Nothing feels better than creating something that entertains people with friends.
Goals:
Create a game with my friends.
Better learn C# while teaching my friends how to use Unity.
Ship a fun game.
In the spring of 2017 a friend reached out to me asking if I was working on any games at the time and he would be happy to help if I was. I told him that I was just going through some tutorials but that we could get people together and make something if people were interested. We got everyone in a chat and started pitching game ideas that we felt were not too difficult, but something we could still learn from.
We ended up on the idea of a combat platformer where you play as different elements. We decided to use a counter system similar to Pokémon (Water>Fire>Earth>Air>Water) if you attacked or were attacked by an element you would deal bonus/reduced damage depending on how both elements interacted. Later we introduced the idea of Dark damage that would exist outside of the counter system.
The first thing we wanted to do was make sure the character’s movement felt good. We wanted the player to feel like they had total control of their character as this is key to not feeling cheated if your take damage. This was our first attempt at player movement and attacks, we sent out a demo and gathered feedback, that it was to floaty.
We then got to work on our core mechanic inspired by the game “Forced” by BetaDwarf. A glowing orb that every player can call to them. Some enemies become vulnerable if the orb passes through them, or hazards/puzzles can only be interacted with having the orb interact with it. We did run into some bugs where it would work just fine in the editor, but the in the build you couldn’t call this. This took far too fix for how simple it really was. In the Unity editor we would see a warning, that I thought wasn’t a big deal because it was working within the editor. I now know how important it is to address all errors.
Character design
How do we make each character different from each other with similar enough controls. We thought about these characters in a few different ways, should we focus on having 2 ranged and 2 melee, or a traditional tank, melee dps, ranged dps, support set up, how each of these elements solve puzzles (ex. Fire burns through plants to solve puzzles), or characters that with their own unique loops. We ended up borrowing elements of each of these.
Water: Short ranged attacks, with a focus on healing yourself by attacking enemies, and healing your team when you block enemy attacks.
Fire: focused on: melee attacks, quick movement, uses a combo system that enhances your special attacks. This is built up by hitting enemies with basic attacks.
Earth: Slow and tanky, who throws shards of earth at enemies for his ranged attack, or creates them when hitting enemies with melee attacks. These can be pulled back in damaging enemies along the way.
Air: Focused on ranged attacks. Throws out small tornados that return to the player after reaching their max distance they return to the player. Your special defend reflects all projectiles that would hit you.
We created several enemy types, hazards, and puzzle elements that would be tied to each element. I don’t want to go too much into these as we are still building out levels and working on bosses. Our hope is to have 5 zones (each element + Dark) each with levels that the player needs to complete. While this game still has work to be done, I am happy to see the game turn from the video above to what we have done. Feel free to download this pre-Alpha version of the game and give me feedback.