Poet Mage

is an experimental project where I apply my theories on level design, whilst prototyping gameplay.

Dissecting the emotional core

The value of entertainment products like games depend on the quality of the emotional ride.

Even primary emotions can appear in many forms. Drawing a word-web helped me find the ‘style’.

Early draft of the cores.
PM_EHumility
PM_ERespect
PM_ESelfShame

Core-context in gameplay

The core experience is always given context in narrative and mechanics (M). This in turn gives rise to emergent player behaviour (D).

I sketched projections of the thoughts and and experiences I want the player to feel (A). This is essential to level design, for it gives a heading as to how it is to facilitate the core eperience.

Page featuring the brainstorm on Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics. Click to enlarge.
Page featuring bits of information, motivations and strategies I want the players to have at certain points in the experience. Click to enlarge.

Gameplay programming

Planning

I like to  designing levels with the mindset of finding the ‘game space formula’. Meaning, finding what level requirements must be, in order to make the mechanics fun and meaningful to the core experience. To this end, I quickly prototyped the mechanic for which I want to design the space. In combat, the player and enemies hurl words at one another. These come from a pool of sentences.

The first step is to understand which attributes and actions both the player and enemies have. After the sketching enemy behaviour on paper, I made a rough UML class diagram.

Class diagram UML. Click to enlarge.

Enemy AI

Before we can shoot projectiles, enemies must be able to perceive and chase the player. Unreal Engine does this through a combination of features:

  • an AI controller;
  • a behaviour tree;
  • a blackboard;
  • behaviour tree tasks (BTT);

and logic therein.

A behaviour tree in UE5 in progress. Click to enlarge.
Top-level logic on projectile behavior in Unreal Engine's blueprint. The first function makes sure the text is always facing the camera, while the second function moves the text towards the player object.

Printing insults

At first, I wasn’t sure how the enemies would yell at you–by words or by letters? I made a prototype where individual letters of a word would be printed. However, this compromised the readability of a word–let alone printing a whole sentence!

Enemy (red) chases and fires a word at the player (blue). UE5.

This evolved into printing sentences from a pool, into word-by-word attacks. Setting this up while keeping track of the next word and whether or not a sentence was finish proved to be a fun challenge!

Shooting by words, UE4.

World paper prototype

The pace of interaction and spacing of objects are mainly dictated by mechanics of resources. To test this, I sketched a landscape and UI to keep track of the player’s resources.

Large magnets represent settlements, while the pawns indicate combat encounters. To the right, I keep track of the inventory, health, inspiration, cooldowns and more. Click to enlarge.

Gallery

“Clicketh to enlarge”

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