Hard Light Vector is a 1st person single play action platformer. You play as Adelaide and use your Hard Light dagger to jump, stab and vault your way through an alien planet-scape.
Goals:
Create a short highly polished experience in our two semester project.
Learn from the experience of being part of a large team.
Create an engaging single player experience using our design pillars.
Feeling Small and Clever
Fluid Movement
Create a sense of awe
Multipurpose mechanic
This has been an amazing project to work on. During the summer of 2018 we got people together and prototyped ideas. We learned what limitations we had, what software we wanted to use, the core pillars of our game (listed above), and how we would structure our development. Then in the fall we got to work, this started out with us breaking into smaller teams to prototype different aspects of the game. My team took the boss while the other worked on the player mechanics.
This involved climbing on a moving boss, it was functional but buggy. It was really cool to see that in a week and a half we had a boss you could climb and bait into hitting himself. While the player team focused on swinging and a grappling hook that could also catch enemy projectiles to throw them back. (the ability to catch/throw projectiles was the only thing we ended up keeping =P)
We then worked on another round of prototypes for a completely different game to see if there was something else we would want to be making. These were VR and co-op prototypes because VR is something that many of us hadn’t gotten to work in yet, and couch co-op is something we all want to see more of.
Ultimately we came back to the first idea, got our team of 21 people back together and got to work. We broke up into 3 different strike forces (Player, Enemy, and Environment) each strike force would have a designer/producer along with artists and engineers. Tech-artists and the audio team would have the most overlap between teams. We also had one producer above each of the strike forces to help out as needed, and help people people when they get into something deep. Teams would still work together and test, but this helped us have ownership over each part of the game. As the game developed these teams would overlap more and more, but it was important for us to use strike forces to keep things focused and move quickly.
Player design
The player was interesting to work on, we started with the idea of a grappling hook that could be used to swing or pull yourself directly to places in the world. We worked on this for a while, but ultimately decided that we wouldn’t have enough time to polish it so we decided to swap to a spear/launch mechanic called Hard Light. This behaves similar to Bash from Ori and the Blind Forest, but changes were made so that it can function in 3D. The player can link with something near them (crystals, enemies, enemy attacks) then throw themselves in any direction off of it. If the player grabs an enemy attack they can then aim that projectile and send it flying in whatever direction they want. This was designed as the primary mechanic the whole game was built around. We feel that it better lines up with our pillars than the grappling hook, is more interesting and is more achievable in our time frame.
We added in a thruster that would allow the player to slow their fall and gather themselves in mid air. The player is given one at the start of the game, and another part way through the level, with 2 more being behind optional challenges. These are the games primary upgrade, and allow you slightly more distance after a jump along with a way to take a breath mid air when you need to turn and quickly grab something.
After switching to this new spear/launch system we looked took a hard look at the game and decided that 1st person would be a better direction to go. It helped convey that senses of awe, and size we were looking for, while making the movement feel even faster.
Enemy and Boss Design
I was in charge of the enemies and boss design. This started with Colossus parts that we could mix and match together to create several different bosses from the same kit. We planned to build 15 different parts. (3 heads, 6 arms, 3 torsos, 3 leg types) These would be put together like Legos to build our bosses. We hoped to have 2-3 bosses built this way. Over the course of our alpha we cut most of the parts and decided to focus on a single boss build from the parts we liked and kept. These parts ended up being:
The Bubble Head that would blow a bubble. These would chase the down the player if the player avoided this long enough or hit it with their dagger to pop it. But if it managed to hit the player it would slow them down.
Our Jericho Missile Arm this would fire a huge amount of missiles around the players location forcing the player to move quickly. Or it would fire a single large missile directly at them. These could be caught by the player and thrown back to damage the boss.
The Wrecking Ball Arm that would crush the player, but if the player managed to avoid the attack they could ride the ball up to the colossus so that they could gain access to his higher up weak points.
The torso had two functions, the Drone Spawner and Chest Laser. These drones would fly around the boss and defend it, but if the player was skilled enough they could launch off them or their attacks to climb the boss, or even use their attacks to hit his weak points.
While the Chest Laser would charge up then fire a beam of constant damage at the player, this would follow the player but be blocked by anything standing between them.
The Spider Legs. These would crush the player if she walked to close to them and would allow the boss to jump into the air when certain health thresholds were reached.
Level Design and Alpha
Level design was a team effort, each designer would own a a section, make a molecule map then build something out. The other designers would play test and make suggestions on how to change it. We would then take it to blind playtesters and the rest of the team and watch them play. Often times we would run this like a thinkaloud or ask them to steam the game while playing. We would then iterate on the area, sometimes scrapping massive amounts of the level to help streamline it or making small tweaks to better allow for expert players to zip through the level.
Another part of this was QA, I would test the expected behavior of everything we added and check against the behavior we had in game. This meant standing under doors as they closed, seeing how the camera reacted to angled walls, and playing with every button in the level to see what all it would affect. It was kind of fun and went a long way in improving our game for it’s reveal at EAE play.
Production and thoughts from my first time on such a large team
Being on a large team has been great, there are always talented people working on the game. It means we can do cool things quickly and rapidly throw ideas together if we want to test something or make a change to the game. We knew there would be a bit of ramp up while everyone gets on the same page, and that there would be some struggle with communication. These were things that we wanted to encounter while in school before we all go off and work at different studios. One thing that we did not anticipate was that our engineers were uncomfortable that they hadn’t seen all of the code going into the game. This tapered off as the game went on and has been a great experience for them going onto bigger better things.
I’m really happy with how this has turned out, seeing the game from early concepts to it’s current place is only 6 months brings tears to my eyes. I could not be more impressed with the hard work and passion for those I worked with. We knew there would be some rough patches and planned for them, we knew team synergy and communication were important and made sure we built a foundations of trusting our team, we knew it would take hard work and late nights and made sure we did whatever it took.
We are showing our game at GDC 2019 and launching on Steam March 26th.
If you have other questions about this game's development I would love to chat more so feel free to check us out on our website.