Dangerous Heights
Dangerous Heights
Dangerous Heights
Anton Palmer
Aspiring Game- & UI designer
Song of the Bardbarians
This was our second game project at PlaygroundSquad. You play as a mix of a bard and a barbarians, hence the name 'bardbarian', and your mission is to rescue your band members from the evil ORChestra.
To do this, you will need to hack your way through orcs and goblins, as well as play your guitar to gain an extra power in strength.
On this project, I was responsible for the enemy behaviour, the guitar gameplay, as well as the design of all UI. The UI-design can be read about here.
Enemy Behaviour
For the enemy behaviour, I worked closely with both the programmer as well as the animators of the enemies. During our pre-production week, I created a behaviour tree of what the enemy should be able to do, which then the programmer would use to create the behaviour. To make sure the tree would work as intuitively as possible for the programmer, we had a lot of discussions about naming conventions and how the different states would be laid up.
Index:
Yellow: Different states - everything below is what the enemy can do while in that state.
Blue: Different types of checks, such as bools or timers.
Purple: Different conditions of the checks, such as true or false.
Green: Actions to take, for example switching to another state or moving towards the player.
Guitar playing
The guitar playing was a 'minigame' the player could stop mid-action and play, and depending on how well they did, they would get different amount of strength buff for a period.
When the player starts the guitar playing, Playstation- icons starts falling downwards. The player needs to press the correct button when the button is within the green area. For every correct press, the orange 'power bar' increases, and depending on how far you managed to fill it, you will gain different amount of strength buff afterwards.
For this, I prototyped a version of the guitar that we could use to test values and how we wanted it to work, so we knew what we wanted when we presented it to the programmer.
We also spent a lot of time tweaking this mechanic to make it as enjoyable, intuitive and as easily readable as possible, since the player would need to be able to do this mid- combat.
Post mortem
Looking back at this project, I realised I should have focused a lot more on prototyping - I did create a prototype for the guitar mechanic, but we didn't try out the actual combat before late into the project, which eventually made the combat turn out pretty dull. If we had done more prototyping to get an actual idea of what the combat would feel like, it might have turned out more enjoyable.
Since this project also took place during the pandemic, we did the majority of it from home, which was a very new environment to work in. A lot of communication was lost, as we were all new to working from home, but it gradually became better and better throughout the project.