Month: February 2020

In Week 6, our team began building assets specifically for our prototype level we will be making for our final product. We wanted to begin building something presentable this week because we have presentations with our faculty during our eighth week of development. We made some hard decisions about what exactly we wanted to build, and why we came to these conclusions. 

We started with what levels and environments we wanted to include in the game. Given that we only essentially have a total of about 6 months of development, it would be hard to create a full experience that has the proper amount of care put in to every beat. Whereas a Vertical Slice of a larger experience gives us a small scope that allows for care and iteration necessary to make it feel fun and complete, while having it show what a full game of its type would feel like. In case you are unaware, a vertical slice is a term that basically means cutting out a small piece of a full game and creating that small section to a shippable state. With the aim of around 2 hours of total playtime for our final product at the end of the next semester, a complete tactical RPG of that size would feel rushed and incomplete. If we pick a small subsection of what could be a full tactical RPG experience, we get to get right to the best part of the experience (i.e. the climax) while hinting towards what more could be offered.

To decide which part of the full experience we wanted to slice out to create our prototype, we first needed to solidify what a full experience of our game would be. We decided to figuratively and literally map out our experience, seen below:

We created a high level story arc that maps out the journey our Protagonist would take to serve the Devil. He would begin by receiving the Plague powers due to the contract taken by the Devil, and join up with the rebellious faction to help take down the Church. He and the army would march to destroy all influence the Church holds in the South (seen at point 1), battle to cross into the Northern half of the country (seen at point 2), storm the Capital to kill the King and take control of the apparent seat of power (seen at point 3), then realize they need to storm the Great Cathedral Hall of the Pope equivalent to take down the true seat of power in the country (seen at point 4). Since we are to building only one piece of the experience, we decided that it would make the most sense to build the most interesting piece. Therefore, our prototype will cover the final assault on the Great Cathedral Hall of the head of the Church.

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From this point, we jumped in to conceptualize the hall. We wanted to take inspirations from real world Gothic Cathedrals as a start, and then tweak it to fit our needs. Since we will be having a full-scale battle within this great hall, it will most likely have to be a bit larger than a standard cathedral. This also matches the idea that the head of the Church is a corrupt man who has used the powers granted to him to take from those who worship him. It would only make sense that his Cathedral would be ridiculously gigantic and grand. 

Speaking of the head of the Church, we started to flesh him out as a character. Since he is technically the “final boss” of what would be the full experience, we wanted to make him a foil to our Plague Doctor protagonist. The Plague Doctor is a sympathetic “villain” who uses evil powers for arguably noble reasons as he is trying to save his daughter. We decided to have the head of the Church to be a “good” character who is only fighting the army to keep his own wealth and status. The Plague Doctor is using evil powers for good purposes, while the head of the Church is using holy powers for evil and selfish purposes. The head of the Church also received his magic from signing a contract with an angel, giving solidarity to how our magic system works. Humans only receive Holy and Demonic magic if they establish a contractual agreement with divine beings. 

Speaking of powers, our designers started brainstorming what divine powers the head of the Church may use in the level. That along with how to best structure the level both for difficulty and engagement. As seen above, the level layout is going to be a long hallway, with the boss seated at the end of the hall on his throne. We wanted to make sure the level layout was more interesting than just a straight hallway, so we began to play around with mechanics that would change how to navigate the space. If you look above, there are seven dice that are circled in red. These are labeled as light beam paths, which is a magic skill that the boss uses. He will randomly choose from 0-2 rows (depending on how much the player has progressed through the map), and shoot a beam of light down it. This damages your units, and destroys any plague infested bodies in its path. The four-sided dice circled in blue are barricades where units cannot walk through. The combination of these two mechanics forces the player to think about how they are moving through the hall. Other iterations with the level include implementation of enemy reinforcements, enemy AI behavior for those who protect the boss, and number of allies to enemies. 

After conducting our first series of playtests with outside players, we found that people found the many character classes to be a lot to remember, and they did not use the plague mechanic much at all. The issue of character classes can be easily solved by simply removing classes to see if the gameplay is still balanced with less intricacy. The lack of using the plague was a big problem, though. If players were not incentivized to use the core mechanic of our game, we are doing something horribly wrong. We are currently in the process implementing new features with the plague to make it more attractive to players. For instance, we created a resurrecting mechanic to bring corpses with the plague back to life. This incentivizes the player to use the plague mechanic more as they will gain more units for battle this way.

We also started a mockup of the UI for the gameplay, along with playing around with controlling the camera when navigating the map. We have started trying out how we want the player to be able to rotate and zoom the camera when playing the game. Taking inspiration from other games in the genre such as Fire Emblem, we have implemented rotation snapping. The player is able to rotate the camera left or right in increments of 60 degrees, allowing them to view the map from several different angles. They are also able to zoom in and out of the map, allowing players to focus on any character they want to closely look at. We want players to be able to really explore the maps in the game, as we find touches like these to make it feel much more complete.

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Last but certainly not least, we have made great strides in the progress of our digital prototype. We have the Plague Doctor being able to infect all units on the field with the plague, and have the possibility of spreading it each turn. Units that die with the plague also resurrect to be Undead units that fight for you. There is an initial UI for players to be able to view character portraits and select what each unit’s action will be. Overall, we have made great strides in our development this week! This places us in a very good spot for next week as we prepare for our halves presentations during Week 8.

Week 5 consisted of the team digesting and reacting to faculty feedback from the previous week. We received a lot for us to parse through, such as the overscoping of our story to best practices of designing characters. We want to make sure  that we are taking our faculty’s feedback, all while also keeping the core of our experience.

Beginning with the narrative, we began to flesh out the role of the “Plague Doctor” avatar and his place in the world. We were torn between making the avatar either a human turned lackey of the Devil, or make him a demon from fictional hell to destroy the country. We ended up choosing a human being as we believe it syncs well with the idea of the plague bringing suffering and misery to the world. Our current direction for this character is that he is a father whose daughter becomes ill from the plague. The Devil makes a deal with him that he will cure the daughter in place of the human helping to destroy the Church and nobility of the nation. The Devil gives him the Plague powers, and takes the daughter as collateral until the deed is accomplished. While a bit of a trope or cliche, we decided to use it to our advantage in order to set up the story quickly. We only have a few hours of gameplay we will most likely finish by the end of next semester, so we should create a story that does not need much explaining. The idea of a father using these evil powers on the world to save his daughter is a compelling and possibly a relatable story for players. It may make parents consider what ends they would go to in order to save their children. 

Moving onto game mechanics and gameplay, we created a mock AI system for the enemy units to follow during our paper prototype. We wanted to create some sort of easy system for our designers playing the enemy to follow what would most closely resemble what the enemies may feel like in-game. Our designers also did begin on deeply documenting all core gameplay elements that we will pass off to the next team. We also began our weekly sprint cycles with prototyping in engine. Our first sprint for programming was the implementation of units on a grid who are able to move around and fight each other.

We wanted to get the bare basics of gameplay set for this sprint to judge how long other aspects may take. We have two more sprint cycles before we present our work for halves (midterms), and we want to be able to show off our main mechanic of the Plague Doctor using the plague on units. Having the unique game mechanic to show for our presentation is where our priorities lie.

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Over on the art side, we took the advice of riffing off of a base design of a character in the fourteenth century to heart. Our artists created multiple sketches of what a “knight” may look like, and we came together to discuss aspects we liked and disliked from each design. This helped the whole team come up with a unified vision of our knight. This style of art review we found to be extremely helpful, so we are going to continue with this approach going forward! We also have some new concepts of other locations in the world shown below:

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We wanted to get a general direction for the style we wanted to go with when creating different types of structures. Our next goal with environments is to bring our narrative and art members together to finalize locations and environments where the player will go to. This will allow our artists to create specific environment sketches from here on out.

Week 3 was where we began to put our research into practice. This week, we wrote out our first draft for our world and story, began to prototype gameplay elements, and began to conceptualize some art that we want to have in our game. 

Beginning with the story, we started from the idea of Light vs Dark. We were given the idea of making the plague the physical embodiment of Satan bringing hell on Earth, along with the plague giving people dark magic. We found that idea enticing, but it left us with one issue story-wise. We as a team were more interested in the idea of our theme of Good vs Evil being based on the perspective of the player. We did not want a moustache-twirling villain or saints of justice. We wanted there to be good and bad aspects of both sides (like the real world), and the player internally chooses which they believe to be the lesser evil. We believe this idea will make our world feel more believable as it mirrors most real world events and groups. We combined these two ideas by making the plague in the dark powers coming from the Devil and Hell be the perception of the people in the world. It is nothing more than another type of magic in the world, but the wielders of Light magic who are in power claim it to be evil. 

As stated above, we also delved into gameplay mechanics and some paper prototyping of mechanics that we were interested in. We knew we had a fascination with Area of Effect attacks on our grid, and we wanted to get a feel for how those would work. Area of Effect attacks are attacking moves that would hit multiple tiles on a grid, contrary to just hitting one tile or unit. We also wanted to get a feel for movement of different types of character classes, like infantry and calvary, to see how each can feel different on the map. We brought out a large grid map, and     assigned colored dice to be different types of units. 

From looking at the images above, we started to play around with how we may want our AI to be programmed, how to properly balance AI against the player, and how positioning in combat will work exactly. As of this week, we found that placing units in diagonals is optimal in order to avoid Area of Effect attacks more easily. We are still in the infancy of playtesting, but we have already learned a lot about how our gameplay should be structured. 

We also began to draw out some beginning rough concept art for both characters and architecture. Our artists have been researching and collecting inspiration and references from all over, including art from the fourteenth century and architecture from buildings at that time.

After spending a lot of time researching how buildings, people, and weapons looked like, we wanted to begin sketching right away. We want to get used to iterating on these sketches dozens of times, so we get a feel of the style we want to use as quickly as possible. In the early stages of a development on a game, getting a feel for what styles we like and dislike is crucial. We want our artists to be constantly sketching as some piece of art could be inspiration for a major component of the game. 

This week was about diving into early stages of all aspects of the project to get our feet wet essentially. We have quarter presentations in Week 4 to receive feedback from faculty to get their insight as to opinions on what we currently have, and what direction would be best to be headed next.