THE GRAND MASTER
Background
Dates: September 2016 - April 2017
Platform: PC
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Role: Systems/Level Designer
Collaborators:
Producer: Andrew Purnell
Lead Gameplay Designer: John Salagaj
Lead Narrative Designer: Anthony Bennie
Designers: Dennis Ngo and Jed Meyers
Lead Programmer: Dmitri Kazanecki
Programmers: Dan Covert and Gabrielle Kenney
Lead Artist: Aaron Higgins
Artists: Ben Hiller and Amanda Deep
Intention: A merchant style resource management game with action adventure monster boss battles.
This game was made in my Senior year for my senior production project. For this project, I was placed into a team halfway through my Senior year and was tasked with helping them complete their game. The team was initially a team of 5 for the first semester of our Senior year. When I joined the team the team grew to 12 people consisting of a producer, some other designers, some artists, and some programmers. I helped create the dialogue system for the game and created level blockouts for the boss battles that were then passed off to our artist, Ben, who then filled the level with his artwork. At the end of the semester we uploaded our game to Steam Greenlight. I also created a weekly development blog for this project which is linked below.
Levels
These are the level blockouts that I made for The Grand Master followed by the finished levels with art assets made by our artist Ben Hiller. In the game we had two boss types, the worm and the troll. The worm's movement consisted of it burrowing underground and popping up in different parts of the map while the troll would slowly walk toward the player. Due to the slower and more predictable movement of the troll we decided to make the levels made for it smaller to add to the difficulty of the boss. The last of the levels, the dark elf level, was made for a boss that we had planned but did not have enough time to implement. Since the dark elf was originally planned to be our final boss, we decided to replace this with a level that would have both the troll and the worm. The worm would pop up around the outside of the map and attack the player, while the troll would be within the map following and attacking the player.
System Documentation
This is my document I created that explained our dialogue and personality system. When I joined the team, their game did not have any options to talk to the customer in the shop and raise how much they would pay for it. Realizing that adding in dialogue options would add a lot more depth and give the player more agency over the game, I decided to pitch the idea of this system. The team liked the idea so I began creating this document to describe to the team, and specifically the programmers, how I envisioned it working in our game. While we made many changes to this system over the course of development, we eventually were able to implement it.