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Video afspelen
Project Details
Position
Time frame
Technical Designer
UI/UX Designer
August 2018 - Present
Team size
4
Engine
Unity
Short brief
"The first half of the year I wanted to do a personal project about to increase my coding skills, and get more experience with UI/UX, which I enjoyed doing on my last project. I teamed up with 2 other designers, and a programmer, to concept and create a prototype over the summer holidays, which proved feasible. Refill Your Roguelike was born."
Software used
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Unity
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Photoshop
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Hack n Plan
Description
Refill Your Roguelike is casual run and gunner, filled with platforming challenges. The player traverses through procedural generated levels filled with creatures made by the community.
Game / Technical Design
Responsibilities
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Design & prototype core gameplay mechanics
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Design & script the procedural level generation
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Design & script the player shooting
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Design & script the weapon mod system and player upgrades
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Design enemy encounters and their behaviour
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Design & script various small game features (physics platforms, item dispensers, etc.)
Challenges
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We had limited time and resources.
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The scale of the project was quite big, there’s so much work to do in so many different areas at once. I found myself getting caught up with adding new features, while forgetting to take the time to properly iterate certain parts of the game.
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Testing levels was convoluted, since I didn't implement a level seed.
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At the time of building this project, nested prefabs was in beta, and unstable. Making random level chunks, or room layouts take lots of time and effort to build.
Procedural Level Generation
"Since were making a Rogue-like, we wanted our game to have virtually endless content.
I made a level generator that spawns a series of rooms, and randomizes its layout every time. Even rooms themselves included randomized chunks providing alternative paths, new challenges and player experience. The level generation has settings, and can change the difficulty of a level gradually."
I gave a presentation on my experience with procedural level generation, which can be downloaded here
Level Design
"Rooms are built with traditional level design principals. Designed around challenges, or giving the player memorable moments.
I designed the level generation to randomly spawn these Rooms. The entrance to a level, scale, chunks, are all quasi-random. Players will eventually learn a pattern, but with enough templates and mutations, there's still plenty variation."
Combat Design
"One of the harder challenges this project was designing fair combat scenarios. All enemies were built by players, and meant that each enemy has its own difficulty. Whether an enemy is hard to hit because it's small, or has lots of weapons on it, everything was spawned procedurally, so the difficulty curve needs to grow with it.
Due to time limitations, and combat not being our main pillar, we ended up with 3 different enemy weapons, that the player has to respond differently to."
Weapon Design & Upgrades
"We wanted the player to be able to get the same upgrades/shooting style as enemies. So I designed a generic weapon class that both the player, and enemies use. Upgrades are dropped from enemies when they die, or from loot boxes. I designed upgrades to change the player's shooting behaviour. This makes it so the player will approach enemies differently, and further increasing the variety in which the player experiences combat."
UI / UX Design
Responsibilities
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Design the enemy editor UI
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Create assets for the enemy editor, and particles
Challenges
User Interface Design
"One of the most iterated design of the game. The enemy editor was tested constantly, and I had to make sure players would be able to create enemies without any need of tutorials. Whenever the player does something, there is always feedback, or hinting further steps."
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Making a streamlined UI for the creature editor was challenging. There are so many elements that need to feel intuitive for the player, without guiding them much.
Nearly 1000 users generated creatures and shared their creations to others.
Achievements
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The procedural level generation works well. I learned a lot on how to design proceduralism, and how to design for it.
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Nearly 1000 users generated creatures and shared their creations to others. It's great to see the interface I made for the enemy editor works well on a large scale of players.
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The team is filled with hard working people. Our velocity was so high, we under estimated our weekly tasks, which never happened to me in a project before.
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