Game Design Masters Final Major Project
My final major project for my game design masters was a combat design document that centred around the one page design philosophies of Stone Librande's One Page Designs GDC talk. Titled Revolver Roulette, this was a combat design document with a proof of concept prototype.
Platform: PC
Engine: Unity
Team Size: 2 [Me and an Artist]
Role: Combat Design, Systems Design
Duration: Jun '24 - Sep '24
Genre: Roguelike, Deckbuilder, Shooter
Overview
The overall premise of the game is a Roguelike, Deckbuilding Shooter with turn based elements. As you play through, you will collect bullets with magical effects. These bullets go into your hand and every time you reload your revolver pulls random bullets from your deck.
Excel:
Developed an inventory list for each bullet to balance individual stats.
Recoil Pattern:
Designed a recoil pattern system that allows for unique per bullet recoil patterns.
Elemental Magic System:
Defined a system for elements that each play their role in the combat sandbox.
Ui Design:
Designed an animated Ui based on artwork from Ron Gregory-Clark, relaying bullets available to the player.
One Page Design:
Utilised methods of one page designs to create clear and consistent design messaging.
Unity Prototyping:
Created an initial prototype of all systems working together.
Design Document
Original Documentation: Initially the design doc had a lot of information within each page, and feedback suggested that information was getting missed. I spent a lot of time within this project with reducing the overall profile for each page. I found that the Core Pillars of each system helped me to reduce each system to what it brought to the overall package.
Visualisations: By using the minimum amount of information within the design doc, it was easy to translate over to a prototype. Visualisations in the forms of diagrams made it incredibly easy to translate these into the prototype.​
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I found the prototyping was very lightweight, I didn't feel as though making changes would cause a ripple effect within the design doc. Because everything in the doc was so visual I didn't have to go through and change loads of small details.​
Per Bullet Recoil Design
Design Goal: I wanted recoil to be very obvious as it was a unique statistic of each bullet. I was inspired by the Ui Reticule from Helldivers. As my system was based on unique bullet recoil profiles I had to come up with a weapon system that would collate the data from each individual bullet.
Solution: I utilised scriptable objects and have a transform for the aiming point. Each time the gun was fired it would collate the bullet stats including the recoil and move the aim point transform.
This would then also add to a recoil offset so the recoil would accumulate and the gun would lerp toward this aim point. The reticule would then find the transform from the camera and convert it to a 2D space for the Ui.
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