NECROSHIFT
More Contributions
Core gameplay loop
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Paper prototyping
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In-engine prototyping
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Designing abilities
Boss encounter
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Paper prototyping
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Writing specs
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Balancing
Game Writing
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Narrative
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Writing & implementation of dialogue.
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Game & Character names.
UX
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UI Programming, implementation and design.
Dev Process
Pre-Production
Early gameplay prototype
When trying to solidify the core gameplay mechanic I created a prototype where you can possess an enemy after a certain amount of damage has been done, but you would also inherit its remaining amount of health. I thought it would bring a fun strategic element to the game if the player is risking their own future health if they get too trigger happy.
This feature did not make it into the game, however, as we wanted the opportunity of possession to be clear and the story to be dark.
Core Gameplay loop
Eventually we settled on a less combat heavy approach to target a more casual audience and so we made the enemy encounters challenging but brief and added interactive elements to the environment instead.
Enemies & Abilities
Because we were taking a "casual player" friendly approach, I wanted to create possessable characters that could Attack, Defend and solve Puzzles, all on one button press. Out of 9 unique characters, these are the ones we chose to put in the game.
Narrative
I wanted to write the narrative around the gameplay so we wouldn't have to spend too many resources on telling the story. The game is quite short and we wanted to use the time to really lean into our core gameplay loop, so with that in mind I chose three ways to convey the king's tale; Environmental clues, dialogue and a boss fight.
Hinting to the narrative
I wanted to give the player a clue to their identity throughout the game so I made the corpses in the dungeon knights that wear the same armor as the king that the player fights at the end.
Our dialogue system
We used a recycled dialogue system that one of the programmers made for a previous game to display the dialogue. The lines were stored in an array and then we could call the desired lines and the desired number of lines to be run on each individual trigger that was placed in the scene.
The UI
Outlining corpses
For the outline around the dead, possessable bodies, I used a material that was added to each Actor Blueprint with Render CustomDepth Pass enabled. The outline would then be made visible through the PostProcessing Volume.
Ability notifier
To make the abilitiy text that you see above the health bar change depending on the enemy you're possessing, I set names for the abilities in each enemy Actor Blueprint and then checked the value of that variable on each new possesion.