SPITE - Fractured Shards
SUMMARY
In the city of the crystal tree, a corruption has taken root. As the guardian of the crystal tree, you must travel down into the dungeons below and defeat the source of the corruption.
Spite is a diablo style 3D top-down adventure game. The player travels down through the dungeons while fighting against three different types of enemies. By defeating enemies and increasing their XP, the player is then able to use a skill tree to upgrade their magical abilities and become stronger.
SPECIFICATIONS
- Developed in 14 weeks half time
- Levels co-designed with William Fredriksson
- Software: Unity, Inhouse game engine "Eggine"
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
- Designing levels
- Balancing difficulty
- Tweaking enemy and player metrics
- Propping levels
THE PROCESS
The process started off by drawing basic level overviews and making iterations on them until we achieved a layout we were happy with. The final layouts did however end up looking very different from these initial overviews.
Since the game engine had not yet been completed, the next step in the process was to make a small prototype game in Unreal Engine. This made it possible to get a feel for the mechanics of the game even before we could do real playtesting. We also made the first rough blockouts of the levels in Unreal Engine.
Once the engine was ready to use, and we had recieved blockout mesh kits from the artists, we started building up whitebox levels in Unity. It was a fun challenge to try to build up an interesting environment from the relatively few meshes, and I feel as if I learned a lot during this process. The whitebox phase also included adding gameplay objects such as AI and pickups, and tweaking them to feel good. This included a large amount of playtesting.
The final step of the process was adding decorative props and lighting to the levels. Making the levels feel alive with only a very limited amount of props was quite a big but fun challenge in this project.
