"Casual RTS/puzzle game developed in four weeks"
Tech
- Unreal engine
- Unreal Blueprints
- Wwise
Roles
- Game design
- Level design
- Sound design
Co-design gameplay
At the start of development we designers sat down to discuss gameplay and mechanics with our programmers. These meetings crystallized in three major mechanics that lay the foundation of the level design.
Fire!
Orcs start burning when they come in contact with fire and can spread this to other Orcs and to anything made of wood.
Oil and explosions!
Orcs become covered in oil by walking into oil barrels, in this state they leave a flammable trail and explode when burnt.
Traps!
Each level has a number of traps created to fit thematically. Based on one component that handle death.
Level design - Village
Collaboration
I began work on this level by using a map created by our artists as a jumping of point. This helped with inspiration and sped up my workflow.
The collaboration with the artist made me look at the mechanics in a new way and inspired the levels segmented structure.
The first obstacle
The player is shown the bridge and the route forward blocked by wooden logs. This usually leads to players burning the bridge as they attempt to set the logs on fire, making the fire less accessible.
Encouraging experimentation
At the start the players actions determine the possible solutions for the next obstacle. Since the player can self-sabotage it felt crucial to have additional solutions and paths forward.
The addition of more paths also helped the level feel less rigid and encouraged experimentation. The finished gameplay feels open ended and players interact with the level in different ways.
Level design - Village to castle
Two kinds of players
During playtests two different groups of players were identified.
The methodical player who inches through the levels using one Orc at a time and the action oriented player who selects all or many and sees what happens.
This level is aimed at the action oriented player.
Chaos and control
In this level we introduce a new mechanic, the flaming arrow. The arrow spawns in two set locations but the landing is random within a set range. This gives way to chaotic, high action gameplay.
Strenght in numbers
Since this level is designed to be reactive I made the Orc pool the biggest in the game. This further allow players to experiment with our mechanics while minimizing the need to restart.
Included in this level is a “secret” alternative route not explicitly shown to the player, only found if the player explores the map. To use it the player must be able to use the oil mechanic effectively.
Sound design and implementation
Sound like a horde
Instead of going the traditional RTS route of having one sound play when marking one or many units, I made every Orc spawn a sound when marked. This set-up use lots of voices but really add to the feel of them being an unruly horde.
Orc movement
I tested and scrapped footsteps because I immediately reached voice starvation and I also felt I didn’t have time to implement switches for different terrain.
Instead I opted to have the Orcs say some gibberish when walking and to continually play these noises during movement. The blueprint is set up to stop spawning new audio when in range of the target location but allows current sounds to continue until completion.
Boulders
In this blueprint I handle SFX behaviour for the boulders. They can travel at different speeds, collide with stuff and also, in one level, bounce!
In this version I start the rolling sound when the boulder spawns then control the volume and pitch of that sound with a float I get from the boulders vector length. The impact sound is triggered by a circle collider whose radius is only a tiny bit bigger than the boulder itself.
Wwise sound design
The sounds heard are a combination of my own private recordings and royalty free audio, recorded and mixed in Logic.
I chose to use Wwise since my use of big audio pools felt easier to handle through a middleware compared to Unreals internal audio tools. I had to work with lots of different attenuation, as the camera had a zooming feature. I set up a base attenuation that worked with different zoom behaviour for groups of sounds and made use of Wwise real-time-parameters to connect audio to scripted behaviours in various blueprints.
Parameters
A good example of my work with parameters, the boulder behaviour!
I used two parameters to control the volume of the rolling sound, one that works with a bool, turning the volume up/down depending on if the boulder moves at all. The other parameters are connected to the movement speed, set by the boulders Velocity vector length. Using this i control the pitch and another volume instance!