What Did I Do?

My name’s Vincent, and I was a Technical Designer on Wizards and Warriors. This project was created as a final project for our Game Design II course. We were told that our game had to have split-screen co-op and a branching dialogue system. We were also told to design our game to make the players feel powerful. My main tasks on this project were implementing the wave-based enemy spawning system and the dialogue system. I made all my game design decisions with the main goal of giving the player the feeling of power.

On our group Kanban board, my assigned tasks did not have specific hour estimations, but I was assigned 8 medium-to-large size tasks, which I would estimate at around 24 hours of work. In reality, I believe I worked closer to ~30 hours. This is because our team became less reliant on the Kanban board closer to the end of the project. By the end, I was handling lots of smaller tasks that weren’t on the board, like small fixes in my own systems.

Designing the Dialogue System

Having NPCs with branching dialogue was a requirement for this project, so I had to figure out how to implement them in a way that would not feel too obtrusive in a split-screen action game. I also wanted to remember to apply the theme of giving the players power, even to something that seems as simple as a basic dialogue system. I raised the idea of having a moment between waves where the players could talk to the NPCs if they wanted to, and then talk to a God-like character that spawns in the center of the map to advance to the next wave. This way, players have control over how much they’d like to interact with NPCs, and when the next waves would begin. I also made the decision to allow players to simply walk away from NPC dialogue if they choose to. At first, this was for programming simplicity, but I realized that it was quite convenient for the player as well. I never wanted players to feel like they were locked into a dialogue, especially if they’re in an intense battle. Thus, the player isn’t locked out of any of their controls when talking to an NPC, and walking away will simply end the sequence. This decision also helped push our theme of giving the players power by allowing them full control over when a conversation ends. Who hasn’t felt like they just wanted to walk away from a conversation before?

Difficulties

There were some difficulties that arose when I was developing the wave system. Creating the wave system was the first task I was assigned to work on. This proved challenging because I was working before I had an expectation of how enemies and players would act, and I had less time to focus on balancing the increasing difficulty of waves. I also had to move around my spawn locations a few times, because I wasn’t aware of how the enemies would react to spawning in certain environments due to their size and behavior. In retrospect, I should have communicated more with the programmers who had their hands in the combat system. That way, I could have gotten a better idea of how difficult the enemies would be, and how they would behave on the map. In the future, I'll remember to discuss these things with my fellow group members, especially in a project of this size.

What I’m Most Proud Of

I’m proud of both the dialogue and wave systems quite a lot. I was able to learn even more meaningful ways that I could utilize data tables. I’m also really proud that everyone’s work seemed to come together well by the end of the project. I think overall, we did a good job communicating with each other about what needed to be done for our systems to interact. I believe that merge problems were also pretty minimal overall, which is super nice considering this is the biggest team I’ve worked with so far. Ultimately, I’m glad I got to be a part of this project.

BlueprintUE Links:

Wave Controller Blueprint: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/pu01m0zu/

Dialogue NPC Blueprint: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/0298k5ah/