I was thinking of ways to introduce the player to certain mechanics in the game, such as the jumping to avoid the falling icicles which is one of the main traps and the player will encounter these quite often. At the same time I wanted to introduce the player to the level and give a little bit of story to what is going on in the game. I have created an intro to the level showing the player running through an icy corridor, the player proceeds to jump and avoid falling icicles (introducing the player to the falling icicles) this also traps the player in the cave giving the player reason to find their way out. The quest to find an exit is given to the player by his companion ‘Sith’ the cat.
Intro:
This was also my first time using the new sequencer and I found it much easier and quicker than matinee.
AI companion
Using Excel I have created a narrative spreadsheet:
There are different columns for different scenarios, for example in the Follow_Idle column if the AI is just following you or inactive they will randomly say lines from that column. The colours represent conversation chains, this means if the cat says Dark blue ‘I’m bored, Lets play a game…’ he will then move to the Conversation chain column and say something between row 1-3 so he might say ‘Okay! I spy with my cats eye…’. below are some images of the cats idle narrative. I thought adding these small conversation chain adds a little more detail and feels a bit more realistic.
The other columns Story, QuestRelated and Puzzles are saved for specific things I want the cat to say at certain points in the game, such as giving the player hints in puzzles or giving them a quest, below are images of what the cat says while trying to complete a puzzle:
Hints to things that happen in the world:
Blueprints:
This is how the cat follows the player, they try to stay in a certain radius around the player as to not get in their way. If the player gets to far away then the cat will teleport to the player, this also solves an issue that the cat cant jump across the gaps with the player. However seeing as how the cat is supposed to be able to use magic the teleportation does not break logic, there is an effect that is played when the cat teleports so that you can’t see the cat disappear and reaper.
narrative control:
The idle and attack narrative is on a random loop were as the story related ones are called by trigger volumes in the world.
Cat following:
End Game boss design
Research:
I want the boss mainly attack from distance firing at the player while the player uses the jump pad mechanic to jump across to different platforms. The way the boss attacks work is that they follow a path from the top of the screen to the bottom or appear as circles on the floor which the player has a short time to dodge.
Dragonica reference
At 1:00 there is an example of the type of attack I want to create.
Example sketch of the boss area, you can see from the image that the player has different areas to jump to but the boss can always shoot the area where the player will be. The boss will either come over to the middle area every now and then or the player can force them over in some way, maybe by blocking off the back. The boss will retreat after loosing about 30% of health.
I plan to add in melee combat and dealing with quests next.