Async Character Battler
This prototype explores the gameplay for an asynchronous battler and character collector. Characters have a variety of abilities and stats, delineating them into the standard RPG roles of Tank, Damage, and Healing/Utility.
Players choose a team of 3 characters to battle against another team of 3 (currently controlled by an NPC only). Both teams asynchronously select the abilities for their characters to perform once the turn resolves. Abilities cost energy, so the player must choose wisely, as not all characters can necessarily use their strongest ability each turn. After each player chooses all their characters’ abilities, they lock in their turns and the turn resolves, ordering abilities based on the players’ decisions as well as the players’ priority.
This project was an excellent opportunity to flesh out a strong data pipeline, allowing characters to be easily created and balanced using in-editor tools. I also took the time to hook the front-end up to a Playfab project, allowing the player to save the progress of their characters remotely, as well as load data from a remote database.
Idle Squad Combat
This prototype explores the gameplay for a squad-based, idle rpg. The player takes control of a small group of characters, moving them together using a virtual joystick. The region in which the player’s characters will move is portrayed by a circular dotted line. If enemies enter this region, the player’s squad will burst into action, attacking any enemy within range.
Characters are separated into two classes: ranged and melee. Melee characters will run at enemies to punch them while ranged characters will try to make distance so they can damage enemies using ranged attacks.
The primary objective of this prototype was to balance the organic feeling of controlling a group of characters, assuring that the individual characters moved fluidly and attacked logically, with the precise control expected from a standard character controller. The end result was idle-forward combat that let the character AI do most of the work, while leaving the player the decisions such as when to engage with enemies and where to position their squad.
Disclaimer
Not all assets in my personal projects were created by me. My go-to character model (Jammo the Robot) comes from the wonderful developer behind Mix and Jam. Animations were taken from Mixamo. UI assets were created by me.