Abolition

description

A first person shooter where you fight alongside past versions of yourself. Every time you die, a ghost gets added to the world, mimicking your exact actions of that playthrough. The game only focusses on the final boss fight.

roles

Caspar Gelderman: Ghost mechanic, animation implementation, player mechanics, shaders
Kris de Haas: Character & Boss concept art, UI art, post processing, lighting
Yasmin van Rooijen: 3D character models (boss & player character)
Levi Vermaning: Level Design, boss mechanic design, prototyping, motion capture, UI design
Mees van Tilburg: Sound Design, Music
Xander Stuivenberg: Church 3D model and 3D props
Ravi Bechoe: Boss implementation, cutscene implementation, general programming

process

For this project we had two wonderful devs who took over (almost) all programming tasks. This gave me room to try out a bunch of different things, like prototyping, motion capture and being able to do UI design with our 2D artist. Level design didn't go too well, because the church (for convenience of the modular pieces of the 3D model) had the stairs at the end of the room, past the boss.

This made it so people didn't know they could go up the stairs. In fact, they would actively avoid it. I tried to solve this by making platforms to go up at the side, but unfortunately the damage had already been done. With this I learned that the art has to work together with certain design decisions; Find a way to keep the modularity of the models, and also have it still be easily usable.

I also worked on boss mechanics and gameplay. Initially the boss had a set type of attacks it would loop through. Slam, swipe and spit. Our developers assured me this was for the best; You would be using your ghosts to attack the boss, so having him loop through the same attacks meant you had a tactical advantage. We found out through playtesting that it wasn't the case: People would just camp out in the corner and spam bullets. I opted for attacks based on distance and health, which made it so that if you walked too far away the boss would spit poison and hurt you. Playtesting saved our design, and made for a cool end product we're all really proud of.

Lastly, our game was playtested by at least 30 visitors at Night of the Nerds, where we got a lot of useful feedback.