A procedurally-generated character action game developed over the course of six months as my final project for university, alongside five other developers (two programmers, a designer & two animators). While highly flawed, as most student projects are, this was my first foray into long-form development, and was overall a fantastic learning experience.
The major contributions I made during design and development are as follows:
- Principle game design
- Attack combo system design & implementation
- Establishing & maintaining work pipeline with animators
- Implementing & tweaking animations & models in-game
- Camera controls and systems
- “Game feel” elements
Darksiders 2 Research & Technical Breakdown
A large part of pre-production of Lather Rinse Repeat was spent researching similar games and seeing what solutions they provided for many design and technical problems. My personal research led me to breaking down the camera and attack systems used in Darksiders 2, such as:
- The camera moving towards the player’s back when attacking
- The camera moving towards the player’s back when moving
- The player turning to face nearby enemies when attacking
- The player stepping forwards with each attack
- Alternate attacks starting from opposite sides of the body to maintain “flow” (See LRR2 below)
- Different “finishing moves” executing depending on the composition of the combo leading up to them
Attack Combo System
During development I created a tool that allowed for attack combos to be balanced or created with relative ease. There was a Google Sheet that contained all the values for attacks, such as the name of the corresponding animation, whether it was a “finishing move” (as well as the conditions for it executing, if so), the attack’s duration, damage, knockback, and other appropriate values.
Changes could be made to this sheet, and when the game was executed it would find the sheet online, read in all its values, and use either it, or the most recent valid sheet (that would be automatically saved locally) in the event that the online sheet contained invalid data. This system allowed for streamlined balancing and tweaking of the character’s attacks, and gave a valuable tool for animators (who otherwise weren’t Unity-savvy enough) to test changes to the speeds & “power” of the attacks they’d animated, opening up the Animator-Developer pipeline to be two way.
Controls (Requires Gamepad)
| Left stick | Move character |
| Right stick | Move camera |
| X | Light attack |
| Y | Heavy attack |
| B | Shield |
| A | Jump |
| Left bumper | Dash |
| Start | Pause |
Created 2015