Prototype Development

Clockwork Sword

The last two weeks have been spent on a prototype for a game called Clockwork Sword. The game is a 3D isometric dungeon crawler focusing on weapon customization. The game is being made for the games capstone program at the University of Utah and will serve as my final and largest project in my education. Currently, we are in the prototyping phase in which we have two weeks to develop a prototype in teams of around 15 and create a presentation for evaluation by an industry panel. After that point half of the prototypes will be cut and the teams will be merged/reallocated such that we will have about 8 months and teams of about 30 to complete the games that passed the prototyping phase.

Attack System

I was responsible for developing the attack system that would be used by both the player and enemies to deal damage. It needed to support attack sequences (think something like stab, stab, slash), ranged & melee attacks, and be entirely controllable in the editor such that a designer could make a unique weapon or enemy attach without assistance from programmers.

I made a simple abstract class for all attacks that supported start attacking, stop attacking, and is attacking methods plus related events (like on attack finished). The start and stop would handle all input and the is attacking & events would allow the user to know when attacks were completed.

The attacks were broadly categorized into two types: coordinators (attacks that would trigger other attacks), and single attacks (attacks that would deal damage and could trigger animations). The coordinators could be used to composite attacks and the timings between them. The single attacks were build with animations in mind so, they could optionaly be bound to an animation that could trigger when damage was dealt and how long the attack would take.

Inventory

I was also responsible for making the player inventory and mode-switching system. This would handle the contents of the inventory, the spawning & attaching of the weapon meshes, and the handling of the player's current mode, its pressure, and its attacks.

I built the inventory as a singleton so that it could be easily accessed and modified, and since the player was also a singleton it was able to attach all the attacks & meshes directly to their appropriate sockets.

Workshop

Originally, our workshop menu was going to be 2D and handled jointly between a 2D artist and another programmer; however, since we only had one 2D artist on the team, they were overworked and unable to produce the necessary art at the needed quality for the primary game mechanic, so I was decided that I would take over and create a diegetic UI to replace the current 2D ui. This new UI would also feature tooltips, which were lacking in the previous version.

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