Team Size:
5
Role:
CSM
Creative Lead
Team lead
Systems Designer
Level Designer
Mithril Keeper
Mithril Keeper was my capstone project when I graduated. It is an action RPG that takes the player on a journey with a cast of four playable characters to secure the mithril treasure from an ancient ruin at the end of the game. I was the team lead and creative lead for this project in a group of five designers. During the project, I held many hats. I worked on some of the systems in the game including MVP and general combat mechanics. In addition to this, I maintained the role of scrum master and assisted in whatever areas needed help by providing guidance on an effective approach for general gameplay and player engagement.
Mithril Keeper: Damage Typing
Mithril Keeper is a action RPG game that introduced 4 characters the player could play. Each avatar has a basic attack that is unique to them. The fighter used swords, the dancer used fans, the mage used magic and the ranger used a bow.
Intent
When I created this system, I intended to shine a spotlight on each class type and provide targets for the player to learn where each avatar is most effective. To this end, I also wanted to make it as modular as possible by basing the damage effectiveness around the parent class and exposing each variable so that if we decided to add any further playable characters it would be as simple as changing the value in the BP. Also with this, I decided to make sure the enemies were color-coded to match the avatars. By doing this, I provided a way for the player to go through the IPM process throughout the game to learn how to utilize the full roster of characters at their disposal.
Mithril Keeper: Hit Trace System
In Mithril Keeper, we needed a hit trace system for the melee characters to make the hit confirmation for damage much more consistent and predictable. So given the game included combat with multiple targets on screen, I decided to do a multi-trace sphere hit check and attached the hit system to specific bones on the skeleton so that the only things tracking hit collisions were the swings of the weapon. Doing this on the parent allowed this system to be transferred to any child character and applied to any weapon. From there it was a matter of just applying the system to the anim. montages to activate on the attack animation.
Mithril Keeper: Dancer Design
Dancer specializes in support with minor crowd control. Through her melee attacks, Dancer builds resources known as flourish points to fill her flourish gauge. Each one of the dancer's dance abilities requires a certain amount of flourish gauge to perform. These dances provide effects ranging from restoring the health of the party to increasing the damage output of the party. The flourish points also augment her strong attack to include a cyclone cleave if enough flourish points are available.
Intent
The Dancer in Mithril Keeper is one of the two possible melee characters. We needed a way for the player to sustain health throughout the game aside from doing basic health pick ups. So we decided to make Dancer the source of recovery. As a big fan of games that introduce dancer type characters, typically dancers are versatile in the bonuses they provide and are melee focused characters so I decided to double down on this concept and provide her a means to utilize multiple abilities if she had fought enough to be able to use them. Unfortunately, at the end of the project, we decided to do away with meters and just give access to the skills to simplify player-to-skill interactions, but above is the flourish meter concept I was going to use.
Dancer Mechanics
Dancer: Drain Samba
Concept
The concept of drain samba came from one of my favorite MMOs "Final Fantasy XI". In that game, the skill restored the health of any player that hit the same target the dancer was attacking. I decided to use that concept and bring it into this game as a means of helping the party recover health. This skill ended up being a bit overpowered because the basic attacks in this game had a cleaving effect allowing the dancer to hit multiple enemies in front of her causing her to generate flourish points much faster and allow her to steal health from any target she hit. We found in our playtest that without another limiting factor, the player was never in danger of dying so we decided to use a cooldown system for our skills. In the final build of this project the CD (cooldown) of drain samba was 15 secs which happened to be the duration of the skill, but my intention was to make the duration at minimum 30 secs to not make it spammable allowing the player to perpetually recover health as long as there was a target she could damage.
Dancer: Vortex Strike
Intent
The intention for adding this skill was to provide the player with a means of crowd control while playing the dancer. The skill is attached to the end of the dancer's heavy strike button and only activates if the player has enough FP (Flourish Points). If the player did not have points the fans would stay closed and instead do one normal hit at the end in addition to the first two initial hits, but if the player had the FP available, the fans would open at the end of the heavy strike and create the vortex additional effect. The skill's FP cost probably should have been much higher, but we ended up leaving the skill at a cost of 20. Vortex strike was a skill that I created to not only apply multiple hits but to also launch enemies in the air so the player could temporarily stop all incoming damage from the enemies hit with it.