FutureGames (2019 - Current) Game Design Student
FutureGames (2019 - Current) Game Design Student
BOBBAN JONSSON
TECHNICAL DESIGNER
I joined Fall Damage as a Technical Designer at a point where they were still prototyping and building the core pillars of Alara Prime.
From that point on I got to help build the game and its gameplay features from the ground up into the polished features that are tested by our community to this day.
GAME DETAILS
Alara Prime is a competetive 4v4v4 tactical first-person shooter where one team is tasked with defending the Uplink against two attacking teams.
Fortify the Uplink site as defenders using versatile gadgets, or push into the fray using firearms with weapon tech such as explosive breaching utility or firewalls!
PROJECT DETAILS
Genre:
Team size:
Game engine:
Responsibilities:
First Person Shooter
50-60
Unreal Engine 5
Gameplay Design
Rapid Prototyping
Player Onboarding
GADGETS
POLLUTION GRENADE
When I joined Fall Damage and started working on Alara Prime, we had a gadget called the Pollution Grenade. It was a thrown gadget that enveloped an area in gas that dealt damage over time.
It was a staple choice in player loadouts to deny area access, but it had a grieveuous issue where its damage area could overlap solid walls, letting it hurt players in completely separate rooms.
This was the start of my design process of creating a replacement that could envelop a large surface area, but at the same time respect the geometry of the map.
A show case of the Pollution Grenade and its unique interactions with other utility.
The result is the current iteration of the Pollution Grenade, which spreads a large number of nodes that over an area. These nodes spawn recursively and follow a strict set of rules that determines whether they're allowed to spawn, where they should spawn, and in which directions that are suitable for further propogation.
POOLING & OPTIMIZATION
Large efforts were made to optimize this gadget, since it deals with a large amount of additional actors. To prevent giving the server tachycardia the Pollution Grenade utilized a pooling system to avoid spawning multiple actors on the fly. I also built the individual puddles to not be replicated, and rather utilize separate actors that were spawned on server and for clients individually, and left the thrown projectile itself to delegate replicated events to reduce server calls.
Early work in progress footage of prototyping the spreading behavior of the Pollution Grenade.
HEALING GRENADE
The Healing Grenade was an effort to add more support utility to our game at a lower cost than our current loadout options.
Before the Healing Grenade our only healing gadgets was the Healing Station, a stationary device that your team could use to restore health.
My goal when prototyping the Healing Grenade was to create a supportive gadget that required a more active participation from the user than the aforementioned Healing Station.
The benefit of having an on demand healing utility have been iterated on many times to make sense within the competitive space of our game, but has finally settled with the Healing Grenade leaving behind an area that restores health, offsetting its benefit by requiring the player to stay put while being healed.
The Healing Grenade in action, as well as how it interacts if you are taking damage. Taking damage will always take priority over you receiving healing.
GAMEPLAY ABILITY SYSTEM
The healing itself was achieved by utilizing the gameplay ability system in Unreal Engine. This allowed me to apply replicated visuals effects and audio when the healing was applied, adjust the heal amount per tick, and add restrictions for whether healing should apply or not.
THE HEAL CAP
An issue that appeared as we added more healing utility to Alara Prime was how prevelant it became to escape duels, completely restore yourself to full health, and swing back to win the duel. This was not satisfying in a competetive setting and had to be mitigated in some way.
The solution I came up with was the heal cap, where any health you'd restore would be capped to 80 health out of a 100.
At this specific value you'd be at risk of getting one-shotted by most headshots in the game. This introduced a lasting consequence by taking damage while still giving players to freedom to restore health and support their teammates.
The remaining 80 health of the healthbar can be restored by healing,
but will leave you within one-shot kills from headshots by the majority
of weapons in Alara Prime.
The top 20 health of your maximum health, which cannot be restored by healing.
DRILL CAMERA
At one point during gadget development in Alara Prime, the team delved into developing camera gadgets. These were gadgets that players could take control over and use to spy on enemies from tactical vantage point, as well as highlight them to reveal their location to teammates.
The Drill Camera was a part of the process of experimenting with different camera type gadgets.
There was a lot of exploration in developing this gadget. The final product only allowed the gadget to be placed on specific surfaces, but efforts were made to prototype having it placeable on any surface that was thin enough.
This was dropped however, due to the excuberant amount of effort it would take to test and maintain this.
Using the Drill Camera to highlight enemy bots
CONTEXTUAL HUD POP-UPS
An issue that arose when players used the Drill Camera in invalid locations were that they had a hard time understanding why they aren't allowed to place it. This led to me prototyping a HUD element that contextualizes erroneus gadget placement with a reason for why it couldn't be placed.
This helped us both help inform the player that an attempt to place a gadget failed, but also to give them some more context as to why it couldn't be placed. This feature was used in other gadgets as well that had conditions for valid placement.
SINGLE-PLAYER ONBOARDING
THE TRAINING RANGE
The Training Range is a single-player offline onboarding experience where you have access to several different areas where you can safely learn how to use every gadget and weapon in the game.
GADGET COURSE
The gadget course consists rooms with a thematic selection of objectives designed to help introduce the vast array of gadgets in Alara Prime.
I was the primary owner of maintaining the gadget onboarding. Each gadget objective was designed to help players understand the primary purpose of each individual gadget, without delving too much into advanced techniques.
The foremost goal was to make players comfortable with gadgets and not to be overwhelming.
An area where the player is tasked with using various grenades to defeat bots.
An open space filled with various items to use in conjunction with defensive utility.
An area where the player is tasked with using various grenades to defeat bots.
While working on the gadget onboarding I developed several unique features for the training range to enable our objective setups.
In some cases I would also repurpose existing features to fit within the onboarding playspace, so that they could be hooked up to the objective system and be altered on the fly for players to experiment with.
Initially our teams Level Designers handled the level design while I was responsible for designing the objectives.
Gradually the task of designing the layout of the gadget course transferred to me, as it became clear that it was easier to design both the layout and the objectives tangentially, rather than one after the other.
SANDBOX AREA
The sandbox area is simply enough an open space where the player has access to every weapon, gadget, and level object available in the game.
Although it is a very straight forward area, it has yielded great results for players; it is usually one of the areas where players spend most of their time thanks to the accessibility and tools for experimentation.
The sandbox area, an open space with access to all weapons and gadgets, plus bots and objects
to try them out on.
OBJECTIVE SYSTEM
In almost every area of the Training Range we present an objective to complete that is tied to how each gadget or weapon is used. To facilitate these objectives I built the objective system, which is takes in parameters from various sources around the onboarding, such as when a bot dies or a level object is interacted with.
The system was designed to easily allow us to change which parameters determine whether an objective has been completed or not.
To accomplish this I used datatables in Unreal Engine to collect all objectives in one easy to edit space, and where I could easly change what parameters the data tables contain in case I had to expand on the objective system.
AI
This led to me creating a template base AI character that could enact the same basic actions as the player; i.e. move about, change equipment, and use various types of gadgets and weapons.
I did not set out to create a fully fleshed out AI with behavior patterns, since the onboarding only demanded rudimentary actions by the AI. But what I and my colleageus manaaged to build the core toolset the AI could use to then be developed into a more dynamic actor.
Bots moving to preset waypoints
Bots firing at the player using a parameterized aim pattern
A bot reacting to the player firing their gun, jumping, and approaching too closely
Bots moving to preset waypoints
After we had built this baseline AI toolkit, we derived more specialised AI's that could be used in more unique instances; such as the Training Range and the tutorial. In these cases we could override functionality and mold it to better fit their specialized use cases, such as more delicate movement patterns for the tutorial or to integrate certain actions to the objective system in the Training Range.
MENUS & HUD
As I developed the onboarding, it became clear that we would need some more UI to help guide the player through the first and subsequent entries to the game mode. This led to me prototyping and developing a couple of menus and HUD elements that were unique to the single-player onboarding experience.
SPAWN LOCATION MENU
This is the first menu the player sees when they boot up the Training Range. I wanted give the player some condensed information on what each area contains.
This menu is interfaced with both the game mode itself as it decides where the player will spawn, as well as the objective system so that I can display the total amount and completed objectives within each area.
ONBOARDING SETTINGS MENU
Within the onboarding area there are some unique settings that only apply there; such as different settings for infinite ammunition, the option to reset your objective progress, and quick travel actions.
This menu was hooked up to the player controller in order to dictate their currently applied infinite ammo setting, as well as tied to functions for quickly teleporting to other areas.
DYNAMIC IN-WORLD HUD
Scattered around the Training Range are interactable pick up points where players can add gadgets and weapons to their inventory.
An issue that appeared as we observed playtests we're that they were easily missable, since they're just static meshes scattered around the level with little indication that they can be interacted with.
The solution was a prototype I created where a dynamic HUD element appears when players approach the pickups, and when they're within interaction range the HUD reveals a card with more details about the equipment.
This helped tremendously in letting players know that there is something to investigate, and subsequently providing more information and context to the object in question!
