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LEAD DESIGNER - COMBAT DESIGNER - BOSS DESIGNER

Alex Campamar Redol

DESIGN


Design department


Game concept

The goal of the project was to accomplish three game pillars

- Fast Paced Diablo-like gameplay

- Cyberpunk world of Battle Angel Alita

- Three Infinite replayable levels


First brainstormings (December-February)

- Play same style games references

- Read GUNNM

- Brainstormings

-  Implementation in unity

- Iterate

Game loop

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First part of project (Vertical Slice 1 - Alpha 1)

Low focus on polish

Poor communication between scrums and  not so much designer meetings

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So much content added.

Lots of design documents

Second part of project (Alpha 2 - Gold)

Grouping game elements sometimes weren't as good as expected

So much time invested in discussions and explanations

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All things have more polish without sacrifying the content production 

Only one GDD with all things grouped and a common idea of the game

Design work pipeline

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Balancing

Excel

The first step was to edit the excel document to test the outcome of the numbers we'll be using.

Implement & test

After that, we implement the values in the excel. We form little groups of testing to complete the full game.

Iterate

After the testing, all testers put in common their opinion and what they would change. After that, the suggestions are writted again in excel and the proces restart.

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Combat Rework Design
(code by Sandra Alvarez)


Why?

- We didn't think that was complicated. At the beginning we thought it will work just making enemies go to Alita.

- Not enough feedback. Without particles and animations was to difficult to know what's happening and was ugly.

- Enemies constantly push Alita and other enemies due to colliders. Enemies may go to a point near Alita and stop there without pushing Alita.

- Feel to artificial. The enemies just walking moving the sword wasn't satisfactory.

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Solution

- Particles and animated enemies to give the players more feedback of what's happening

- After research looking at how the games use to manage big number of melee, I decided the faster and easier way to solve our problems was a Battle Circle. With that, we can define a maximum number of attackers and the rest remain in wander. 

- Animation Cancel to enemies and player. With that we can have a more interesting combat rhythm

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Assasins Creed Battle Circle

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Our Implementation

What could have been improved

-More variation in enemies attack to have a more natural feeling. Now we only have one and feels repetitive.

- More particles to give the player feedback.

-The enemies could have more complex communication between them. This can make our enemies look so much clever.


Boss Design
(code by Sandra Alvarez)
(art by David Lozano)

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Grewishka/Makaku

We choose as a final boss the villain more iconic in the movie: Grewishka. We choose him instead of another enemy from the manga because he's very recognizable and he's so big, perfect to be a final boss. For design him, we took as a reference "The butcher" from Diablo 3. We were looking to reproduce the in-out combat of that boss.

The boss has two different phases. In the first phase he only attacks with melee hits. When he changes of phase use his throwing fingers to attack Alita. This was done because of make easier to the player to distinguish both phases and to make the combat against Grewishka deeper.

The AI of Grewishka is very simple. He launches one of his three attacks every 6 seconds. He has 3 attacks:

-  The first one is a hit on the floor that makes damage in an area in front     of him. In the second phase, Grewishka also digs with his fingers which     attacks alita rising from the floor. Grewishka use this attack

-  The second is a hand-hit that throws Alita away from him. This is used     when Alita is at a medium distance. Grewishka have very large arms,     so if Alita is away for him he will use this attack

-  The last attack it's only used in the second phase. Grewishka throws his     fingers to Alita and if he catches her, Alita is attracted to him. This attack     replace the Hand hit in first phase for the second one. It's also used     when Alita is away from Grewishka.

With this Grewishka react to the player decision making and his situation what allows the player to have more strategical combat. Testing this we perceived that Grewishka became so predictable because depending on your position will throw one attack or another. To solve this we implement a repetition cap, so if he does two times the same attack, the third will be the other attack, independently of Alita position. 


References

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Result

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Frog design
(code by Aleix Gabarró)
(art by David Lozano)


Concept

We needed a thematic enemy for sewers level as barrelman is for Scrapyard city. Barrelman it's a tanky enemy so we wanted to have a squishy enemy with high damage. We choose the frog, an enemy proposed by the author in one appendix of GUNNM   

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AI & Attacks

The frog has two different attacks:
The first attack it's a projectile shooted against Alita. This projectile does a great amount of damage.
The second is used by the frog to avoid Alita. The frog jump against Alita with two possibles outcomes:

If the enemy hits Alita, the frog impulse in her and go in the other direction.

If Alita dodge the attack the frog fall to the ground and is stunned.

Result

We approached the objective with this enemy. It feels very different than all the other. His set of attacks is very unique and the flying kick it's very spectacular. 

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Particles Implementation
(engine tools by Aleix Gabarró and Óscar Hernández)
(art by Ricardo Gutiérrez)

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I implemented almost all particles in the game using the engine tools and doing the scripts in C#.

Focusing on give the player feedback in combat and make it look spectacular

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Alita Unbreakable Warrior