APD Week 02 - Play and Time

Theme

Play and Time

Context

SUPERHOT (developed and published by SUPERHOT Team, 2016) is a first person shooter game (later got ported to VR too) where the world moves only when you move. I’ve used this game as one of my main inspiration for the core mechanic of this prototype, but I wanted to give different control to the player, such as projectiles and zones.

Chronotron (developed by Scarybug) is an old flash game where you have the ability to record your previous playthroughs and have them replay in a puzzle level. The game itself has a pretty complex mechanic but innovative for the time. While my prototype doesn’t include any feature near that level, I believe that if I was to push this game on a longer term, I would want similar mechanics.

Dark Souls series (developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco Games, 2011-2014-2016) is a series of game where the player is heavily punished mainly by heavy movement and gameplay feel. Instead of going the JRPG mechanics I usually go for, I tried to implement a much rougher and heavier feel to the game by implementing a similar animation system as the Dark Souls Series. The animations are purposely taking a long time to happen, requiring a solid timing.

Method

I want to create a first person shooter game prototype on Unity where the player is able to shoot projectiles which can slow down objects in contact for a small duration of time.

This mechanic is made to be used in a puzzle or adventure environment to solve problems where key items and obstacles go too fast.

Response

For this ADP entry, I wanted to keep building mechanics for the player.

In the end, I decided to go for a Third Person Shooter (in contrast to CPS), and implemented both the base system for the future ADP entries and a time-shooting mechanic.

The animation system was on purpose filled with punishments in reference to Dark Souls series, although it should get a lot worse as more skills and features come aboard. A respawn system was created as well.

The shooting mechanic so far is an ability to throw a slow ball which expands on contact of an object. Any object in contact will have their core movement slowed down for as long as they are in contact of the sphere. Each sphere lasts 10 seconds.

Additionally, I’ve added the ability to remove all spheres active so far for the sake of cleaning the map.

No body allowed!