Personal Project | Designing an invincible character that can stomp anything in their path
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The goal was to create 3 levels with a well defined progression curve, that teaches the player a core mechanic that can be used in a multitude of different ways i.e. a low skill entry but a high skill ceiling.
Your character cannot die. Enemies pose no harm to a vampire ninja. You can slash and dash through them, by flicking the mouse in the direction you want to move. But of course, to balance this invincibility, I decided to introduce the concept of a blood meter. A bar that drains over time, if an enemy is not consumed or dashed into. Your dash normally has a cool-down of 2 secs (which I decided to keep after a bunch of play-testing). This act of dashing into an enemy resets your cool-down, so that you can quickly get a dash reset enabling for a double dash, triple dash, etc.
There are currently 4 types of enemies. Those that are static and simply accept their end. Those that run away from you, those that climb ladders to get away from you (since you don't have time to climb silly ladders). And finally those that can teleport away from you, forcing you to experiment with the double dash mechanic.
Since everything is balanced around your blood meter draining, it was important to introduce obstacles. These range from pits that introduce you to the greatest enemy of all video game characters...gravity. As well as magical spikes that can't hurt you, but do slow you down and turn on the cool-down for your dash.
The art you see below is still in it's placeholder form of course. This was so I could quickly create a functional prototype in the Unity Game Engine.
I first worked on the paper level design and then translated it to unity. After some testing....you can see the result of how each level was finalized:
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