Spell Maker
A downloadable game for Windows
Context
This is a student project with a team of 4 people, during 2 weeks (December 2023). The goal was to learn about types of IA in games and feedbacks to improve the user experience in Unity. The game had to be a dungeon crawler, but the game mechanics were free to design.
Gameloop
In this game, you play a sorcerer who combines an ability type to an element. There’re 4 types : single target, multiple target, crowd control and utility, to combine with 2 elements : wind or thunder. Those combinations give birth to 8 different abilities to defeat the dungeon. After using an ability, you can’t use the same type before a define cooldown.
The 8 spells don’t have specific names, and the purpose of this text isn’t to explain each one of them.
There are 4 levels in the dungeon. The 3 firsts ones are mazes with only 1 exit to find. The last one is the boss room, who is a giant sorceress.
You can find 4 different opponents in the corridors and rooms of this dungeon :
- The Golem, standing in a static position but attacking with a high speed rate when you’re in range.
- The Spiders, waiting that you walk into a cobweb to chase you in a large band.
- The Ravens, flying around you and quickly attacking.
- The Mimicks, fleeing as soon as you approach them, but they hide treasures.
There is no restriction on monster eliminations, but letting them gathering around you is quite dangerous.
Regarding the final boss, the Sorceress, she has 3 steps, each one unlocking her an ability.
The game end when she is defeated, or when she defeat you.
Technical part
The game is made to be played with a controlled. It doesn’t support mouse and keyboard. We’ll use Xbox controller inputs name.
You can move your character with the left joystick or the directional cross and the camera follow your character in a top-down view.
The ability combinaison system takes 2 inputs to trigger the right spell. Those 2 inputs are A,B,X,Y (type) + A,Y (element).
The behaviours of the common opponents you’ll meet in the maze are made with a simple custom state machine system.
The Sorceress IA is a behaviour tree and we made our own behaviour tree interface to implement it. This was also one of our goal to understand how a behaviour tree works.
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