ANDREW SIPES
GAME DEVELOPER
SpellStorm is a third-person action-platformer where you can mix different elements to create new spells and unique gameplay. As the wizard, you'll embark on a quest to defeat challenging enemies, engage in mind-bending puzzles, and collect stars while mastering various spell combinations and gameplay mechanics along the way.
Platform: PC
Playtime: 5 mins
Engine: Unreal Engine 5.2
Roles: Gameplay Programmer, Combat Design, Team Lead
Development Duration: Sept 2024 - Nov 2024
Team Size: 5
Itch: codecrashers.itch.io/spellstorm
Download: SpellStorm
MY ROLE
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Developed the initial game concept and pitch.
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Designed and implemented spell combat mechanics, including the token system, spell abilities, and effects.
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Facilitated daily stand-up meetings, sprint planning, and milestone completion.
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Updated and managed project tasks in Jira.
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Consistently updated Confluence project information during development.
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Led the integration of User Interface, Animations, and Enemy AI into the core game play.
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Conducted comprehensive debugging to ensure stability and functionality before key milestone submissions.
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Developed solutions for complex challenges through effective team collaboration.
SPELL TOKEN SYSTEM
The spell token system was designed to give player's an engaging expierence, with a variety of different effects and options to enhance their gameplay. Our goal was to give players the ability to play how they want with very few limitations other than the amount of available combinations at any given time. To accomplish this we developed a universal token cooldown, and give the player 2 tokens per element: Fire, Earth, Water, Wind. The player can then either use single tokens, or combine tokens to create a different spell
These were the spell combinations we came up with:
Element 1 | Element 2 | Spell | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
Wind | Wind | Tornado | Creates a tornado that will lift all enemies and the player in the air that are within its radius |
Water | Water | Water Wave | AOE effect that knocks all enemies back from the player |
Earth | Earth | Earth Bubble | Creates invincible bubble around the player for a short time. |
Fire | Fire | Flame Cone | Creates a flamethrower in front of the user that will do initial damage and apply burn damage over time |
Water | Wind | Rapid Dash | Gives the player a small dash in the direction the choose. |
Earth | Wind | Rock Shotgun | AOE Earth damage that affects all enemies in its range |
Earth | Water | Mud Slide | Creates a mud pit in front of the caster that will slow enemies down that walk inside |
Fire | Wind | Fire Tornado | Creates a tornado that uses suction to draw enemies into its radius, and does initial impact damage and burn damage over time |
Fire | Water | Steam Cloud | Creates a steam cloud around the wizard that prevents enemy's from detecting the player |
Fire | Earth | Meteor | Calls a meteor from the sky and deals AOE damage to all enemies that overlap, and does burn damage over time |
Fire | NotUsed | Fireball | Projectile that does initial fire damage and burn damge over time |
Earth | NotUsed | EarthShield | Creates a platformable object that also acts as as a shield |
Water | NotUsed | Waterball | Projectile that does initial water damage and can grow platforms |
Wind | NotUsed | WindGust | Projectile that will lift an enemy in the air for a short time |
HOW DOES THE SPELL TOKEN SYSTEM WORK?
In the center of the screen is a crosshair, that also operates as a visual indicator for tokens are queued and tokens that are available. The center shows the queued tokens, for example if you queued a single fire token, the left side of the center square would be colored red. If you had a fire token and an earth token queued, you would see a red and brown in the center, the left side of the square corresponds with the first token queued, and the right side corresponds with the second token queued. If you cleared the queue the middle would turn back to white. If you have tokens on cool down, their corresponding indicator would not be show in the user interface.
Here you can see how the tokens correspond, the left side of the cross hair has 2 Fire tokens, the right side has 2 Water tokens, the bottom has 2 Earth tokens, and the top has 2 Wind Tokens.
Now you can see when the player queues 2 Earth Tokens, the middle turns brown, displaying the queued tokens. After Earth Bubble is cast, the middle turns white and the tokens are now not visible
BEHIND THE SCENES
To make this work in code, we're using uInt8s to determine the status of each token, then we pass them as references in several methods to ensure these values remain consistent through the system.
First we check to see if the token that was requested to be queued is available, then the spell queue array is updated with the proper element type. There is a special condition when both tokens are queued which goes through a separate verification.
When the player decides to cast their spell, we use nested switches to determine which combination of elements equates to which spell to use. Since the order of the elements doesn't matter, we account for this making sure the order is arbitrary in code. Once the spell is determined, we set the ability that we plan to cast, then determine which tokens need to get placed into cooldown state.
Once the spell is casted, we check which elements were queued, then place them into a std::queue which tracks the pointer addresses of the tokens that have been spent. Using an event timer, we pop these out of the queue in the order of which they were placed and update them to being available again.
