Role: Solo Developer
Throw and retrieve your magnetic ball to make your way through enemies and platforms.
For this project, I intended to create a new concept for an FPS game. My approach was to alter the FPS formula by adding elements from fighting games (combos and parries) into the typical FPS Gameplay.
The original concept for the game included multiple weapons (the ball that can be seen in the gameplay, a spear, a boomerang,...) which players would swap to by just using its assigned button in the controller.
This would ultimately streamline changing between weapons, opposite to the industry standard of having a dedicated button to switch weapons. It also gave direction to the behavior of each weapon, as all weapon actions now had to be contextual.
For that purpose, the "Throwing - Returning" system was created.
The "Throwing - Returning" system could be summarized with a single word: Boomerang.
If we think of our weapon as a magical boomerang, it would perform 2 core actions, being thrown and returned.
Now that our weapon does different things depending on whether it's being held by our character or not, we have a simple contextual system for weapon behavior.​
If we add parries (hitting a weapon with a melee attack when it comes back to the player), we now have a full combat system.
Of course, the current prototype does not reflect the original vision for the project, as the time allocated to it was limited by my other academic commitments. This was reflected in the removal of any weapons other than the ball from the prototype.
However, my development process did include a fast-to-implement discovery, platforming.
Close to the end of development, I added a feature that displaced players when they grabbed the ball while it was going fast.
This feedbacked to players that they had just absorbed the kinetic energy of the ball, making it feel a lot more impactful.
However, the original code gave players the same displacement regardless of whether they were airborne or not, which felt bad. Players who were in the air should not be able to use friction with the ground to absorb the hit, thus they should be displaced more.
So, a few lines of code and I had players being thrown in the air by the ball. This was fun! It made me want to play with it.
I quickly created a small parkour space that players could play in and sent it to a friend for feedback. I got back a speedrun video, as my friend had been playing with the prototype to record the quickest attempt he could. The concept was engaging.
For some time I've been tempted to revisit this concept, as I've always seen a lot of potential in it. Looking back, it had difficulties caused by the friction between its scope and my own time limitations, but despite all that, I believe an interesting prototype was created.
