ROBOT WIPEOUT
DESCRIPTION
Robot Wipeout is a 3rd person hack and slash game where the player is attending a world-famous E-sports event. The player navigates from arena to arena evading hazards while fighting hordes of enemies through various combos. Defeat all the bosses to win the event and take home the grand prize!
ROLES
Lead Designer
System Design & Enemies
SKILLS LEARNED
- Dependencies and communication in a larger team.
- Managing these dependencies and communcations as a lead.
- Behavior Trees and EQS in Unreal Engine.
- Swarm enemy design do's and do not's.
- Setting up a proper QA pipeline.
- The importance of scheduled QA testing.
Enemy Design One Pager
Surrounding Movement
Attack Logic
Ragdoll
Large Group Avoidance
Aggresive Enemy Group
Idle Behaviour
Ranged Enemies
Complete Enemies
Surrounding Movement
SWARMER Enemy Iterations
During the 24 weeks of the project my main task was the creation of the Swarmer enemies.
The images below show the swarmer enemies being created, from first prototype to finalised version that has been balanced and QA tested. Some iterations and steps are missing due to changes being minor and showing no significat improvement (balancing changes and minor bug fixes for example).
At the start of the project I was inexperienced in creating enemy behavior in unreal engine, and as the project goes on you can see that the enemies and I improve greatly.
Before creating the swarmer enemies I had done research into competitor games to find out how swarmer enemies work in those games.
To conclude my research I created a 'One-Pager', to show the intended design of the enemies that will need to be created. (which proved very helpful during implementation).
The enemies find a point around the player and move to that point. The enemies do not possess any attacking behaviour yet.
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Attacking behaviour has now been added. Only one enemy can attack at the same time (set on a variable of how many enemies can attack at the same time). The GIF on the right showcases the EQS logic behind the movement of the enemies.
Ragdoll has been implemented on the enemies as well as knockback system with variable input. Enemies can now also attack and their attacks can get interupted.
Enemies now have the option to have a 'tell' before attacking (in this case some particles). Enemies have also been optimised for bigger groups using RVO avoidance to make sure enemies do not bump into each other constantly and keep a reasonable distance when possible.
Enemies are now split into the 'inner circle' and 'outer circle' only X enemies can be in the inner circle at the same time and only enemies in the inner circle can attack. This makes it so the player isn't overwhelmed by the amount of enemies that can attack while keeping the feeling of being surrounded by enemies. The red colours in the GIF for showcasing purpose, the red enemies are the inner circle enemies.
After receiving a lot of feedback on the chaotic nature of the enemies and how overwhelming large groups still were, I implemented a function for enemies to be able to choose to be idle. The green colour in the GIF indicates enemies that are choosing to idle for illustration purposes.
I created a variant on the melee swarmers, the ranged swarmers. This was very easy to do as I had built the enemies with a proper pipeline for iteration and deviation.
The last iterations were spent on adding the art assets into the enemies, balancing the enemies around the combat and fixing issues and bugs with the enemies. In the end a fully functional swarmer enemy with 2 types was created and through the use of the pipeline 2 larger variants were created that could resist knockback and used different animations.
Combat Prototype
The original prototype of our combat system was made by me and showcased a way to create different moves through inputs on a timing. Using 2 different inputs as can be seen in the inputs diagram. The player can choose between a Light Attack (L) or Strong attack (S).
The top GIF showcases the L-L-L-L-L line of combo's.
The bottom GIF inputs the L-L-L-S line of combo's.