About

Developed as the final project (TFM) for u-tad's Game Design Master's Degree, "Naamu: The Lost Essence" is a 3rd person Hack N' Slash game made in Unreal Engine 4, where your main resource is both your health and you energy, meaning you will lose life every time you attack and will need to manage this resource very carefully in order to survive.

Born from the idea of using blood magic to convert your own blood into your weapons, during Pre-Production, the entire design time worked together to figure out how to make that into a playable game that was viable for our production time, and more importantly, fun to play.

Once we entered production, we had a strict policy of prototyping every game mechanic in Blueprints before handing it over to our Programmers for final implementation.

Contributions

While the team worked together early during preproduction and everyone was involved in every aspect, once we went into developing the first prototype, each designer joined a team of programmers and artists to develop a specific area of the game. By the end, I led or participated in the design of:

• 3Cs Design
  • Core Movement
    • All movement abilities (run, jump, dash, wall bounce, etc.) and the definition of rational design metrics to empower level designers (max jump distance, distances for levels of challenge, etc).
    • Kinetic Energy.
      • A unique mechanic that allowed the player to "build up" energy as they chained up combos without taking damage, this energy would then amplify or buff most actions.
  • Combat Rework
    • Late in the development the game reached a critical point where the combat just wasn't landing. Combining part of the combat team with my team, we made a small taskforce that had two weeks to completely revamp it without room to make any more significant changes, the result is what can be found in the game.
    • This change introduced the now core concepts of purification as a finisher based on kinetic energy and last resort mechanic to survive going beyond 0 health while attacking, while simplifying other aspects and refocusing the combat to be proactive instead of reactive.
• Level Elements & Systems
  • Environmental Hazards
    • Elements like Corrupted Rivers and Vines that limited movement and locked the player into battle arenas.
  • Puzzle System
    • A low production cost system that structures gameplay and encourages exploration while delivering environmental storytelling.
  • Enemy Wave System & Spawn
    • Tied to the puzzle system, combat zones can also close off areas, support multiple waves of enemies with flexible authoring and enemy-specific features for spawn mechanics (e.g. Wolfs jump from over the hills while snakes come out of burrows).
  • Music & Ambience System
    • Zone and gameplay context-based system that handles music and ambience as the player traverses the world, enters and exits combats, etc.
    • Developed in close collaboration with and to achieve the vision of the composer, who ended up winning the PlayStation Talents award for Best Original Soundtrack that year.
• UI
  • HUD
    • Player Health & Kinetic Energy Bar
      • As the most complex UI element in the game, the Health Bar needed to accommodate the health recovery mechanic, track kinetic energy, inform of the finisher availability and highlight last resort state while doing all of its usual jobs and allowing the player to focus on the combat.
    • Enemy Health Bar
      • Dynamically adjusts divisions to inform the player of the enemy's total health.
    • Enemy Indicator
      • To accommodate for the high-speed action of the game yet fairly close up camera that provides a more intimate connection with Naamu, animated arrows appear around the character to indicate enemy spawn and attack directions.
      • Each enemy type has a different style arrow and each attack type animates differently to reflect the type of attack (e.g. Long range attacks animate the arrow into an exaggerated thin and long stretch)
  • Post Process Effects
    • Used to reinforce when the player takes damage and/or goes into last resort state.
  • Menus
    • Implemented the Main and Pause menus, as well as loading screens, animated loaded icons, etc. including dynamic controller and mouse & keyboard support.
  • Tutorials
    • Wrote and implemented all tutorial text, UI and gameplay affordances, including animated camera transitions to highlight relevant elements, button-press prompt pop-ups, etc.
• Level Streaming
  • Worked with the programming team to define the game's level streaming workflow and handled its implementation to ensure a smooth transition through the entire game world.
• Tech Art
  • I was able to use my background in Game Art to help the art department by taking over a lot of the implementation and problem solving around some technical features of the game, while they focused on asset production. This included:
    • Purification
      • Built a custom tri-planar projection shader that allowed to purify the environment, making between material sets in a circular motion expanding from any purified Corruption Core in the world. Along this, the handler checks for any gameplay actors that could be purified and individually purifies them at the right time.
      • Every enemy and some gameplay actors in the game have a Corrupted and a Natural state, I was able to use a disintegration shader produced by one of our artists played forwards and backwards respectively to implement a transition during gameplay.
    • Animation Blueprint & Workflow
      • Was responsible for the entire animation setup for the player character, including Leg IKs, Upper/Lower Body Blending, leaning while running, etc.