GodMarked: Curse of The Fallen
Battle fallen souls and take your revenge on the god that stole your family & your future in this Action RPG inspired by the Diablo series.
Team / Duration: 6 / 7 Weeks
Genre: 3/4 View, Action, RPG
Focus: Design and produce a vertical slice of a game
Role: Lead Game & UI Designer, Producer, Programmer
Engine: Unity
Purpose: University BSc Project (2020)
Software Used: Unity, Adobe illustrator, Github (Source Control), Microsoft Office
GodMarked: Curse of the Fallen was a 6-person team university project created in 13 weeks using the Unity Engine. I was chosen as the lead designer and this resulted in me being given the producer role, which involved keeping the team on track and aware of upcoming deadlines.
Given my background in graphic design and as we already had a level designer, I decided to make the main UI for the game aswell as design the main gameplay for the game and also took on the main programming when the main programmer was indisposed during the project.
To improve efficiency in this project, we used source control in order to constantly add to the project, however (due to unfamiliarity with the program and the programmer who was handling the source control progress becoming unable to work) nearing to the end of the development we had issues with uploading to the Sourcetree project, therefore we had to drop that method and revert to sending files over google drive.
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I may revisit this project one day and get it to a decent state to release it on Itch.io. But for now, it remains majorly unfinished with some promising ideas.
The Concept
The only task in the assignment was that the game had to fit the theme of "Lost in the Wilderness". So as the project was mostly open ended, we went straight into creating the concept for the game. As a team we decided on a direction, taking the majority of our inspiration from 3/4 top down view games like Diablo and Divinity: Original Sin.
Gameplay
The gameplay took heavy inspiration from the Diablo series and included similar mechanics when it came to how it handles basic attacks with abilities.
For the levels, I used the Divinity series as my main inspiration, I wanted to include similar puzzles and how the player can interact with the environment.
Planning
I started the project by dividing tasks and asking people what they would like to work on, when everyone was happy with their roles, I created a Trello board to track the progress of each process. I also created an overall process listing when each milestone needed to be completed and in the game in order to be on track to finish.
To help with tracking time and managing deadlines I created a Gantt chart that was put on the Trello board for each member to see an accurate representation of the time limits and the commitments to each section.
UI Design
As the lead designer, I believe the user experience throughout the whole game is paramount and I wanted to carry this philosophy into creating the UI. The logos and menus were made the priority as this would be the first thing the player sees when starting the game. After the menus, I focused on the in game icons and the health bar. I wanted the UI to be easy to use, so the UI's function was more of a concern over the actual looks of the UI. So I settled for a simple, easy to use, easily legible main screen that would act as the base for the UI.
Scripting
Nearing to submission the player controller was not in a finished state so I started by creating a shooting, targeting and player damage system for the overall gameplay.
I then moved on to more gameplay systems including puzzles to add more variety for the player and decided to add a boss at the end as a final stage before finishing.
I proposed the idea of puzzles to the team and they agreed that the game needed more gameplay to help with the enjoyment of the overall experience. The puzzle systems were designed to add more features to the level design, which is where the idea of teleporters and transparent walls came from. As the original level was small due to time constraints, I wanted the puzzles to provide the player with a bigger sense of exploration aswell as a small challenge.
All of the code I completed was coded with a modular mindset; the puzzles, characters and enemies scripts were assigned to the appopriate game objects and were all saved as prefabs within the editor so that they could be dropped in and linked up as quickly as possible, all neccessary variables were exposed within the inspector tab and were grouped using headers.
The completed systems can be seen in the devlog video at the top of this page:
