Spite - The Yellow Plague
Spite - The Yellow Plague is a diablo inspired game where you play as a bounty hunter equipped with a sword and crossbow. You explore a swamp town that has been overrun by monsters infected by a mysterious yellow plague. You are hired by a big swamp monster that used to rule the land but has been dethroned by the plague. Your goal is to clear the town of monsters and in the end kill the big "Yellow king" that controls all the monsters. The game features action-packed combat and skills.
This was our sixth game project on The Game Assembly where we used our own DX11 custom game engine.
My contributions
player controller
My main contribution to this project was to create the player controller. It was a great challenge because most games created on The Game Assembly so far had been controlled using the keyboard but on this project, the player was controlled using point-and-click with the mouse. I calculated a direction from the camera by converting the mouse position from screen space to world space when clicking and then casting a Raycast in that direction to find a target position. One of my group member (Samuel Ryberg) A-Star pathfinding system was used to move the player to the target position.
I really enjoy working on the game feel when creating player controllers and one of our most recurring feedback after our alpha playtest was that the player combat felt slow and that you easily got stuck in attack animations leading to you getting hit by enemy attacks.
My solution and fixes were to make the ability animations split into start and recovery states that made you able to do the next attack without having to do the entire animation including the recovery part. I worked closely with the animator in our group responsible for the avatar animations, testing a lot of different timings and such until we were satisfied. This combined with an input buffer to activate the next attack while the current where active led to a very satisfying combat making you feel like a quick ninja dashing around, dodging and killing enemies. I got very proud of this and got a lot of great feedback on the next playtest session where the players said it was a massive improvement.
player Combat
Before (Alpha)
After (Beta)
During our pre-production, one of the programmers in our group (Max Hartell) created the base backend system for emitting particles. The particle editor got paused in development because of other priorities but in the middle, I took it upon myself to fix the editor so our technical artist had something to work with.
The properties and functionality I added were:
Interface with a custom viewport for editing in a separate window
Custom sprite
Blending velocity, size, and color over a lifetime
Emitter movement inside the editor for projectile visualization
One-shot emission for impact effects