet which can be seen here to keep track of the enemy stats:

• As you can see from the chart above we wanted a gradual increase in difficulty for the player, there is leeway at the beginning for the player to only purchase potions and survive but as the game progresses the enemies defence increases and so does their health and attacks. The idea was to push the player to use the levelling up system via the shop (increase attack strength). After every four floors the player would have to face a boss, the first one being an increase in difficulty but still fairly easy so that the player would want to continue to press on. These stats were not play tested unfortunately due to not being able to access the project since the programmer was busy with the engine, therefore we had to do our best to speculate the outcome of the stats that we had come up with. Great care was also taken into account for the visuals of the enemies for example Bloodshed is a nimble enemy so therefore we game him a high speed stat but weak defence. The slimes have decent defence but weak attacks etc.

• I created a simple table of which enemies would be used for each floor and placed it into the game documentation. This was so everyone had a clear understanding instead of having to go into the excel sheet myself and the other team member were using:

Sound effects & Music

• At the beginning of the project we had someone who was working on all of the SFX but did not turn up for the second half of the project, which didn’t dawn on me until the last few days of the project. With that in mind I quickly went looking for some royalty free SFX online. I was asked to shorten the timing of the VFX and leave the SFX but personally I thought the SFX were much more important, giving the player some form of feedback. In the end I ended up doing both of these tasks within the remaining time. 

• I used Zapsplat.com, freeSFX.com and Mixkit.com for all of the sound effects in the game. I went looking for sounds for the VFX/magic abilities, sword attacks, battle begin and end screens as well as potions being used etc. I found it quite difficult to find simple sounds such as a character being hit (oomph) or (ughh) kind of noises so in the end I recorded my own voice through my laptop microphone, I created 16 of these and yes they sound ridiculous but luckily in tone with the game:

• Something else that was missing at the last minute was battle, shop and boss musical scores. I searched around for some royalty free music but in the end I thought it would be better to try and make my own. I had no experience in this department but I set myself a task to try to rectify this and got some tunes in there. I managed to find some software called LMMS and managed to put together some basic music to use for the game. Unfortunately due to time restrictions they were nowhere near as polished as I would have liked and way too short for what I wanted to accomplish. Despite this I was happy with what I did manage to make with no experience and a short timeframe. Here is a video of said recordings, it contains a battle theme, boss theme and shop theme: