The Bloodletting

Building Arwen

Though possessing supernatural and demonic elements, I built the demo level of Arwen to still feel rooted in history. The late gothic/late medieval inspired architecture was imagined already when the level was in a whitebox state. This in turn informed the time period of the story and the societal status of the town.

I wrote a short story prelude, though not as something to be presented in the game. Rather, it was to serve as an anchor for the world building and the micro-stories peppered throughout the level.

Original Idea

This action platformer project was originally conceived as a scripting assignment for a course at The Game Assembly Malmö. The plan was to make a 2.5D camera system and character that could follow spline paths and transition back to a 2D plane. I also wanted to unlock the movement in a fixed third person view at times. This twist would give both the player and designer some more open areas to explore.

The project was inspired a lot by the Castlevania-series and its spiritual successor, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

Camera, Character, Action!

The camera system took less than a week to get up and running, with some tweaks to smooth out transitions later on.

The player’s move set was kept simple and then polished to achieve the right balance of responsiveness and heft. The character blueprint featured movement, crouched movement, sword attack and a death animation.

Traps & Terrors

The interactable blueprints were modelled in a modular fashion. This meant that I had a solid base BP for making the things I needed in the level. The fire traps, moving platform and collapsing bridge all use this base trap-BP.

Enemies were also developed with a modular mindset, the two featured enemies use two different bases.

The possessed Ram Skull enemy inherits from a flying enemy base BP, which has logic for following a movement spline and chasing the player when they’re close.

The Barghest/Wolf enemy in turn uses a simple AI that I repurposed from a previous project. It will patrol an area semi-randomly, until it either sees or is attacked by the player. Then they will hunt down and bite the player.

Refinement

For part of the specialization course, I put in another 4 weeks (half-time) worth of work. I worked on polishing the camera system and adding some functionality. The smoothing was improved overall, a “look-ahead” was added and the ability to interpolate to a different FOV.

A magic mechanic was added, giving the player a ranged attack. The mana bar also restores slowly over time, but the next feature can potentially speed up that recovery!

Next, I added the ability to get health and mana potions. They drop at random from destroyed lanterns (Castlevania-style) or from defeated enemies. The chance to get either of the potions increases if the respective bar is below a certain threshold.

Last, but not least, I decided to spend the remaining allotted time to polish up the experience. Taking it to a “golded” vertical slice level with proper meshes, sound effects, lighting and environment.