Emergence from the Grave
Designed and Led by Ani Manchella
Emerge from the grave of your death and reclaim the title of the Ira Lucis, the First Consort, Loyal Soldier to Regiroth, Goddess of Willpower. Traverse the open world, find the Lord of Wrath, Vyrian, and defeat him in combat. With parry based mechanics, punishing combat, and an unguided open world, explore how Andoras, the main character, regains their memory of what happened to them in the Wars of the Gods.
Systems Design
Health, Stagger, and XP
Health is an extremely simple mechanic, but it was expanded upon by the classic respawn system used in the Souls Games.
In this game, we have the health bar that could be replenished by the graves that the player will interact with. At this graves, the player will also get replenished health flask. These health flasks replenish the entire health bar.
This design decision was different from the classic Fromsoftware decision to replenish only a set amount. This was because of the availability of the health items and the price it takes to get that.
The XP, dubbed Reikon in the game, is gained through death. We explained this mechanic by the story of the game. The main character needed to gain their memory from the pas wars that they had fought. This was a design decsion taken to introduce the player to the world of the game as well. In addition, Reikon is gained on killing enemies and is lost upon death, but recoverable. The player will not automatically gain Reikon, but will have the collide with the ball to gain it.
The stagger meter was one of the more complex systems. As it was from Sekiro, the game, taking a hit causes the stagger meter to rise. To parry and get parried causes the stagger meter to rise. This is mainly to signify the lack of the usual stamina bar and have it replaced with a stagger meter. This was done to encourage aggression in the player’s gameplay as usually shown in Bloodborne and Sekiro, rather than the slow and methodical dodge-hit dance of Dark Souls.
Final Combat Enemy Flowchart
All of the systems here are complex, each with its own purpose. The player and the enemy are given the same stats. As the combat was inspired by Dark Souls, the player will attack, dodge, and parry if they are good enough. Parries will increase the stamina meter until full, in which the player will go into a stagger state.
The combat flow is extremely simple, as both the enemy and the player can do the exact same thing: attack and parry. This was accomplished through the use of enumerators, and and more. The combat flowchart starting with the Enemy Swings showcases the technical design of the gameplay loop with the focus of programming. Each shape was color coded to showcase a different part of the design.
For example, the rhombus indicate decisions made in the code. As visual scripting in Unreal Engine 5 has booleans color coded as red, the color was put into a slight red to make it easier.
The green and blue shapes are functions that were created to handle those specific actions and were color-coded to be actor specific. This makes finding certain actions easier for the programmers and other designers.
To showcase the design, it just talks about the ways that the stagger meter goes up and handles its consequences. If the player is not guarding and does not parry, it means the player got hit and hence needs to be handled properly. That function to use is in the green, and the extremely light red shows the variables that needs to go into that function. The values of the variables was given in a data table and that data table was implemented into the game.
Combat
First Combat Flowchart
Here is the first iteration of the actions taken during combat. This was done during pre-production to get a base understanding of all that needed to be done during the programming aspect of the game. There was much more to consider in the final pipeline, but this gave us a good bit to scope with and understand where we needed to cut back, if at all we needed to.
Grappling System
This is the blueprint for the grappling system as it was done in Sekiro. Since we used teh Game Animation Sample published by Epic Games. This is the blueprint for the Grappling Point. This is the location where the player will go to.
The following images is the input for the main character that is in a Blueprint Component. This is all of the logic made to make sure that the player can grapple from one point to another. This scripting here is to showcase the input from the actor component for the character blueprint. Here, a lot of the variables are preset to graphs and more. This is to make the actual grappling itself smoother and easier to edit using graphs instead of variables and formulas.
Knowing physics, I was able to take the displacment curves, taking the derivatives, to get the velocity curves to better accurately map out the speed and path of the player when grappling.
In addition, there is a lot of math to show the widget for the player so that they can see exactly where the grappling point is. A constant sphere trace is shown on the screen to show the widgets and that is then used to see where the player will grapple to.
Here is the main HUD. In the Main UI, there are four elements to be conveyed to the player. The health bar, the stagger bar, the item equipped, and the XP bar. For the sake of our story and lore, we renamed our XP to Reikon. The items are all on the UI, and scrolling through them just sets their visiblity to on and off. The health bar, stagger meter, and Reikon are all bound to the variables in the stats of the main character. Done through binding, it works extremely well to have the variables working with each other.
UI Design
Here is the main shop. The main shop is should portray the item, the name, and the description. The price was decided to be a variable amount and modular to be changed. This allows for level scaling in case the player decides to farm for Reikon. The item description gives a simple description of the world while also being ambiguious about its effects. As there are an infinite number of them, this allows the player to experiment with them to better see and understand its uses and more.
Here is the main tutorial UI. The tutorial UI has three elements that need to happen: The input key, the message, and the message. All three needed to appear and disappear at the same time. These were set in the level blueprint as it was much easier to work with those trigger boxes though a custom actor blueprint could have also worked just fine. However, this way it was a lot easier to see and understand everything and tweak certain aspects if needed. There are several pathways to get here, but this was the most optimal that we chose.
Map/Level Design
This was the basic landscape that was created. Instead of sculpting out the area that is explorable, we decided to sculpt inward to get the effect of water in the engine.
This was the initial draft for the map. The map was made. Each square was to represent 5000 units in Unreal Engine 5. This was the first draft as we wanted the entire game to take place a simple area that is outline in black. The player can explore every single place outlined in black and cannot traverse in the water.
Here is a simple showcase of what the main character looks like in the game at the initial stage. Here, we did not put a material for the landscape yet, and instead just had an actual landscape done. This was done to give us a feeling of scale that is more tangible.
We finally got to sculpting the outsides. Here, we had the mountains try to resemble that of a crater. This was done intentioanlly as it ws to follow the story that we were trying to say. The landscape material was a basic one that was found in the starter content.
This is the final version of the map. For the sake of pacing, it was condensed a little bit as an executive design decision. The entire world was kitbashed using an asset pack called Sicka Dynasty during the free give assets of the month on fab.com that we were lucky to get our hands on.
