FORESCYTHE
Genre
Hack ‘n’ Slash
Engine
Unity
Team Size
5
Role
Technical Game Design
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Forescythe is a 3D action game in which you play as the last world reaper, able to travel between worlds, stopping times and disabling collisions in the other one.
Use your great mobility and your world-traveling ability to accomplish what could not be finished: the end of this world.
INTRODUCTION
Forescythe is the first project I’ve worked on during my second year at ISART Digital. It is an action game that gives to players the ability to switch between two worlds, enabling only one at a time. It is the most complex mechanic I had to work on. The project was mostly focused on polish and clarity.
PROTOTYPING
Prototyping the main gameplay didn’t take long. In 2 weeks, we already had pretty much everything in the game. It was a huge advantage, as it gave us more time to polish the game.
The mechanics also had more time to be clarified. A whole tutorial level is dedicated to learning those mechanics to the player.
AI DESIGN
Speaking of mechanics, I’ll talk now about what I worked on. First, but not least, the enemies.
Among all the ideas of enemies we thought about, we only added the simplest ones to the game: the golems and the turrets.
Golems are strong and chase you, while turrets are weak but can overwhelm you with their bullets if they are not killed quickly.
CAMERA
Another important system I worked on was the camera. Although the player can’t control it directly, the camera adapts its position to the player’s, thanks to a rail system.
When the player enters an arena, the rail stops, and the camera moves to a fixed distance from the player, to give players a full view of the fight.
POST MORTEM
During this period, we managed to create 2 different levels and a hub, including a complete tutorial. One regret was not having enough time to think about the mechanics during pre-production.
Iteration on this game was the key. It would surely be much more interesting with more levels, but we preferred to focus on polishing the first 2 levels rather than adding new ones. This decision hurts our game design, which isn’t highlighted that much in those levels (some mechanics were not added to the game despite being fully codded), but it helped us to polish the game to the state it is nowadays.
What I learned from this project:
– Good enemies force players to change their fight style.
– Introducing mechanics in a short game (in this case a vertical slice) is hard.
– A camera system is perfect when the player doesn’t notice it anymore.
– Cameras on rail are useful if used wisely.
Walkthrough