Overview

Hi! my name is Fran Ruiz Gimenez and I've worked as game designer of NjoyGames on our project Unthrone.

I have worked designing the player, enemies, boss, level design, artificial intelligence, animations, sounds, videogame concept, game balance and QA.

Implementing in-game sound FX, metrics of enemies (mid-develpment) and boss (hard and easy difficulty), enemies and boss performance and stage narrative (on boss level). I've organized a playtesting of 16 people and have been scrum master for the artificial intelligence scrum.

Gameplay Systems

Movement System

Taking as reference the traditional dungeon crawlers and taking into account the technical limitations that we faced, I proposed with Sergio Sáez several different movement systems.

Finally we decided to implement a movement system similar to The Legend Of Grimrock, a movement by tiles in which the player can look in a total of four directions. North, south, east and west.

On the other hand, one of the main problems that this movement system presents today is the limitation of vision.

Combat System

To create a more dynamic combat than in traditional dungeons crawlers, we decided that the player could control three different types of characters, each one with different abilities that are more or less favorable depending of the situation.

In addition, to add wealth to these decisions, the player have a character on the front, which has two skills availables, while the secondary characters have only one of their characteristic abilities.

The character in the front is the one that gets damage and spends energy when using skills, which favors the rotation of characters, making the player search and adapt of different situations.

Enemies

I designed a total of three enemies considering the different ways that the player could combat. Depending on the color of their armor they will have different stats (what makes a total of 9 enemies). Everyone have the same base behavior programmed through scripts, and each enemy has unique attacks and weapons. When the enemy loses life looks damaged with blood on his armor to improve the hp feedback.

[Documentation]

For each enemy, I made a programmers document, defining his behavior and the debug tools that should be available in the engine to iterate, with priority of production. For the art team I made an art document with references of how the enemy and his weapon aesthetics should look like and his differential characteristics, a list of animations with a detailed description of the action, his animation state machine to generate transitions correctly between animations and at least one video reference for each one. Animations were listed by priority of production.

Finally, there was third document for audio FXs, specifying his duration, loop and properties. Ordered by priority.

Once the artists and programmers produced the content, I was in charge of implement it in-game.

Enemies behaviour tree and guard with shield ASM:

The enemies have two perception systems, sight (left image) and hearing (right image). If the enemy loses sight the player will back to patrol or guard.

Guard with sword

Is the first enemy the player fights. The player can face him with the character he prefers, without making it more difficult or affordable to use a specific character, adapting to the desired game style of the player with the intention of making a softer introduction to the game.

When the player is detected, the enemy draws the sword and begins to chase him. When he is on adjacent tile to the player, makes an attack.

Spearman

To favor the distance attack of Tyrion and Daenerys, I designed an enemy with a spear that attacks with one tile of distance, so the most optimal way to defeat this enemy is with distance attack characters. If the player corner the enemy, he can also make a melee attack.

This enemy is weaker but has the ability to walk laterally and attack from a distance, making him more agile.

Guard with shield

To favor the melee attack of Jaime and Daenerys, I designed an enemy able to block the player's abilities, in a way that counters the low rate of attacks of Tyrion and Daenerys and force the player to approach the enemy and make melee fights.

It is the enemy with the greatest defense.

Boss: The Mountain

I was in charge of the boss design and his presentation in the level. My main objective was to challenge and surprise the player, testing all the knowledge he had learned with a new and fresh combat challenge.

[Documentation]

I've made a programmers document, defining his behavior and the debug tools that should be available in the engine to iterate, with priority of production. For the art team I made an art document with references of how the enemy and his weapon aesthetics should look like and his differential characteristics, a list of animations with a detailed description of the action, his animation state machine to generate transitions correctly between animations and at least one video reference for each one. Animations were listed by priority of production.

Finally, there was third document for audio FXs, specifying his duration, loop and properties. Ordered by priority.

[Behaviour]

The mountain have two phases. In the first one, he have two types of attack. In the second one, a third attack is added to the pool. Making the combat more frenetic and making the player adapt to different combat styles. Each one have a unique way to dodge, so we force the player to read the boss anticipation animations to don´t get hit.

Wide attack: Makes damage in area. Player can dodge It going backwards.

Forward attack: Makes damage in the two front tiles of the enemy. Player can dodge It going left or right.

Charge attack: Only made on the second phase. Gregor charges from one side of the map to the player´s position, so we prevent the distance attack abuse. If the player is reached, he will receive damage and get pushed.

Level Design

To add tension to the situation, on the begining of the level, there will be no music and the player will hear the mountain killing a soldier. He will not see what happened, just listens it.

When the player turns the corner, will see the dead soldier on the floor and the door closed.

Finally, when the player activates the lever to open the door, we will land a in-game cinematic where the player enters the boss room and see the boss on knees, who will stand up, shout and begin the battle. During this cinematic, two black bars will appear to notice the player.

I did the following storyboard to visualice the game flow.

I've designed the narrative of level, conceptualiced the level design, implemented the soldier on the floor with his blood, the player cinematic (coded by script with the functions provided by Jordi Oña) and the necessary triggers to play the presentation sounds. The final concept and map build was made by Sergio Saez.

I made a document with Cersei aesthetics, animations and voices but this last two elements wasn't produced, just the model on the throne.

Sound FX

I've used Wwise to implement sounds FX on the boss, enemies and boss scene using reverberation (implemented by Carlos Cabreira) to improve the player's immersion.

Playtesting

Playtesting of 24 people.

Created a questionnaire with Sergio Sáez and Aleix Cardona to detect what´s the best, the worst and the problems of our the videogame.

Game Concept

In the beginning of the project, I've worked on the conceptualization of the videogame and defining the movement system, combat system, player abilities system and proposing one playable level with principal areas and story.

Made the neccesary documentation to explain the game concept to the team, including gif animations (some of which you can see in this web) to facilitate the understanding.

Not Implemented

Puzzles

Pressure plates puzzles of level tutorial (left image), which we did not have time to build and third level puzzle proposal (right image).

Level design

Recreation of Meereen governed by the Great Masters, where the player will pass through the combat arenas, streets from Mereen and the interior of the pyramid.

The mission was about escape the battle sands, find the pyramid and kill the great masters.

We discarded this idea because we prefer to recreate King's Landing, the most emblematic area of Game of Thrones.

Camera movement

Therefore I proposed with Sergio Sáez a camera movement system to generate a free rotation movement while holding a key (shown on the right), but finally we discarded it and implemented a 90 degrees rotation to give greater strength to the grid format of our videogame.

Thats all folks! Hope you liked It!

If you have any answers or suggestions don´t doubt to contact me. See you!