About “Sovereignless”
During our third term in Van Arts we were tasked with making a complete game in 8 weeks, deciding who would be the producer, leads and the way we would work to get to a complete playable game with our given timeframe, we decided to call our small team Sundry Digital.
The team:
Juan Romero - Producer, Programmer, Tech Art, Environments
Jake Francis - Lead Programmer, Lighting, Environments
Maya Sorvala - Lead Artist, Character Modeler, Environments, Illustration
Uriel Flores - Character Artist, Environments, Material Artist
James Wei - Game Design, Character Artist, Environments
Daniela Joo - UI/UX, VFX, Concept Art, Webpage
Producing the game
The first task I had was not only to organize the team and have everyone on different roles but to create a solid plan on how we would communicate throughout the upcoming weeks, I decided the easiest and cleanest way would be to separate our small team into 2 big categories and list out our strengths and clear weaknesses that we had.
Alongside Jacob we created a perforce repository along with a naming convention for our files so the whole team could work together in a more efficient way. I also scheduled meetings two times a week so we could talk about development and implement changes on a very fast manner, given the small timeframe we had to create this game.
Implementing Houdini
Early in our development the team took the challenge of implementing as much Houdini as we could, every boss has different RBD simulations, from breaking the ground around them to smashing through the Stained Glass in the cutscenes. The simulations were done inside Houdini with different approaches depending on the results we wanted.
We baked the simulations inside Houdini, imported those FBX into Unreal and once inside the engine we created actors with moving collision boxes to handle the damage they would do to the character.
Coding the AI
We wanted to get all bosses working in a similar enough way so our player would recognize patterns and play around defeating every level while not feeling monotone, "Gaur the Warchief" is focused on rushing down the player and destroying his environment while other bosses like "Alba, The Deacon" have a bigger focus on dodging projectiles and being aware of your surroundings and distance to her.
Because of this the behaviour trees basically work around the same idea, finding the players distance to the enemy and doing diferent attacks in a random order with different luck chance. This attacks are a sequence of different instructions depending on the attack, for example Gaur has one attack where he will run towards the center stage and charge an attack giving the player enough time to hide behind a pillar so he destroys it and gets stunned, giving our players chance to attack him and catch a break from his oppresive attacks, meanwhile Alba will throw projectiles at the player forcing them to come up close and fight against her face to face .
