Magic Mayhem

Technical Game Designer | Spell Design

Introduction

For this project I was tasked with creating two unique spells. I was excited going into this project as a massive fan of all things fantasy.

With this project I really focused on implementing spells in a way where they interacted with one another in a systematic way to create weird and different combinations. I also want to focus on creating a more mobile character.

Project Breakdown

Practiced source control revision
Scripting inventory interactions
Designing basic level layouts
Project utilized Unreal Engine 5.3
Implementing enemy/weapon interactions

Overview

Shrunken character doing one jump with the jump spell, then one normal jump

Checkpoints that allow you to pick which one is the starting point

An overview shot of the level I designed

A player thinking about how to traverse the higher up sections...

Design Techniques

Fine-Tuning, Testing, and Problem Solving

I utilized constant prototyping to fine-tune the way in which my code was written. Getting the two spells to interact was a huge challenge for me, but through consistent testing, I was able to alter the way in which the character animated when shrinking. I also fine-tuned until I had a functioning protoype, with minimal errors in the spells. I also practiced good naming conventions to make it clear to myself and peers what was happening on the event graph.

Sequencing

To ensure the level was organized in a proper sequence, I left the player free to explore, rewarding their exploration of the level with a new spell. This gave them more access to traverse the level as they wish. I tried to avoid gates and valves for this project to make the player feel more like a wizard.

I encouraged exploration through a large island in the sky, creating a focal point for the player.

Game Feeling

I tried to keep the feeling of the game fantastical as I iterated in the design process. I felt the character model represented a humorous character, so when choosing which spells to implement, a Super Jump and Shrink spell were obvious. With the third-person view, I knew making a shrink spell look interesting as it happened was important, thus the gradual shrinking effect of the spell.

Reflections

This project was an interesting practice in programming for me. As someone who’s primarily focused on level design, the amount of work I did in Blueprint was massive for this project. I learned some vital lessons with this project, as highlighted below.

Documentation - This page is being updated much later than when the project was complete. In my more recent projects, I’d made a wonderful effort to document my progress from blockmesh, to final product. As you can likely see from the size of this page, I did not have much additional documentation from this project. While I’ve already improved on this problem in my practices, it’s very obvious in this older project.

Smoothing - Magical Mayhem needed a lot of smoothing over in several places before I even got my hands on it. There are many places, specifically with the character, where I think values need to be tweaked to make a more effective game. This extends into my own work as well. While the shrink spell does look marvelous, the character model interacts poorly with some parts of the level. A possible solution for this could be to have a dedicated miniature player model that we switch between with a shrinking animation.