Your party just got to the end of the dungeon and is reaping the rewards! Only, you and your party took too long talking about what you would do with your share of the loot and... the dungeon just reset. Now you must combat your way through the dungeon all. Over. Again. You've had a long rest already, so grab a weapon and take initative. It's time to fight your way out!
There are 2 different teams with their own goals:The creation of this game was intended to teach members of my team, the Game Analysis and Design Interest Group (GADIG), about how to work in Core and programming in Lua. Thus, my goal with this game was not to reach a minimum vialble product, but rather to further both my own understanding of Core as well as GADIG's. The game GADIG worked on, Collateral Damage, can be found here.
While I did finish a beta version of the game, I do not have any plans to continue developing Bleak as this was meant to be an educational experience.
I ended up designing several of my own unique weapons for Bleak. My intention was to design a game where each team would be comprised of players with their own simple, unique, and distinct roles depending on their choice of weapons.
I wanted players to have an easy transition between each role. I designed each weapon to have three different abilities: at least one attack ability and a dash or speed boost. The third ability would be unique to each weapon.
Like any other pvp game, difficulties arose in designing each weapon when I had to balance their power and abilities. For example, I made sure to reward players who use close range abilities by allowing them to deal more damage than ranged weapons. I also allowed some ranged weapons to deal less damage, but be more spammable.
One appeal of Core is implementing assets from other games into yours. I was able to do just that with Bleak. After acquiring assets from some of Core's other games, I dove into the weapons code to modify and balance them for my game.
The most unique weapon I designed would have to be the Focus of Air as shown below. This focus would throw out bursts of air that could ricochet off the walls. Thus, using multiple bursts of air could result in haivng control over an area for a certain period of time. I balanced this out by limiting the amount of damage they dealt.
I had a specific idea in mind for when I designed Bleak's map: a labyrinth-like dungeon that's difficult to navigate. I wanted to convey the idea that this map is a place to be explored, from the various enemy AI's and small traps all the to the underwater pond.
As Bleak is heavily inspired by MOBAs and is centered around a labrynth like map, I wanted to implement a fog of war effect into the game. This added a sense of realism to Bleak's setting of a labrinth-like dungeon and make the game more interesting from a gameplay perspective.
There were a few complications to this while working in Core. One is that there's no inherent way to hinder the player's vision without affecting the PC's performance. Another is that I only wanted to apply this effect to the team that is stuck tyring to escape the map. This would them to use light-based weapons in order to figure out how to escape.
I figured out a way workaround this. First, I chose to create several heavy fog effects that would persist throughout the entire map. Second, I dimmed the lighting of the entire map so it would be difficult to navigate. Lastly, I chose to give light-emmitting weapons to only the party trying to escape the dungeon. That way, the monster team could hunt down the team trying to escape without getting caught themselves.
My inspirations for making Bleak were MOBAs and MMORPGs. However, Bleak was intentionally designed to be simple. So I chose to UI components loosely based off of MOBAs with a focus on how the UI functions with a camera using 3rd person perspectives.
With that in mind, I chose to have as little on screen as possible, showing only the player's health and ammo and their abilities. However, one of Core's core issues is creating and altering in-game UI elements. Luckily for me, because of my prior design decisions, I was able to work around Core's difficulty with UI.
I learned a lot about having to work around various in-engine issues and putting together a hodge podge of ideas and systems to create the game I intended to make.
I learned how to implement UI in an unfamiliar engine from scratch as well as how different systems interact with each other (i.e. how weapons, abilities, and UI interact and synergize in game).
As a designer, I learned a lot about how the themes of a game can help influence design decisions and how they impact gameplay. In a broader sense, I achieved a better understanding of how thematic ideas affect the funciton, design, and the aesthetics of its software.
I was able to use the development of this game as a sort of tutorial for my team so that they could better contribute to developing our game: Collateral Damage.
I feel a lot more comfortable in tackling new systems and software development engines and definitely look forward to doing so in the future! Despite my gripes with Core, learning an entirely new and foreign engine was a lot more fun than I anticipated.