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FutureGames (2019 - Current) Game Design Student
FutureGames (2019 - Current) Game Design Student
BOBBAN JONSSON
TECHNICAL DESIGNER
During this project, my main contributions were to design core mechanics and enemy design patterns.
A lot of these features were made using blueprint scripting.
I also managed the planning and scrum meetings throughout the project in order to help our team keep track of our
progress.
PROJECT DETAILS
Genre:
Project length:
Team size:
Game engine:
Responsibilities:
Top-down action
4 weeks
12
Unreal Engine 4.23
Gameplay Design
Visual Scripting
Enemy Design
Planning
GAME DETAILS
Kid Fury vs. The Dodgeballians is a fast-paced, single-player
action-game where the player must reflect projectiles at
robots to destroy them! Dash and dodge your way through the suburbs and save your dad from the evil robots!
Kid Fury vs. The Dodgeballians was a finalist in
The Rookies Awards 2020 competition for Console & PC
Game of the Year. You can view the entry page here!
THE REFLECT MECHANIC
Old System
Reflect towards cursor
Final System
Return-to-sender
Initially, whenever a projectile was reflected by the player, it would shoot towards the world-location of the cursor. This was to promote skill-based play; you needed to dodge and reflect projectiles, as well as aim to defeat your opponents.
But after some playtesting, we realized that players missed a lot of projectiles, which made the game quite frustrating to play.
The solution was simply to give the 'fun' directly to the player. We designed a return-to-sender trajectory, where if the cursor is close enough to an enemy, the reflected ball will travel to the enemy's exact location. Projectiles would connect a lot more predictably, and make our core feature all the more rewarding and fun to use!
AUDIO AND LIGHT TRANSITION
In this project, I helped out implementing audio that we got from our sound producer. Since we only had two states for music, I simply created events to crossfade between our music tracks.
Another tool I assisted with was an ambiance blend, where light-sources would blend into a different color and intensity as the player progressed through the level.
ENEMY VARIATION AND PROJECTILE PATTERNS
In order to vary enemy encounters, I assisted in designing and implementing some enemies with variant projectile patterns. Most of these were designed to counter some player strategies, e.g sine-wave projectiles to cover strafing. Without adding any mechanics, we introduced new challenges frequently through our level.
After the project was over, I prototyped an additional enemy variant with a connected split-projectile that would utilize the player's dash mechanic more.
I also helped to balance the enemies' individual parameters such as health and speed, as well as the enemy content of each enemy wave.
Split projectile
A prototype projectile I made after the project had wrapped up.
Sine projectile
A wave-pattern projectile designed to cover side-stepping players.
Homing projectile
The homing projectile is a late game weapon that can't be dodged; it must be batted away.
Split projectile
A prototype projectile I made after the project had wrapped up.
1/3
AGILE PLANNING AND PRESENTATIONS
Throughout the project, I helped our team manage and plan our production in weekly sprints. I also held presentations about the game for peer reviews.
Every morning we would have an agile morning standup where we would go through complete tasks, current tasks, and if we had any blockers.
We would iterate on our planning process to suit our production every week.
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