Accomplishments

• Gameplay Prototyping

• Enemy AI

• Player Feedback

• Overworld Mechanics

Gameplay Prototyping

In the beginning we figured out the tags we wanted for our game; melee, horde, magic, and fighting we got started. Early on we decided to make our project in unity as it provided more comfort for the programmers when doing their work. With the keywords we decided upon we deduced for the gameplay prototype we would need; entity movement, player movement, basic melee attack, entity health, and enemy AI. And while we knew we wanted the concept of magic in our game we did not know how we wanted to execute it and that it was auxiliary to our melee combat. We later decided on a melee empowerment, a ranged projectile, and an area of effect crowd control. We committed to the ideas we had and got to work.

Enemy AI

This was my first time creating a game with multiple enemies so I needed to figure out their framework and decision making. All Enemies use the same decision tree to decide what actions they are performing at any point in time, the actions and conditions to trigger these actions vary based on enemy type.

Overworld Mechanics

Creating the mechanics that the player would interact with in game was very satisfying, as it is the closest a programmer can get to interacting with the player. There were a couple things such as simple triggers to change the world around the player, closing off paths and opening new ones. Another being the meteors present during the final encounter to bring more threat to the players life.

Player Feedback

Player feedback is one thing, after working on Crescent Valley, that is not considered enough and have since learned is one of the most important things. This is evident through the remaining enemy indicators that appear on screen when their are a certain number of remaining enemies in a horde encounter. There was a lot of playtest involved with this system as getting its behavior right for players was important. Originally the indicators would always be on screen when the condition was met until defeated. However, it blocked the players view of the enemy a little bit when on screen and was distracting to players, it now does not appear on screen when in line of sight.