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Devil's In The Details

Devil's in the Details is a top-down rogue-like inspired by "Curse of the Dead Gods". You died fighting a high-level demon and accept an offer to take revenge in order to earn your pass to heaven as a contractor.

Platform |  PC                                     Engine | Unreal Engine 5         Duration |  Four Months                       Team Size | 5 
Playtime | 10 Minutes                         Roles | Player Character Designer, Enemy Designer, Team Lead

Responsibilities 

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  • Designed a Custom Damage System to take into account damage modifiers and effects
     

  • Implement 4-way Locomotion for the player and state machines to make the player feel fluid while moving and shooting
     

  • Designed and Implemented all Enemy AI Interactions and Attacks
     

  • Helped Implement Dodge Roll and Weapon Swapping into the Player
     

  • Manage Git Repository Management and Errors with Collaboration
     

  • Assigned Roles and Tasks to Team Members
     

  • Managed Jira/Google Drive for Documentation

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Working on the Player's Character

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With Curse of the Dead Gods as the main inspiration for the gameplay as it is also rouge-like we ran into a couple of issues when trying to figure out how to build our character. One of the design goals was to focus on ranged gameplay. Which is the main differing point of our reference game. I made the initial iteration of the player character combat system before it was passed onto another designer. However, I maintained the animations and state machines for the player.

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My Goal for the animations was to allow the player to feel as if they could travel in all directions no matter the direction they were facing as the direction the player faced was depending on the cursor location. Due to this aspect, I needed to utilize blend space animations to account for any character's sudden change in direction. As seen above.

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PlayerAnimBP_DITD.png

As for my layout and organization at this point, I didn't understand Animation Montages so I incorporated animation that wasn't used all the time like reload. However, I did experiment with multiple animations when the player is Idle to add to player feel. After a certain period, one of the two animations will play.

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Enemy AI patterns and attacks

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I worked on a majority of the AI with the goal in mind to try to make them as realistic as possible. However, due to the aspect of it being a rouge-like enemy variety matters to a certain extent to not bore the player. As this was my first time diving into AI I had to learn a lot of styles and I was interested in Goal Oriented Action Planning AI but due to limited documentation at the time I decided to use Unreal's native Behavior trees.

 

These Enemies had two iterations (I will only be focusing on 2nd Iteration):

  • 1st Iteration - Very Robotic / Limited Siteline / Lots of Bugs
     

  • 2nd Iteration - Strafing / Multiple States / Very Aggressive

Skeleton

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The Skeleton can use multiple combat types. So it has Ranged and Melee. It also comes with a patrol sequence before it finds the player and depending on its range to the player it allows for it to switch modes. This Enemy was mainly a testing type as the swapping of the weapons wasn't necessary for this game and it was slightly clunky when switching states as this AI uses multiple Behavior Trees.

  • Used as a base for all other enemies in terms of BT Layout and AI Controller Setup

  • Used later on in levels as a unique enemy to force the player to reposition constantly if they get too close to it

  • Getting close to ranged enemies gives the player a wider area to strafe to avoid bullets

Mage

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The Mage is a Ranged type enemy that once it gets a hold of the player should never lose the player. This is done via a teleport when the player is out of range for the enemy to relocate the player. It also shoots a dark fire to damage the player.

  • The first of its kind to incorporate strafing into its movement while attacking

  • In terms of placement, its overall objective is to force the player to move out of cover if they were to take cover from fire

  • Utilizes messages from BT to the actor to trigger attacks within the character. 

Bomber

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The Bomber is meant to spawn in clusters but they simply run straight towards the player and once in range they become invulnerable bombs that jump on the player within a radius.

  • Another type of enemy that is used to force the player to reposition

  • Since these types of enemies die in their attacks they spawn in clusters to force the player to kite them all

  • I used color to help provide players feedback when they are armed

Earth Walker

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The Earth Walker is a Power Enemy (Bigger, More Damage, Slower). Once they get within effective range of the player it does a grould slam which summons an AoE on the player which will stun them.

  • Another repositioning type of enemy but with a bigger hitbox and more health

  • Wanted to force the player to utilize their sprint so the AOE that the enemy throws is big enough to require the sprint to escape it

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