Eternal Circus
Capstone Project at UCSC
Tools:
Unreal
Blueprint
Niagara
Photoshop
Role: VFX Artist, 3D Modeler, Game Designer, Creative Lead, Producer
Led a team of 6 to create a dodge'm up where your mech dances with missiles
Roles & Contributions
Creative Director
I was in charge of the game's direction throughout the project. Constantly reviewing gameplay, art, sound, and UI/UX.
3D Modeling
Worked with the team's technical artist to make the player character model using Blender.
Producer
Led a team of 6 and managed their workload throughout the project. We did a 1 week sprints using JIRA and Google Sheets
Project Details
What if Itano Circus, but a Video Game
Mecha (Giant Robots) is one of my favorite genre of Anime and the idea for this game originally came from "what if I made a video game about dodging missiles"
(Footage from Eureka Seven)
Movement
Core Mechanic #1: Outmaneuver Missiles
Players need to move or dash away from the missiles until the EC Drive is ready.
The basic movement of the game had a few iterations where it started out as a simple WASD directional control.
We also tried a steer control where W moved the mech forward and the A and D rotated the character. While the steer control introduced a more interesting movement to the player, a lot of the playtester found the sudden control swap.
We eventually settled on a version where WASD rotates the character towards direction pressed (similar to Kirby Air Riders's alternate control)
EC Drive
Core Mechanic #2: Enter EC Drive and dodge missiles to gain energy.
This is a new mechanic that wasn't in the prototype that lets the player gather energy while interacting with the missiles.
This started out as Superhot-like time dialation and went through many iterations in terms of amount of slowdown. We eventually settled on a value that doesn't let the player feel like they're compeltely out of control during the mode.
We also spent a good time adjusting when the player can activate the EC Drive. Initially it worked like a resource bar where you can activate the mode at any time. However to give player time to interact with missiles outside of EC drive and not soley rely on it, the final version only lets you activate the EC drive when the gauge is full.
Melee Attack
Core Mechanic #3: Use the energy to perform a melee attack.
Once you gain enough energy, you can perform a Melee Attack to progress the main goal of defeating the boss.
Three Bosses
Three bosses were created following three common tropes in mecha anime. Laser beams, beam swords, and bits(beats)
Missile AI
A lot of work went into making the missiles feel engainging and chaotic, yet fair.
Something new we added in this version of the game is making the missiles enrage if you dodge or graze them. The missile glows orange and starts to fly a bit faster than before, but if you dodge again, you gain a considerable amount of additional energy. This was added in to encourage players to interact with missiles further and truely fulfill the goal of making your mech to "Dance with Missiles"
Cut Content
One of the goals of the project was to have a Superhot-like replay where player can watch their action in real time (perhaps from interesting angles that could make the dodges look more scenematic).
However as we progressed on the project we made the decision to cut this due to the following reasons. First, we kept on tripping over creating new mechanics or animation with the concern that it might not look good in the replay. Second, the amount of time and the technical hoops the programmers would have to jump through were too much in terms of scope.
As a producer and creative director of the game, I decided the team should spend more time making and polishing the core game, and not splitting the development time on the replay system.
Godot Prototype
A Godot prototype was created prior to the greenlight pitch.