Death Reaver is an isometric hack and slash game where the player controls Kesh, a powerful demigod. Kesh grows stronger as he defeats opponents, and gains talent points as he levels up, talent points are then used to unlock powerful new abilities. The story summary is “A recently resurrected demigod uses his ancient sword to seek vengeance on humanity and surviving demigods of the past in 1950’s New York.” The game is basically a fully playable concept demo that was still in its early prototype phase when we moved on to other projects but I liked the concept we came up with and had good work put into it so still wanted to share what we had for it so far.

The game prototype was created in roughly 2 months worth of work time.

Creation Tools: 
The game was created in the Unity game engine, we used GitHub for version control, C# code written inside of Unity’s MonoDevelop environment, and most of the 3D assets were sculpted, painted, and rigged/animated in 3D-Coat and either Autodesk 3DS Max or Autodesk Maya.

My Contributions: 
For this game project, I took on the roles of Designer and Programmer. As a Designer, I worked with the team on design documentation while we all figured out what features, elements, and mechanics we wanted the game to have until concluding that we wanted to create an isometric hack and slash game giving the player levels and abilities to unlock as they kill enemies. We then went through the process of figuring out what unique abilities we felt like giving the player as talent skill options and balancing out how many talent points/levels it should take before getting the chance to unlock each ability and flushing out how exactly each talent ability should work while trying to make them all equally fun and powerful options in their own ways. I also worked with the design team on flushing out what enemies we wanted the player to face, what stats and abilities each enemy should have, and describing in detail what behavior each NPC character should have and how they interact with the player. Basically laid out how all of the different game systems and mechanics should interact with each other in an organized Game Design Document (GDD). I then worked with the team to map out the levels placing assets and key elements where needed in order to give the player a reason to explore and reward them with interesting sights to see and level up opportunities.

As a Programmer, one of the toughest challenges I faced was getting the NavMesh (Navigation Mesh) working properly. The NavMesh was basically an invisible ground layer used by the character pathing as a directional movement guide each time the player clicked on the map to make their player move or the enemy AI was supposed to run away/towards the player (this is how characters navigate around objects such as stationary walls or supply crates to get to the player’s location or their target movement location). By using the NavMesh the player could click to move around the map, nearby frightened museum visitors could run away from the player in a panic, and enemies such as the security guards could navigate to the player’s location in an effort to detain the player character or use lethal force shooting guns at the player from a distance. I also implemented the player level-up system collecting souls each time the player killed an enemy until leveling up and unlocking new abilities and adding all of the unique talent abilities for the player to use to move faster, deal damage in an AOE (area of effect) radius, shooting waves of damage in a straight direction, etc. making the player more powerful with each new ability unlocked. I also set up all of the user interface navigation elements and player saving, death, respawn, and level loading systems and got most of the other systems/mechanics that needed integration into the game to work properly.