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FELLCHASER is a PC "Roguelike" Action game developed in Unreal Engine 5 as a capstone project at UCI. Players play as a alchemist who has stolen Death’s scythe in an attempt to cheat your fate. Now they must escape Purgatory by brewing combo-building potions and reaping hordes of creatures. We recently successfully released the game on Steam, with 30,000+ copies already in user's libraries!
Summary:
Designed an in-depth potion creation system that allows for a variety of builds and countless interactions between each effect.
Developed three base enemies with different behaviors inside Unreal Blueprints, each with their own variant and elite version of the enemies.
Implemented and tuned character controller and animation state machine to deliver a responsive experience to match the fast-paced combat.
Led weekly standups on design topics to update and inform departments about decisions and potential implementation of ideas through fun slideshows.
Designing Potions
Design Goals
Allow for different player types to achieve their prefered builds.
Make potion effects naturally work together but be able to experiment with.
Get players excited to see certain items or effects.
Potion Tags
Designed 38 effects that could be assigned to different potion ingredients named "Tags".
Tags could stack together or combine with other tags to create devastating results.
The goal of each tag was that it would be designed for a specific player archetype to perform its best but a new player could still have a lot of fun by combining them at random.
Potion Ingredients
All 47 Ingredients contained 1-4 tags but were designed to be intuitive upon first glance.
Each one had a rarity attached that changed how often it would spawn but also how good the tags attached were.
Some of the ingredients could not be obtained in a normal way and must be traded with by a merchant.
Iterating
Tags and Ingredients were tweaked after every standup and playtest
Some tags didn't play well with others and tried to stand out more than I liked so they were folded into or modified to fit the archetype they were designed for
Ingredients needed to me modified so that they would be beneficial by themselves but want to combined with others
How They Turned Out
The effects come together to create some chaotic but incredibly satisfying results
Players are able to start the game just randomly throwing things together and having fun but are able to develop deliberate strategies or shift plans mid run.
The goal of creating some luck based builds like the Binding of Issac worked perfectly and the player can achieve some truly wacky results which I love.
Developing Enemies
Design Goals
Create enemies that persuade players to take certain actions and eliminate space.
Make the most out of the least amount of art.
Create enemies that would be fun for players to play around.
Artillery Enemy (Vigil)
I programmed the vigils behavior to act similar to artillery and take up space but stand close.
They are perfect targets for potions and its nice to fight ranged with ranged.
Variants are much more aggressive and attack in a triangle pattern all at once, allowing for more dangerous encounters.
Melee Enemy (Gulas)
These balls of death love to be unpredicatble and get up close to you. They were intended to force you to use your dash to get away from them.
They are stunned by melee combos so its suggested to use space to your advantage.
Variants are able to dash away from you when you combo them and have more powerful attacks.
Projectile Enemy (Saxum)
Saxums were intended to be cute but dangerous enemy. They slowly bring you down from afar.
Saxum like to sit in corners and split up, makeing them inefficent targets for potions. They were designed so players would have to decide if pursuing them was worth the risk.
Variants are much more aggressive, running straight towards you and blow up. This change of tactics is sure to surprise some players into dangerous situations.
Tuning Combat
Design Goals
Should feel good just to run around.
Players should be using melee for the purpose of using the potions.
Make it intuitive to group enemies up but allow for player expression through their build.
Combat Loop
Wanted the player to feel super agile so I gave them a quick 3 hit combo and fast dash
Melee combat is there to suppliment potion throwing. This is further pushed by having the player regain their potion charges by hitting enemies with melee.
Players are locked in place during attacks to force the player to take on more risk for longer combos. It cause the fights to be less fluid but more intentional.
A successful combat loop consists of space management and pushing enemies together to create a better target for the potions.
Weekly Standups
Design Goals
Inform team members of other departments what was new.
Give options for implementation and discuss them.
Have fun and keep everyone entertained in the project!
Presentations
I created presentations for fun to show off during our standups each week. I thought just verbally saying the updates was too boring and loved to get people involved.
Created graphics to better show off were the process was at that moment.
Being able to get everyone's feedback on a feature was really good for overall team dynamics.
Made people laugh and have fun with some of the more silly slides.
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