Team Doomsday - Dev Diary

Feb 25
3 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

This is a compilation of my weekly design journal entries for a combat design project I worked on.

Week 1

The team met on the 8th to brainstorm a direction for our game. We decided to model our game off of Hades and the Batman Arkham games. From Hades, we would take the top-down perspective, quick movement options, and upgrade system. From the Arkham series we’d take the close-up combat and counters. We also decided to set our game in a mall, with the avatar being a mannequin.

I met with Ethan on the 9th to set up version control through Diversion. I made a little document to help people get set up with Diversion. We get our personal computers set up, we plan to get everyone else set up on Week 2 when we have our computers in the office.

On the 10th and 12th I set up the Gameplay Ability System (GAS). This was a challenge for me, as it involved a lot of technical problems. This was my first time using C++ inside of Unreal, so I had to troubleshoot Unreal, Visual Studio, and Rider. I got the framework implemented and applied to the player character and a base enemy character. Going forward, this will allow us to more easily change what each character can do and will decouple all the abilities (and alleviate some bottlenecking).

Week 2

The team had a meeting on the 16th to get the direction of our game down. We decided to use the gauntlet weapon from Hades as a starting point, basically recreating that basic system. From there, we would iterate on it with our own mechanics. We outlined all the moves in our characters toolkits, and considered the button mapping.

I spent some time refining the movement, taking into consideration the ADSR envelope. I made the character faster, with less time to accelerate and decelerate. I was trying to make the game feel more fast paced, and slightly rigid to convey the feeling of a static mannequin. Decreasing the time the character takes to turn around really helps this feeling, and it will pop into different directions very quickly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJbE0WENhxY

Week 3

I worked on the charge attack for the player. The longer you charge the attack, the larger the hit box and power becomes. Currently this is in the player blueprint, but I plan to move it over to a gameplay ability so enemies can use it also.

Week 4

We had already hit this week's requirements of two distinct attacks, so this week was focused on polish and technical issues. I moved the light attack and heavy attack into their own gameplay abilities. Next I want to get gameplay effects working, so we can add things like status effects and cooldown.

I also did work to differentiate the two attacks. I cut down the animation of the light attack, and made the heavy attack slow down the player’s movement speed.

Week 5

This week I focused on adding polish effects to the attacks. I got my friend to make some VFX for the game, and I implemented them for the heavy attack, light attack and dash. I delved into Gameplay Cues, so that VFX, SFX, and screenshake can be added to individual moves.

I also implemented the gameplay effects system. This will allow the different moves to interact with eachother more. Currently, certain moves will block eachother out so some moves cannot cancel eachother.

Week 6

This week I ran the playtests with 4 people. The main feedback we got was that the quick attack felt unresponsive, it was unclear when you were hitting enemies, and enemies could attack the player too often.

In response to the feedback, I made it more clear when enemies were hit by adding a red flash effect to any enemy that takes damage.

I also edited the animation of the fast attack to make it more responsive. The animation now starts at the apex of the punch, with a trail to give the illusion of the full motion. I also made it so you can cancel out of the animation before it ends.

Week 7

This week I focused on fixing a glitch with knockback and changing the animation of the heavy attack. I reworked how knockback is done. Enemies now turn off collision with other enemies, so they pass through each other when hit. Each attack has its own knockback variable, and each enemy has a knockback resistance variable.