Game- System Designer
Brief: First person online multiplayer sneak action game.
Role: Game Design, Programming, FX
Team Size: 5
Date: 2018-10
Period: 5,4 weeks
The Project
Idea
A first person online multiplayer sneak action game, with up to four players. Using gadgets and invisibility with a quick respawn the game becomes almost a party game about killing and outplaying your opponents. The visuals were imagined a combo of cartoonish graphics and gory blood, with emphasis on sounds and light play.
The game is an online game using Unity's own network system of RPCs, Commands and ClientRpcs.
I have worked with the game design, programming and FX.
Game Design: Rebalancing the invisibility, coming up with items and their functionality and working on the pace of the game. Me and another member took charge of the game design and bounced ideas of eachother.
Programming: I did all of the networking, player controller which was reused and repurposed from an older project, and item functionality.
FX: Particles for items and feedback.
Initial Idea
Should be easily pickuable, the players testing the game will only be playing 5-10 min during exhibition, limited duration on the length is also preferable.
Standing still makes you fade out and become invisible.
Only deal damage through backstabs - the angle is about 45°.
The player had 3 health and each backstab did 1 damage.
This was not good. The combat was frustrating:
Hard to hit enemy and you need to do it 3 times.
There was also no reason to move so camping became the bestway to play the game and that is not fun.
The course had the project planned into 4 segments: MVP, alpha, beta and final with playtesting days scheduled in, a lot of feedback was collected during these testing days and came to transform the whole game idea.
Changes based on feedback:
We made the invisibility toggleable with a resource limiting the duration and reactivation, with a flat cost on activation and draining overtime. Regenerating when not being used. You still could not sprint during invisibility so atleast partly mobility limited.
The hit angle increased to 180° also makeing the enemies 1 shottable and using a low downtime respawn thhhe player into a random position on the map. Using rounds instead to see who manages to get most kill per round and then the player that wins most rounds is the final winner.
We also added pickups proximity mines and bear traps also nightvision googles to aid play in darker areas. The mines and traps can be placed where you want.
All of these changes added up to shift the whole game, this was playing into what most testers were doing, more run around and kill eachother instead of slowly sneak around. The result was more of a party game. With the addition of killscore the game also got a bit more competitive.
Design Evolution
