Sol Tenebrae was the second project I had ever worked on. Work took place over 6 months and I was one of the two programmers. I focused mainly on gameplay programming and level design.
The goal was to create our own rendition of a dungeon crawler game with a theme in eldritch horror. The player must travel travel down 4 areas, solving puzzles and fighting the bug infested halls to open the gate to the final boss.
Design
The game’s combat centred around a combo system. The player could switch between a total of three weapons: The Sycthe, the hammer and the sword. Each had an attack pattern of three strikes. When they player would switch weapon, it would hold their strike pattern. So the idea was that you could switch weapons mid combat to create new combos.
Each weapon had different strengths. The scythe was mostly about mobility, and the main focus was the dash attacks, the hammer was all about crown control. Knocking enemies up especially on the third stike and the sword was just about raw damage, multiple hitting strikes that would decimate foes.
Level design was mainly an exploration for ourselves. each route was something different. One was a gauntlet, that had sevel rounds the player had to fend off enemies. One was a riddle to solve, one was a mad dash to escape enemies and the other was a treacherous trap dodge fiesta. It was a fun way to explore and change how gameplay felt for each area.
My Contribution
As a student in my second year of university, I was still trying to figure out my goals. This was a chance for me to try out gameplay and level design. I created the combo system, the working UI for the game, and also programmed two of the routes along with the final boss.
Combat was a huge focus for the team, as we knew it was difficult to get right. We spent the majority of our time tweaking timings, and delays to try and make it fell impactful. However, combat is nothing if no enemies are present to fight.
This is where I also stepped in, I created most of the AI for the game. This involved, patrolling spiders that would search where they last saw you, a protector, that would take the damage for all nearby minions and also a bomb bug, that would chase the player to try and blow them to smithereens.
Watch the Trailer!
Post Mortem
Overall the project was difficult, it was a much smaller than intended team but we managed to change the project enough to fit our new capabilities. Being one of two of the only designers and programmers in the team meant that a lot of the game mechanics and feel was down to myself and the other designer.
The combat ended up okay, the weapons were a little clunky but it turned out alright. The only thing missing from the attacks were the animations and the VFX on them to really give them impact. however, the work me and the other designer put into it really shone.
Level design in the end was a little simplistic, and we managed to shoehorn ourselves into a weird corner where we didnt have much room for creativity. Bearing in mind that this version was the 3rd set of levels we had ever created, so by this time we realised that we did not have time to do it again, so we jsut worked on making it as polished as possible.
This project is where I feel I really came to grasp with design work. I started to analyse my work critically, and looking back on it now I would love to go back and create something similar as a side project, to really show myself that I’ve grown since this project. I feel like I could now do it the true justice it deserves.
Thomas Simpson - Game Designer 