My Contribution
Design the combat mechanic and document the game design document.
Design the enemy behavior and balance the enemy stats to ensure the player progression over time is effective.
Communicate with other disciplines such as level designers, UX designers, programmers, and artists to ensure the combat experience is engaging.
Design Pillars
Before designing the combat, we had a meeting with the whole team for setting up the design pillars for the combat.
Simple combat that will allow the player to make some mistakes.
Encourage the player to be agile and quickly adopt a smooth combat system that allows them to kill enemy after enemy.
The player will be fighting groups of enemies that come in wave-like staggers
Revna First Combat Design
I then worked with the programmers and artists to come up with the first design plan for the combat.
Player Combat Mechanics
Light attack without root motion, letting the player move freely while attacking just at a slower speed. The plan is to give the player a better chance of repositioning themselves during combat, making the game less punishing.
Heavy attack, a single-target overhead slash dealing massive damage.
Dash, which turns into a bash when you dash into enemies, staggering them.
Melee enemy behavior
They circle around you.
Take turns bashing into the player.
If the player hits them first, they also hit the player back after a certain number of hits are received.
The Problem with Revna's first Combat Design
At the end of the semester there was a playtesting event where you let everyone in the campus walk in and playtest your game. I already expected that the game wouldn’t be engaging for most people since combat games rely heavily on getting all the UX done, which is almost impossible without proper animations.
But then I noticed 3 problems
Most testers only use light attacks and not heavy ones.
All of them are walking up close to the enemy, spamming light attacks. This behavior is not preferred, we want to encourage the player to think about timing and attacking other than tanking the buff enemy and spamming light attacks.
When introduced to the bash, they only choose to bash and would clear every combat encounter with just bashing.
(The following footages were not from the actual playtesters, but are recreations by me.)
This sends me into a big realization. Everything feels disconnected. If the basic combat system at its bare bones doesn’t even work. How is adding a rage gauge going to work? How am I going to fix this before it’s too late?
Analysis and Research
Before I start dissecting Revna, I start diving into what makes good combat. Combat games usually layer multiple mechanics that work with a set of rules. It’s not just about hitting an enemy, but how would you hit them, and how does the journey of hitting them feel?
Revna's combat lacks a proper set of rules. It lacks a journey. We have the pillars, but we didn’t set a system or rules during combat that would go well with it, or at least I didn’t test or iterate the design enough. All of this could have been prevented earlier if I had started testing the game mechanic more seriously in its earlier state.
Things that made Revna different from other mainstream action game
Revna's light attack doesn’t launch forward (Root motion). Root motion is found in most of the heavy action games, since it helps with the attack range, helping the player feel safer to engage in the enemy attack range and making the attack feel snappier. However, Revna doesn’t have root motion.
The design goal behind this system in the first place is to make it feel less punishing and allow repositioning. We do have to keep in mind that it WILL most likely feel off to the player who’s into the mid-high core action genre (God of war, Monster hunter, Batman Arkham, etc.).
Instead of ripping off the system the team took one semester to create, I figured I should work on what I can do to make it better without ripping off the core mechanic of the game.
Nimble Revna Combat Design
Adding more mechanics will be risky with the production time, so I work around Revna's mobility mechanics that the game already has, such as dash, jump, and glide. The idea is to make the combat experiences feel nimble, as Revna is a teenage girl fighting an 8 ft tall frost giant. She focuses on dodging with her mobility skills and finding an opportunity to attack.
New enemy attack
The melee enemy now has a stomp attack, which can be dodged by jumping.
Aerial attacks & Special attacks
While in midair, player can press light attack to perform an aerial light attack.
The heavy attack had changed into a special attack button.
Pressing special on the ground will perform a Rush, which is the Bash in the previous design.
Pressing special midair will perform an Aerial Slam, which will send Revna diving down, dealing heavy AOE damage upon hitting the ground.
Magic Gauge
Performing a special attack will spend some amount of the magic gauge. The gauge that will fill up when the player hits the enemy.
Design Methodology
The system is designed to give more choices of dodging for the player with the jump and more attack choices. The player can always attack and dash on the ground, but they'll receive more magic gauge when landing an aerial attack. This is to ensure the player feels rewarded when hitting the enemy and looking forward to doing more cool special moves, turning this into an engaging combat loop journey.
To be continued...
