JOSH HARDY

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Within this project, my goal was to make a 3D level that catered to a Norse-themed action-adventure game. This entailed creating a full combat system with magic abilities and a small narrative. I created everything from scratch apart from: the dialogue and quest system, art and animations.

I proceeded to design and build a level that catered to this games mechanics. That led me to create puzzles, create open spaces for combat and use visual language to guide the player through the level. The level is split into 3 sections. These 3 sections each play a part in terms of level/story progress, increasing difficulty and teaching the player new things.

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The main problems faced were trying to teach the player the mechanics in a single level whilst still being challenging and fun, and also trying to tell the player how to solve the puzzles... without telling them.

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That is what initially led me to split the level into 3 sections. The first part would operate as a railroaded introduction to the controls with small UI prompts similar to those in the Dark Souls series. This contained easy combat with an optional more challenging boss near the end for those that were replaying or just wanted to. This would also serve as the intro to the story and its characters.

The second part would operate as the adventure where players will advance further into the story and be given free reign to run around and explore. There are also extra boss enemies and an optional side quest for them to have fun with. The third part/act serves as the rise in challenge and also the story climax. There is more challenging combat here with slightly varied enemies that force the player to utilise different combat mechanics that they have learned.

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I also wanted to create an engaging combat that was an improvement upon my previous project: "Project Virus". For this I watched many GDC talks and furthered the combat system with lock-on capabilities and changed the way the attacking works. In 'Project Virus', the player merely attacked towards where the camera was facing as they had a single enemy at one time, however, in Ragnarok, there are many times the player faces many enemies. This led me to create a targeting system that would have any one main target decided by screen position and distance from player. This meant the player can have input on the target by where they are aiming but if an enemy is very close it will auto attack that target.

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I also improved upon my FPS project where I created my first AI. I used a switch case to create the AI for that game as it was more simple than the AI for this project. This project had many more states and variables so I create a proper finite state machine for the AI that was made to be versatile enough to use for every enemy type in the game. This was challenging but fun and is still very rudimentary. I would love to learn about other AI algorithms in the future such as behaviour trees to create more engaging and advanced AI.

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More information can be seen on my development blogs.