Gaol
Tools: Unity / Duration: December 2017-present / Team size: 5
Gaol is a narrative-driven dungeon crawler with a distinct, minimal art style and a focus on deliberate, ranged combated. In Gaol, the player must journey through a bleak and surreal afterlife where the souls of the dead are imprisoned in an ancient and monolithic fortress known only as The Gaol.
Gaol began as a collaboration between Jill Knight (writing) and Josiah Hunt (design, programming) and myself (art, design, programming, narrative) in early 2018. We’re in pre-alpha right now! This post will certainly change as more of the game is built out.
My Responsibilities (so far)
Game Designer:
· Narrative design: work with writers to establish the broad strokes end-to-end flow of the adventure.
Scripting:
· Created dungeon generation system.
· Created enemy AI for Executioner
Visual:
· Designed/modeled/rigged characters: Unknown Prisoner (main character), Executioner (enemy), Crawler (enemy)
· Created/implemented all UI
April 2018 – Implementation of ranged combat and a “charged shot”. I’ve never made anything with combat before so this project has been a huge learning experience for me! The gif above is the end result of a ton of iterations to way our combat looks and feels. But for a minute I want to do a quick flashback to a few months ago *drumroll*...
…to what I’m pretty sure is the first implementation of our combat system (side note: If you’re wondering about the decision to go from top-down to 3rd person over-the-shoulder perspective, my fellow designer and all-around great-dude, Josiah Hunt, has a nice write-up on his site: http://www.josiahhunt.com/gaol.html)
I think one of the most egregious issues with this first example is a general lack of anxiety (or interest) concerning the fight itself. The player character moves so much faster than the Executioners that they can easily stay out of range and avoid danger. The Executioners have significantly more health than the player which should tip the scales away from the player but because the encounter is so easy, instead of feeling disempowering, the fact that the enemies take a long time to whittle down actually diminishes the tension by prolonging an uninteresting encounter.
Speeding up the executioners doesn’t work for me here because it fundamentally hurts their characterization. Being towering and lumbering sells the idea that they are powerful, scary and unshakable. Similarly I really wanted to keep the relationship where the player was ranged and the executioners were not. I wanted players to avoid the executioner but be fearful of the moment they finally came within range of that axe
The answer came (as it always does) from sifting through games for industry analogues. Something I took from earlier Resident Evil games was the deliberate decision between moving and attacking. Aiming drops the player speed down to around half the speed of the Executioner, meaning that every moment you are lining them up for a shot, they are rapidly gaining on your position. The inclusion of the charged shot was another way to capitalize on this relationship of speed vs attack. A charged shot will do double damage, but forces the player to stay in a low-mobility state for even longer, sacrificing safety for the chance and ending the encounter faster.
The enemy AI is actually the same behavior between the top-down and the 3rd person examples but the way the aiming/movement system works now puts the player in peril much more often and opens up a very simple fight into an opportunity for the player to make a series of meaningful decisions.
