Alien: 1916
Alien: 1916 is a vertical slice produced for the Journeyman module in my second year of university. It was made with a team of 16 people, including designers and environment artists, over 3 months. Character art and animations were outsourced. Our brief was to create a vertical slice for a game based on modernising an arcade classic, of which one of the options was the Alien arcade game.
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My role in the group was Junior Design Lead, and my responsibilities consisted primarily of:
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Creating and maintaining project design documentation.
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Communication with the art team on behalf of the design team.
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Heading the design and implementation of the core player mechanics.
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Running the project's source control.
I ended up spending most of my time in a very technical role, managing the project build and GitHub, and scripting the player's mechanics. This project allowed me to develop and demonstrate my technical and leadership abilities, and proved to be an invaluable learning experience.
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Below you can see a summary of some of our design work, and at the bottom of the page is a sample of some of the scripting I created for the player character.
Design Report
We settled upon designing a 2D stealth game in which the player controlled a Xenomorph, inspired by titles such as Mark of the Ninja and Deadbolt. Designing for the player to control the Xenomorph offered many interesting challenges and opportunities, particularly with regards to traversal.
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Principles
Pillars:
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"Hunting, not fighting"
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Find and create opportunities
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"Plan, prepare, pick them off"
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Player Motivations:
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Primarily targeting the Mastery-Achievement cluster.
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Encouraging strategic, deliberate play. Allowing the player to control the pace to observe, plan and prepare before acting. Achieving quicker, smoother runs through optimisation of your strategy.
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The 3 C's:
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Camera: Camera control should allow for a broad view of the player's surroundings, with freedom to move the camera further in a chosen direction. The Xenomorph's enhanced hunter senses leave little hidden, and the player should never or very rarely be surprised: they are the hunter, this is their hunting ground.
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Character: The player character should be fast, agile and responsive. They should be able to traverse walls and ceilings with ease to navigate and find new angles of attack. They should, however, be fragile: the punishment for losing the element of surprise should be harsh, and the Xenomorph should never have good odds when confronting any more than 1 opponent head on.
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Control: Controls should be simple and intuitive on both keyboard + mouse and controller. You MUST be able to control precise facing angle (right stick) while jumping, so jump should not be bound to a face button. Complex input combinations should never be necessary: controlling the xenomorph should be simple and quick.
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Core Gameplay Loop:
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Hour-to-hour: Retrying levels to optimise strategy, achieving better scores and times.
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Minute-to-minute: Setting up and executing plans to take out enemies, advancing between areas to progress.
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Second-to-second: Traversing the environment to find new approaches, observing enemies and coming up with plans of attack.
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Technical Challenges
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The most intensive aspect of this project by far was the technical design and scripting for the player character.
Our design was based around the Xenomorph's ability to climb walls and ceilings, but the premade Unreal 4 character templates are not capable of altering their gravity direction on an individual basis without plugins, which the university computers couldn't install. Thus, I had to build my character from the ground up using the physics system, even needing to manually script gravity instead of using Unreal's existing system. I also had to oversee full animation implementation and create a light-sensitive stealth system (Unreal is also, by default, incapable of reading light levels).
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A sample of the player character blueprint can be found below. It's a bit messy on account of the fact that it was made only for me, and also because time for organisation became quite tight when a pandemic forced us to convert to fully remote development half way through the project. I hope it can demonstrate some of my technical abilities nonetheless.