Abstract: This is an article on the combat design process and design decisions in my capstone game Asurya's Embers.
I would like to give thanks to (in last name alphabetical order) Tanishq Chawla, Sean Ervin, Yufei "Faye" Tian, Yousha “Yusa” Qu, Kangni “Canny” Yuan, Layne Zhang, and Shuo “Shaw” Zhang for their assistance in combat design throughout the development of Asurya’s Embers. I would also like to thank our stakeholders, Steve Stringer, Mike Porter, and Martin Sawkins for their detailed and generous feedback on every milestone. Special thanks to Hugo and Evan from iD Software, and Antonio and Nic from Santa Monica Studio for their industry feedback on our project. The combat experience of the game would not be the same without them.
Introduction
Early in the development of Asurya’s Embers (development name SunSlayer), the lead design team identified that combat experience would be crucial to our game. At the start of production, we took a large amount of time and effort to ideate and refine the designs of our Bow and Arrow Design and Enemy Designs. Later in the development, after the implementation of AI Implementation and Character art had started, we began to investigate the Combat Dynamic Design to elevate the gameplay experience.
In this article, I will be focusing on the three major areas of combat design in Asurya’s Embers – Bow and Arrow Design, Enemy Designs, and Combat Dynamic Design. I will discuss our design processes, the challenges we ran into (there are many), and what are the solutions that we came up with to tackle these challenges. After these discussions, I will wrap up the article with a self-reflection on the major design decisions and solutions that we settled on.
Bow and Arrow Design
Inspirations and References
Bow and Arrow combat is not uncommon in video game titles, I love the variety of combat styles that a bow provides in a dynamic combat environment. It has the ability to adapt to fast-paced combat sequences like a gun and the ability to accommodate stealth combat gameplay. A bow in combat also displays grace and elegance with the tenacity of a bow and the agility of the arrow.
That being said, even with the popularity of a bow-and-arrow gameplay experience, designing an ability-based, first-person, bow-and-arrow shooter game that plays into a unique light-and-shadow mechanic has been an interesting experience.
We started off with the big question: Do we want a First-Person perspective or a Third-Person perspective? Each presents itself with various Pros and Cons, as shown in the table below and we can find a considerable amount of references for both options.
After a series of thorough considerations, we decided on a First-Person perspective. Our primary concern was with limited artists and work hours, we do not wish to put additional stress on our artists to model, rig, and animate a main character.
With designing a First-Person game in mind, we put together a list of game references that our team can break down and analyze.
Designing the Abilities
Our Bow in Asurya’s Embers has three different abilities – Scatter Arrow, Explosive Arrow, and Black Hole Arrow. The process of designing these abilities started with team-wide brainstorming with supporting references.
After the initial brainstorming finished, the lead team moved on to evaluate the technical feasibility as well as gameplay compatibilities of each ability. After a round of filtering, another round of prototyping and brainstorming began. We iterated and prototyped more based on their ideas – and finally ended up with the current three.
Designing the "Feel" of the Bow
After deciding on the First-Person perspective, the bow as the Player Weapon became the center of attention, thus, the game feel of the bow became an integral part of the game experience. Throughout the process of designing the bow, I keep asking myself these questions:
Where should the bow be positioned on the screen?
How fast should I shoot?
What are the bow conveyance and feedback?
What are the control mappings?
What is some important feedback for the game feel?
In order to answer these questions, we’ve looked at various FPS games and their camera perspectives and weapon positioning.
Later, we ran into issues regarding “the bow feeling numb” – we then investigated bows in games that felt good, for example, various bows in Destiny 2. We identified VFX and SFX related to the bow actions, as well as diagetic feedback for player actions on the bow itself.
Most importantly, we studied the control scheme associated with their bows that provides the optimal player feel when controlling the bow.
Enemy Design
Inspirations and References
We have taken inspiration from two different perspectives – Narrative Inspirations and Gameplay Inspirations. Our game takes place in the Himalayan regions, which consists of a wide range of cultural and religious influences. In order to design enemies that fit the narrative scope of the game, our team of designers researched different mythological stories from various cultures.
Other than the narrative design angle, we also designed our enemies according to the archetypes needed to complete our core combat dynamics. Other than referencing the games we mentioned above and all the classic enemy types. We took a closer look at the enemy types in Doom Eternal. I drafted up a table template for the team to brainstorm and consider while coming up with ideas.
Identifying the Archetypes
Through our research, we have identified several key enemy archetypes crucial to our combat experience. Our decision was heavily influenced by the design of Doom enemy types and Horizon Zero Dawn enemy types.
Fodder | Charger | Pusher | Tank |
With these enemy types identified, we iterated another round of enemy designs that fit the gameplay of Asurya’s Embers. Furthering our design iterations, we started considering enemy metrics and player combat metrics. These are some of the questions we had in mind while designing enemy metrics:
Is the enemy moving on-ground or in-air?
Is the enemy Melee or Ranged?
Is the enemy fast-paced or slow-paced?
Does this enemy have a weak point? If so, what it is?
Is the enemy particularly weak against a certain Bow ability?
I initialized a table with criteria that the team can design these enemies with. The team compiled all the design information onto a table with metrics I set up, as shown below.
This is a list of the enemies that we ended up with after three rounds of iterations and lead review. We finalized our enemy types so that we can move forward to our production pipeline.
Combat Dynamic Design
One of our core gameplay loops is the first-person shooting experience with a bow and arrow. In order to complete the gameplay loop and identify our minute-to-minute “fun”, I deconstructed existing games for their combat compositions, experimented with different compositions in-engine, and adjusted the combat balance sheet during my experiments.
Deconstruct Existing Games
As mentioned above, we referenced Doom Eternal and Horizon Zero Dawn for our enemy archetypes. However, I am looking for a combat pacing that is slightly different. I turned to God of War: Ragnarok for its combat pacing.
After looking at early combat sequences of Ragnarok, I’ve identified that lots of the melee enemies can rush toward the player, and most ranged enemies hang back around their original positions and never leave their dedicated zones.
After some experimentation in-engine, I realized that the same design philosophy might not work for Asurya’s Embers. God of War is a third-person perspective game where the main character wields a primarily melee weapon with a ranged, secondary attack; Asurya’s Embers is a first-person perspective game in which the primary weapon is a bow and arrow and the melee ability is rarely emphasized.
Before the overhaul of combat composition, our levels consisted of Melee Toadies as our Fodder enemies, and Ranged Toadies as a pusher enemy. I decided that it would be better to counter our ranged player weapon with a ranged fodder enemy for the easy kills – therefore, turning our combat composition around. To do that, not only do the level designers need to change the number of each enemy in each combat arena, but I also need to tweak enemy stats from their blueprints.
As a result:
Ranged Toady as our updated Fodder Enemy would have the lowest TTK, slowest movement, and the easiest for the Player to counter.
Melee Toady as our updated Pusher Enemy has the second lowest TTK, more agile movement, and longer range detection, forcing the Player to move around the arena more.
Abyssal (Beetle) as our Charger enemy is the easiest to kill but the hardest to target based on its explosive nature and fast-moving patrol lines.
Pango as our Tank and partial charger enemy is the most difficult to kill, with more variations in its behaviors, and it can also traverse the whole arena following the Player.
Post-Mortem
What Went Well
Team Creativity and Communication
Enemy Idea iterations Efficiency
Combat Dynamic Iterations and Improvements
What Went Wrong
Unaccounted for on-ground and in-air AI movement conflicts
Enemy AI iterations came in a little late to the production process
Even Better If…
Branching out to different archetypes
Consider conflict between enemy behaviors
Set up combat testing zoo even earlier
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