Unnamed Project
This project is a first person dungeon crawler developed being solo developed by me. Try to cure the disease plaguing your world by exploring different dimensions that have already been corrupted. But be careful, for you yourself are not immune to this corruption.
​
Character Progression
Gather crafting material to upgrade your equipment and give you permeant buffs
Extraction Style Gameplay
Your character cannot stay in corrupted realms for long, so you have a limited time to explore a dungeon, collect material and unlock shortcuts on each run
​
Exploration
Although you will go in and out of the same dungeon many times, not every run will be the same, since you can unlock new knowledge equipment and shortcuts to get through the same areas.
Inspiration
-
Inspired by old PS1 and PS2 games from From Software, the King's Field franchise and Shadow Tower Abyss.
-
I believe they provide a unique style of play that is rarely tried nowadays.
-
​
-
A newer example of this genre is Lunacid, a game I have also studied to help the project's development.
​
-
Extraction style gameplay like Escape from Tarkov and Dark and Darker, have also heavily influenced the games development.
​
-
The combination of both of these styles seemed like an interesting concept and worth making at least a prototype to try it.
Development
-
I started this project's development in May of 2024.
​
-
As of writing this, I have been working on it for around 3 weeks.
-
Although it hasn't been long since I started it, I have already learned quite a bit while working on it.
-
I've had to learn how to do rigging and animations in Blender, as well as getting better at 3D modelling.
-
​
-
It has also improved my expertise in Unreal Engine visual scripting, becoming a lot more efficient.
​
-
This project is still in its infancy, but having already made a block-out and a round of initial tests, I've gotten some great feedback and believe it has a lot of potential moving forward.
Research and Design
-
After the initial concepts I decided to make both the Core Loop and the Gameplay Loop.
-
Got a better understanding as to how to design both the combat and the levels.
-
-
I started by researching and taking notes of the games I used as inspiration.
-
There were several points that were key that I realized with studying these games, both what should be done and what shouldn't.
-
​
-
Still on paper, I sketches out some initial designs and loops to get a better understanding on the type of game I wanted to build.
Level Design
-
Currently there is only 1 level designed which is the tutorial level.
​
-
I tried to make this level easy, since its the first, but challenging and interesting enough to be engaging.
-
Through interesting geometry, specially vertically and having to fights in different circumstances.
-
-
I also aimed to have a few hidden secret to reward player exploration, like crafting ingredients, heals or even equipment.
-
I divided the process into 3 phases:
-
Freeform brainstorming.
-
Creating a design without thinking about proportions, only about making interesting challenges.​​
-
-
Proportions.
-
Taking this map into Photoshop and using the grid view to determine the proportions of rooms and how the map will flow.
-
-
Block-out and Testing.
-
Then make the map with the set proportions in Blender and porting it over to Unreal Engine, where I started testing and iterating making changes where I felt necessary.
-
-
Enemy and Weapons
-
Both weapons and enemy design are quite bare bones only having 1 enemy and 1 weapon implemented.
​
-
Despite that I tried to create a template that would make designing these a lot easier in the future.
​
-
For the current sword, I wanted to implement something simple and easy to use so the player could get accustomed to the controls.
​
-
The same can be said about the enemy, since its the tutorial it only has 1 attack patterns and very simple AI.
