Camera-Character-Controls

Nebula's Descent had me being the designer on a team with 4 programmers, 3 artists, and two mentors from Ubisoft. 

All of the decisions below(and more) were presented to the team in Design Documents, and then tweaked to make implementation simple and good looking with feedback from the team before work started on the features. This saved a lot of dev time and kept the team highly engaged with the project. 

The goal was to make a game that was challenging to play well, but very easy to pick up for even those who do not play videogames.

• The Cinemachine Camera is controlled by the game, being a fixed overhead view on the main game, and a follow camera that keeps the player and boss in focus on the boss fight. 

  • Camera shake and strict color-coding of enemies as purple and friendlies as blue is used to make the game easily readable and communicative to the player.

• The character has access to a gun for dealing damage, deployable crates that are used as cover, dashes for avoiding damage, and a throwable black-hole grenade that pulls in and damages enemies, bullets, and physics objects. 

  • This toolset is relatively easy to control but offers great variation on how to tackle encounters, hence making gameplay expressive.

• We realized via playtesting that players would ignore the right joystick and use their movement to aim their gun, and as a fix, removed the dedicated shoot button and made the shooting automatically happen when the right stick is pushed.

Coffin Mall's goal was to immerse the player in the low-resolution world by making it interactable and dynamic to allow the game to better scare and entertain the player.

• The Camera is player controlled when on foot, and limited to a straight-on first-person view when driving to constrain the player, fostering the horror element. The crosshair is hidden until the player looks at an interactable object in first person for further immersion.

• The Controls are purposefully simple: WASD+Mouse for movement/camera control, and left click to interact with objects.

• The Character is capable of interacting with or commenting on a large variety of objects in the world:

  • There's a context-based interaction system where if the player looks at certain objects, their character will comment on it. Clicking often results in an interaction or more comments

  • Objects are often interactable via a left-click. The player can carry ladders, press buttons, pet a cat and make extra comments

  • The shopping carts and signs around the mall are physics objects with dynamic sound generation, allowing them to convincingly react to being pushed or hit by the player or vehicles.