One of the features in the game that changed in design the most over the course of development was the magic selection system.
The Original Concept
(Original concept art by Luke)
The team went through a lot of early concepts, but one that we stuck with for a while involved a ring on the back of the player's hand that would have every magic crystal the player had unlocked on it. To use a particular type of magic, the player would pick the corresponding crystal from the ring, causing a holographic projection to appear above it. By placing the crystal into a slot on the projection, the player would then be able to use magic with that hand for a time.
Most of the feedback and concerns about this concept revolved around how slow the process would be during battle, and the precision required to select the correct crystal. It would also have been confusing and frustrating for the player to have to drop whatever was held in their right hand to pick a crystal to be used in their left hand.
For all these reasons we decided to do a large redesign of the system.
The Redesign
(Redesign concept art by Luke)
Luke took on most of the work of designing the new magic menu system. Just like for the first, he drew up a set of concept images to convey to the rest of the team how the new system would work. Now instead of selecting from the ring on their hand, the player would open a larger glyph-like menu in front of them, grab a crystal and crush it to activate its associated magic.
Having the concept's illustrated this way made it a lot easier to properly understand how the finished mechanic should work, and helped make sure everyone on the team was on the same page. There was far less ambiguity when approaching the task of actually implementing the feature as a result.
Implementing The New Menu
For scripting the new design, me and Josh worked together on different parts of the blueprint. I worked on the opening and closing functionality for the menu itself, and since he was responsible for the magic system, he oversaw the menu's integration with the crystals.
I ended up making a few changes, like having the menu spawn at the hand rather than in front of the player camera. I felt the movement required to grab the crystals was easier and more intuitive this way, and could be more easily memorised (move hand up for fire, to the right for ice etc.)
The new menu was seen as generally as a large improvement by our playtesters and tutors, with the only significant feedback being to allow the menu to be opened by both hands, as opposed to only the left. The whole team agreed with this suggestion, since the menu being limited to the left hand was really just a holdover from the original concept.
Making this change did however mean having to decide on how we would handle opening the menu while magic is already active. We were generally against the idea of letting the player use magic on both hands simultaneously, as it would most likely be overpowered and we wanted to encourage the player to use a variety of combat options.
We settled on interrupting whatever magic was currently active upon opening the menu. Similarly, opening the menu on another hand while it was already open would cause it to close and immediately re-open at the other hand.
The Shield Mechanic
Around the time of development that we were designing enemy attacks, we felt that the player lacked an option to better manage incoming ranged projectiles. We had planned to develop a shield the player could equip at some point to address this, but hadn't settled on whether it would be a physical item found in each level, or a form of magic.
Specifically, a few of the team members had mentioned the magic glyph effects in the film Doctor Strange as an inspiration. While we left this idea behind at the time, it still ended up inspiring the look of the magic menu. So when we came back to the shield mechanic, we had the idea of merging the two concepts.
Similar to with the magic menu, I worked alongside Luke and Josh for designing and implementing the shield. Luke drew up the concept art to properly convey how the mechanic should function, while myself and Josh implemented it into the game itself.
As shown in the images above, the shield would be activated by grabbing a handle in the centre of the magic menu, turning it, and pulling it towards you. This would transform the menu into a functional shield, until disappearing upon release.
The shield would also have a limited durability, beginning to visibly break as it took more and more hits, until finally breaking and dissipating. We had planned for there to be a cooldown period before the shield could be activated again after this, although this didn't end up in the submitted version of the game due to a lack of time.
Implementing The Shield
Between me and Josh, we split the work of making the shield mechanic into two parts. Firstly, I worked on the activation of the shield, and properly equipping it to the player's hand. To do this, I had to rewrite some of the code for equipping objects in general, so I could allow the player to grab and turn the handle in the centre of the magic menu without moving it away from the menu itself.
While grabbed, the handle is constantly checked to see if its current angle is larger than 89 degrees. Once it meets this requirement, a boolean is set to true and the handle is considered 'locked'. The boolean remains set to true until the handle reaches an angle under 70 degrees, to give some room for movement when the player attempts to pull the handle and activate the shield. For detecting the pulling motion itself, I just had the menu check if the velocity of the player's hand was above a certain threshold.
After the shield activation was working, Josh then took over to do the scripting for blocking projectiles, and making the shield take damage over time. Luke also helped at this stage by creating new glyph textures to represent the shield's progressing damage, becoming more cracked and broken with each hit.
Working together on both the shield and magic menu was a pretty positive experience. We were able to get the features developed a lot quicker than we even expected, and it really helped that we were all on the same page for what the finished concept should look like.
Comentarios