YoungBuck$ Combat Design - Devlog #1 - Concepting

📍Intro

Hi, welcome to my Combat Design development journal 👋. In this journal, I'll be documenting my team's and my own progress throughout our coursework in Combat Design taught by Troy Johnson 💪. The goal of the class is to have an action game demo that, by the end, should demonstrate a fundamental understanding of how to make good design choices from a combat perspective. In other words...

We'll be making some awesome, action-packed gameplay.

🧭 Overview

This project started with assembling teams and discussing an overarching idea. I was late to the table since I was sick (on week one 😭) but happy to hop into the project. My team had decided to work towards the following idea:

• 🤔Similar feel to...

  • Zenless Zone Zero

  • Monster Hunter

• 🤺Player wields...

  • A heavy chainsaw greatsword

• 🗺️World is...

  • Eldritch Horror

• 🎬Player does...

  • Combos

    • Well-timed combo chains lead to

      • More powerful combos

      • Faster combos

And thus, we called ourselves the Young Buck$ 😎

⚒️Work done

Knowing that our game would be in Unreal Engine 5 and an action game, we spent the first week setting up our environment. For version control, we opted into Perforce and got to work in our depot right away with the GAS (Gameplay Ability System). Having never used GAS, a lot of work was put into getting comfortable with using it. I decided to make a basic dash ability that looked like this in blueprints:

Most of the other work was adjusting references in the details panel since the beauty of GAS is that you can make sure all of your gameplay abilities and states are modular and scalable down the line. I decided to experiment a bit further and add a dash attack, which involved attaching one of our animations to get called when a player input left click while in a dashing state.

Combine that with my 3 other teammates' work, and we had a light attack combo chain ⚡, a 'rage meter' buildup 👺, a dash 💨, and a dash attack 💨⚔️.