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TAMARELLE-WEBER ALEXANDRE
Game Designer
Paradise Burn
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Role: Design, Art and Programmation
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State: In progress
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Duration: Start in October 2022
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Genre: Tactical, Narrative
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Engine: Unreal Ungine 5
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Platform: PC
Intro:
It's a personal project that started a year before my first year of the master's degree in game design.
I wanted to have a personal project in my spare time and create a game prototype. I had the idea and the desire to make a tactical game with a strong emphasis on characters (Fire Emblem is my main source of inspiration). I also dreamt of making a game inspired by mythology. In the end I chose to make a game where the characters are evil figures from different mythologies, which led me to create characters based on a narrative arc of redemption, and to set the game in Hell.
Design:
Now I know what I want: a tactical game with a strong emphasis on evil characters from mythology.
But how can I translate my intentions into the game in terms of game design?
Basic Tactical Gameplay
First of all I went for the basic tactical gameplay, and I didn't really want more for this part, because the emphasis is on the characters, I don't want to create a game that asks the player to be the next Bismarck. But I decided to keep the option of squares with special effects, such as only an air unit can move on that square, if a unit is on that square it takes damage unless it's not that type of unit, etc... This avoids giving the player 40k actions to do in one turn, while giving him a minimum of thought in his moves and team building.
I'm also keeping the option of different attack choices, single target, Aoe, powerful but expensive, etc...
Here we can see the movement options for the Daji character
The player targets two enemies with one of Daji's aoe attacks
The both enemies have received damage
Recruitment
To give the characters more interest, I decided to take the recruitment mechanic from the Fire Emblem games and combine it with that of the Shin Megami Tensei games. To avoid going into too much detail, in combat you can talk to an opponent and if you answer the choice dialogue correctly, you can recruit the opponent into your team. This doesn't apply to all opposing characters, so you need to pay attention to the behaviour of your enemies and pay attention to the dialogue with your companions to detect who is a recruitable opponent.
Recruitment is in the game, but the dialogue are currently missing.
The player targets an enemy to recruit
The player has recruited an enemy.
Transformation
It's a very popular mechanic because of the Pokemon games, but here I think the version that best suited my idea of a game was the version from the digimon games where your monster can transform differently depending on how it's been treated.
The characters in the game aren't pets, they're evil according to the mythology, so I chose to base their transformation on a possible redemption arc, depending on whether throughout the game you encourage the character to be redeemed or to continue on their evil path, they'll transform differently.
This mechanism is in the game, but still requires a fair amount of modification.
The basic version of the character Daji
One of the possible transformations of the Daji character
When a character transforms, an fx is there to provide feedback
Another possible transformations of the Daji character
Other:
Prog:
Prog was the big one and it's still the big one,
Because I started with virtually no prog knowledge (I knew what a boolean was and 2 or 3 other things).
Luckily I found an excellent tutorial on youtube that explained the whole tactical part to me and when I had to set up the other mechanics like recruitment and transformation, it was easy for me because I had a sufficient level.
Art:
The part that's obviously not the most important when it comes to creating a game prototype. But because it's a game that I imagined, I wanted to have something.
So I decided to make the character models myself based on my design ideas.
For one of the characters (the dog) I used a model from the epic shop and I did the same for most of the environment with quixel.
Above all, I didn't work hard enough on the game's artistic direction and rendering.
As a result, the game doesn't look very good at the moment.
What I have learnt:
I think it's good, I've learnt a lot about prototyping games, especially programming.
I've also learnt a lot about creating and choosing game mechanisms to meet a game's intention.
And finally, I've also worked a lot on my personal project, the back and forth on design-prog etc...
Now:
My prototype has a long way to go before it's finished and with studies and job hunting, it's hard to keep going. I hope and want to finish this game, and I'm already happy to have a testable version, which is already a good part of the way done.
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