Hi, I'm Tom!

Situation…

With only a few weeks to go until the 2024 Gamebridge festival, I wanted to submit my best work to the showcase. My ‘Search for a Star’ project, designed to a highly specific brief, felt too compromised outside of the competition context where it would be assessed alongside other designs with open briefs. Therefore, I decided to start fresh and implement new and more ambitious ideas and systems while retaining some of the DNA, and all of the lessons learned, from The Outcast God.

Task…

• Design an engaging and original dark fantasy combat system
• Design, implement, program and balance abilities across three different skill types
• Create multiple enemy variants and behaviour trees
• Implement a simple tutorial to efficiently onboard players for a short demo
• Implement surface polish to create or enhance critical audio-visual feedback: sound effects, particles, UI, and music
• Produce a stable, fully playable build of the game in three weeks using Unreal engine

Action…

The combat system I devised centres around cycling between three ability types: Piety, Sickness, and Devilry.

Piety is the player’s main weapon, a crossbow. Powerful and accurate but slow to reload, with three distinct bolt types with varying effects.

Sickness represents physical abilities that effect the player’s health, speed, armour, melee damage etc.

Devilry is the player’s magical abilities and spells that effect enemies: freezing, throwing, dodging, etc.

I took the combat system from the Fable series as inspiration. I always enjoyed cycling through Strength, Skill and Will abilities in turn, bouncing back and forth in various combinations and finding ruthless combos that effectively dealt with numerous enemies.

Players must balance the use of the three abilities taking into account cooldown periods, enemy immunity to certain kinds of attacks (e.g. shamans are immune to Devilry), and plan ahead using Shrines to swap out and upgrade the various powers.

Result…

The final product was a five-minute demo featuring a tutorial and combat encounter meant to show off the range of abilities at the player’s disposal. The work was accepted to the 2024 Gamebridge showcase and exhibited alongside other student work, much of it months in the making.

The combat, concept and overall gameplay experience received praise from industry professionals and students alike.

Feedback primarily focussed on confusion over the role of shrines, intensity of the headbob, the tutorial, and some accessibility suggestions including font and UI alterations.

Reflection…

The gameplay loop is tight, satisfying, and most importantly, scalable. It is easy to see how the three skill trees could grow and develop over multiple levels, encounters, and boss fights over the course of a complete game. Enemy types ensure that the dominant strategy is constantly changing, and the shrines mean that not being able to change abilities on the fly makes players think ahead, plan, and execute various tactics to defeat foes.

Creating the tutorial was undoubtedly the biggest design challenge I faced in this project. Specifically in the context of a very short five-minute demo, I should have considered more carefully the burden of information I was placing on first-time players. Next time, I would limit the demo abilities to one or two selectable skills with use-cases for each prior to the main encounter. I would also add a mandatory step for making use of shrines and add a companion walkthrough for the shrine UI to make sure players know how to navigate the perhaps overwhelming array of options.

Gallery…