The Fallen is a 2.5D hack-and-slash game - think Mega Man with a splash of Dark Souls. It was developed over four days for the Schell Games Jam Week 2015, and borrows concepts familiar to the Soulsian games: infinite lives, a fixed level layout with respawning enemies, and intense difficulty. The twist here is that heroes are disposable and progression is stored on the weapons themselves.
Each weapon is also associated with a god, which gave the game thematic opportunities since each god defines the weapon, the weapon’s abilities, and the enemies that would be in that god’s domain. For the demo, we gave the player the nature god’s sword and set the demo in the domain of madness.
As the player completes achievement-style “Potentials” the weapon grows in power and gains additional abilities. But since this power is stored on the weapons, when the player dies the weapon falls into the world waiting to be picked up by enemies. Enemies find swords are empowered, but players can always retrieve their weapons.
During Jam Week, our goal was to dig into the core loop of the game and flesh out systems for the Potentials, develop behavior-tree based enemy AI, and develop a pipeline for the 2.5D character and its associated weapon effects to visualize progress. And the outcome far exceeded all of our expectations!
The group was composed of eight people (1 designer, 3 artists, 1 audio, 2 programmers, and 1 producer) and we scoped to our goal based on each of our individual strengths. Because of the volume of 2D art, two problems arose: (1) There was a significant amount of time spent purely getting the animation and visual effects sprites into Unity, and (2) Our game size was huge because we were using massive sprite resolutions. While we didn’t have much time to address the second, and we spent a significant amount of time working through the first.
Our biggest takeaway was to get things on screen as fast as possible so people can comment on how things feel. Getting the character moving and attacking with a primitive cylinder let people comment on how the camera didn’t match expectations. Placing a sprite on the cylinder let people think about movement and attacking animations. Putting the UI up as basic sliders with default text gave clear indications as to what requirements for the UI would be.
For everyone on the team, one thing was clear: We all loved the style of leveling weapons through strange and unexpected Potentials. It gave the game a different feel in which players had to strategize how they would achieve their next ability, rather than stumbling into it through amassing incidental experience and then selecting a power after the level up.
From here, we absolutely want to refine our enemy AI system and the character pipeline. We gained tremendous insight about behavior trees by using RAIN AI, but we would likely move to a more custom solution. And for characters, while we achieved the cutout style we wanted, it was a massive time sink to animate the character in each direction. We believe moving to a 3D pipeline would save an enormous amount of time, especially considering how many different weapons we want to incorporate.
We’re really excited about this concept, and would love to hear any feedback you have about it. The PC demo is available here so give it a play and share your thoughts with us at info@schellgames.com.