Elemental

Role:

Programmer & Design

Game Description:

This project is a prototype for a boss fighting game where the player needs to choose between elemental powers (fire, ice and earth). Each element has diffrent abilitys which can be used to help defeate the Boss. The aim for the player is to survive the bosses attacks and ultimately deal enough damage that the boss is killed and defeated.

Year:

2022: Developed in 12 weeks

Genre:
  • Boss Fighting Game

Software:
  • Unreal Engine 5
  • Rider IDE for C++

This video is a narrated playthrough of the game and demonstrates many of the features of the project. I give a naration of what is happening throughout the playthrough.

Mechanics and Systems

Movement System

The movement in this project I wanted to experement with as I was reseaching movement from game such as Super Smash Bros. As a result, I desinged that I wanted the movement to not have a set speed that the charcter moves at but will acctually accelrate towards a top speed over time giving snappy movment but with gradual changes in accelration towards diffrent directions. This had to be created within C++, I bugun by overriding the default character movement component and adding my own custom one. The system works by sampling a curve at a time interval to get the current speed value. The time value is gotten from how long th input key duration has been. This then sets the speed of the charcter. Therefore the charcters movement accelration and speed can be changed by ajusting the movement curve. A simplar theory was also applyed to the jump but insted of setting the speed of the character the upwards velocity was changed.

Ability System

The ability system was created to reduce dependences and allow for changes to current ability and for new ability to be created easily. Each elemental weapon has two ability slots, so that they can be use by the player within the game. Each ability has the code and logic in its own actor component. This component is added to the weapon that has that ability during initalization. Any data from a weapon is housed within an Elemental data asset. This asset has information such as primary and secondary abilitys, VFX, animations fire rates, ect. Because the data assets contain which ability is used only the correct ability components are added. This means to create a new ability you would only need to make an actor component that conatins the logic for that ability and add it to the data asset.

AI Boss

The boss as elemental abilitys just like the player weapons (Staffs) however they are diffrent so that the AI abilities can deal with the way the AI decides to use an ability. However the AI abilities and players still inherit from the same parent. The Boss as three abilities, one for each element (fire, ice, earth). Each of the bosses abilitys have been design in a way so that they have telegraphing. This means the player knows what is going to happen before it does. So each ability has a build up before using the ability. The boss AI will decide which elemental ability to use based of its health. Once in knows what ability to use it will then transition to the build up (before the attack) and then once the build up has finished, perform the attack. After the attack the boss will check to see if the player is still within view, if not it will move towards the player to get them back in view. When the player is in view the boss will wait for a random duration between 1-5 seconds and repreate ther cycle. The final boss attacks had polishing aspects added to it such as camera shake which made the boss attacks feel more powerful.