Melee Combat | Oscar Hildebrand

First Person Melee Combat Design

A First Person Melee Action RPG Adventure

Goals for this Piece

In this piece I wanted to create a combat-intensive First-Person Melee oriented experience set in Dracula's Castle. Due to technical issues I scoped it down to an old ruin with inspirations from Weathertop and Barad-dûr.

Specification

Credits

Forsaken Template was created by Tony Palm
Assets shared by Gustav
Good Sky from Unreal Market

Project Details

Developed in 6 weeks
Unreal Engine 5
Fantasy Action-RPG
First person
Linear Experience

What I Did

Level Design
Ability Design
Combat Design
Mood/Lighting
Blockout Models
Scripting

Software Used

Unreal Engine 5
- Forsaken Template
- Good Sky
Blender
Photopea
Inkscape

Overview

Pre-Production

Getting Started

With my goals revolving around creating Interesting Combat Scenarios and Expanding upon the established template with new opportunities.

I started by making a list of abilities from both Vermintide II and Dark Messiah to see what I could re-create in the template, and what was outside of my scope.

References

After brainstorming in an online dashboard and gathering references from videos as well as images, I created a moodboard of references for the environment, new interactable objects, and mechanics for the player.

My focus for the references were for Player Abilities, Shape Language, and Combat Design.

Blockout

Back to the Basics

I started with setting the metrics for minimum and maximum sizes for combat areas that felt good to move around in.

These would be the foundational pieces for every encounter from here on out, helping to quickly create new combat rooms to quickly iterate on combat spaces.

Setting the Mood

To hark back to classic Fantasy settings and stories already told, I wanted the player to move through a prison/dungeon as they offer great environments for onboarding.

I quickly created an onboarding section with my metrics, and began blocking out the first few rooms as a diorama for the rest of the level.

Planning Combat

After I had decided on the mood and metrics, I began to block out combat areas for potential final designs.

Since Melee Combat templates tend to have simple AI, Cover Islands would be less about hiding from incoming fire, and more about leading the enemy into favorable positions.

Game Design

Expanding Gameplay

Grappling Hook

In the moodboard I showcased my inspiration for a grappling hook mechanic. Originally intended to be more complex, I pivoted and kept it simple.

The key focus was to help with vertical movement and to break up the progression from simple stairways to something more interactive.

Interactables

Within the template there exists several systems that are player interactables, from pickup-actors to destructible items.

As such, I wanted to expand on that system, creating more interactable systems that the player can use within the level.

Explosive Barrels

One aspect many players, myself included, enjoy about games such as Left for Dead, Vermintide, and Dark Messiah is the ability to deal with several enemies at once. As such, I would combine the Firebolt I created with the existing Interactable item in the template (the Pick-up Actor) to create an explosive barrel that explodes when it comes in contact with fire.

Bolt Types

The original options the players have to deal with multiple enemies was unfortunately limited even with the inclusion of certain environmental hazards.

As such I wanted to explore opening up two new avenues players can deal with these enemies: The Fire Bolt and the Ice Bolt.

The Ice Bolt aimed to offer the player the ability to trip opponents who run across the patch of ice it creates.

The Fire Bolt aimed to deal a moderate amount of damage in an Area of Effect that can be combined with the Explosive Barrels for a satisfying combo.

The decision was made later to make all arrows share a single pool of arrows as a resource since the Ice Arrow was too strong during gameplay feedback. As such, I wanted to limit their uses.

Roadblocks

Development Difficulties

The Crash

As mentioned; I ran into an unfortunate computer crash that erased all of the work I had done that day. As such, I was essentially a week and a half behind my original plan due to the next week's scheduling issues as well.

To overcome this, I had to change the plan quickly. I would remove several puzzles I had planned based around the arrows, as well as a boss fight finalé, and a third of the level in total that were meant to be the player going inside the actual citadel and fighting their way to the top.

The rooms I had on paper were still there and as such were repurposed and carefully selected as to what would fit the new thematic of the level.

This would however open up new opportunities for how I would build up the environment and the overall thematic of the level.

Environment

What first needed to change was the environment. The onboarding section was originally meant to be an indoor dungeon, but thanks to some feedback from my colleagues I removed the roof and created new vantage points throughout the level.

This actually elevated the design as I now had a good mix of indoor/outdoor scenery that both helped lead the player and create moments of discoverability to encourage exploration. It made the experience a lot more linear, but the pros outweighed the cons of linearity in this instance.

Explosion Crash

Since I wanted to create Explosive Barrels that could chain react from one barrel to the other, it became an issue where they would infinitely loop one barrel into the next and crash Unreal.

To solve this, I created a new Custom Event which was the trigger for 'Chain Reactions', making it only trigger once in the barrels lifespan so that no matter how many barrels told it to explode, it could only activate it's Chain Reaction Event once.

Leading the Player

The Tower

When I pivoted the design of the piece to be a ruin with exterior design and not just be inside of a dungeon/castle, I needed to have something to help guide the player throughout the journey; that is when I decided on a Tower which was the end goal of the level.

Utilizing this throughout the level, I made sure to design the main path in such a way where you keep seeing the tower for new angles throughout the experience, so that the player can experience the same scene several times without feeling fatigued.

The Ruins

During playtest, I always aimed to make short term goals in each room where the player knew exactly where they wanted to go.

To enhance this sense of progression, I often gave the player vantage points at the end of the rooms as well to see the journey they had just made in that room.

It also became a delicate balance of not giving the player too much information, limiting or expanding vision depending on each combat arena's design intent.

Light

Since I wanted to make a moodier setting I substituted the dark castle vibe for a moonlit night as the contrast from blue and orange with purples would be lend itself well into guiding the player to served spaces.

The moon was used to uplift the scene together with the mist, the ambient light helping with creating a night time scene without losing out on visibility.

Ability Retrospective

Since I needed to cut down on areas of Game Design to play catchup with the Level Design lost, I boiled down the scripting and the mechanics to the essentials.

Crossbow Bolts. The system uses a general pool of arrows no matter the bolt type. In future iterations of this piece I would have either a cooldown system for the unique arrow types or different arrow resources for each special bolt, as currently the Ice Bolt is a bit too strong for the resources it costs to use it. In addition, the arrow casings around the level would be swapped out for an Ammo Box similar to how it is done in Vermintide, as it creates more elegant solutions for ammo placements.

Health Regeneration. The template has a very generous health regeneration system, one I was curious to alter; but those plans were cut due to time constraints. The change I wanted to experiment with was the speed of the health regeneration - as well as create a "gray health" system. A system which tracks the amount of damage a player has taken, and regenerates some of it when the player deals damage to an enemy. This would aim to increase proactivity - and encourage a more aggressive playstyle that I was interested in exploring.

Kick. A lot of the interactable objects use physics, mass, and weight - and the kick operates on the same axis. The knockback against enemies in the template can be a bit on the weaker side - and sometimes it can be hard to use the kick to knock them into spike boards or similar hazards. Though I wanted to tinker with it, it quickly became a rabbit hole of finding the precise right weight/mass/force relationship with all the objects in the game to create the experience I was looking for - and for a level of this size, this would have to be sidelined for a future project.