SLIMES:
Cannon Combat
MY ROLES
Design & Scripting
(and a little tech art)
PROJECT TYPE
Self funded indie game
MY RESPONSIBILITIES
As we are only 2 people working on the project, I do all the things not art related. This include among other things: gameplay design, level design, network setup for online play, blueprint scripting, implementation of models, vfx, UI, controls, camera and more.
PROJECT SUMMARY
The project goal is to create a completely new version of a one of our school projects, and to have the final version of the game developed in the latest release of Unreal Engine 5(UE5) and be released on Steam later this year.
The big technical updates of the game is a new Online Multiplayer mode to play against others over Steam and a revamped destruction simulation using the new Chaos Physics in UE5.
For the redesign we are updating the knockback and power-ups systems and adding additional power-ups, basic character customization (hats/cannon), a new sudden death system to limit round time, a completely new UI, new battle maps and reworked and updated models and animations for all assets for a consistent art style.
GENRE
Online Multiplayer Party Game
YEAR
2023
DEVELOPMENT TEAM
1 Designer (me), 1 Artist
GAME ENGINE
Unreal Engine 5
DEVELOPMENT
Our Process
As a two person team there are many unique and challenging scenarios that come into play during development. That both of us have a wide interest on how games are developed and our consistent communication surrounding task we are less familiar with has been our biggest strength when we have to step out of our comfort zone to learn and adapt new skills.
Most of our ideas goes through the process of finding similar references in other games to deconstruct so we can get a better understanding how they would work in our game.
We explore these ideas through discussion and prototyping to see how we would go about to implement them and how far we can push them while staying inside our technical capabilities and target performance.
Below are some of our progress through different stages of the development (click on the video to start playing)
My Personal Experience
As I worked on all design and scripting there where a lot of new learning experiences from the first day to the last.
Networking and physics have definitely been the two biggest technical challenges combined with their impact on performance. Reading up on the never-ending rabbit holes of network prediction & rollbacks, together with non-/deterministic physics and it's behaviour during online play goes beyond what we have the capability of implementing but learning them on a more surface level still lead to our own solutions for making it work in the end.
UI and menus has been another challenge as my previous experience is limited to mostly gameplay related elements. We've gone through multiple iterations of our menus while learning something new each time, from underestimating the space needed for clear and readable information to the added complexity of designing and implementing UI with both mouse and gamepad support.
Level Design of our stages went trough multiple iterations early on to find the right size, destructible density, object scale and more to make them chaotic but readable. To speed up the process of iterating on the base layout I made a simple grid tool that I've gradually updated and still use when prototyping new levels.
Grid tool used to make a quick prototype layout during early development.
General gameplay & match rules went through some iteration but at large remained as originally designed. This design and implementation is what is closest to what I've spent my time on before this project so it's where I feel most at home working. The controls, camera, movement, cannon charge and player knockback has had improvements through polish and added effects for better readability but no larger change otherwise.
Power-up system became one place we had to make a larger change to. We originally had more of a Super Smash Bros approach with many powers spawning sporadically to create variety and chaos in matches. The problem with this approach was that our original amount of powers was not enough to keep things interesting and to get enough we would needed a lot of art assets created for the different powers, and with just the two of us that would mean a big time investment.
We needed something to give a bit more bang for our buck in terms of unique art assets needed so I came up with a combination system where we split powers in categories: Cannon powers, Projectile powers, Ground Effects. Any powers from these groups can be combined for more interesting results.
Example: A Gatling Cannon, Bouncy Projectile and Ice Effect can all be picked up and used individually one at a time, or combined for a rapid fire of a large amount of bouncy balls that drop ice patches all over the map. This systems gives every new power a large variety with a lower time investment in art at the cost of some extra complexity in script and design.
As of writing a new projectile would combine with four different cannons to be fired from: normal, large, spread and gatling cannons, while also having three different ground effect that could be dropped on impact. All while just one art asset for the projectile and potentially a new particle effect would be needed.
Bouncy Projectile fired from a Normal Cannon
Bouncy Projectile fired from a Gatling Cannon with Ice Effect