Mechanic Design
Tournamental
One of the most common practices in game design is to be able to create and implement new mechanics in already existing games. Taking this into consideration, we worked on Tournamental, a tile based game made on Unreal Engine 5, in Project & Portfolio III: Game Design (DES3). The sole purpose of working Tournamental was to get accustomed to working on documentation while designing and creating new mechanics in an already existing game!
There were two parts associated with working on Tournamental for DES3:
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Designing, documenting and implementing a new mechanic into the game - also known as the Navigator phase or Navigator Sprint
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Implementing another designers documented mechanic to work in coherence with the navigator sprint mechanic - also called the Driver Sprint
As part of my Navigator Sprint, I designed a new mechanic called the Mirror Mechanic. This mechanic involved another character-type entity in the game that copies the player characters' every movement, as illustrated in the image below.
The way this mechanic works is relatively quite simple:
An AI that has spawned somewhere in the space mirrors the player's every move - if the player moves left, it moves to its right. It can be used to either help the player open up new spaces to move to by pushing blocks or it can block the player character’s path and stop them from moving forward.
Below is an in-editor screenshot of the mechanic, along with a video that shows the mechanic in work and a quick explanation of the workings behind it.
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Following the successful completion of my Navigator Sprint, I was then asked to move on to the next phase - the Driver Sprint. In this stage, I was tasked with implementing another designers mechanic in union with my Navigator Sprint mechanic. As a result, I chose to implement the Ice Break mechanic - a mechanic developed by my classmate, Paden Hillegass.
Description of the mechanic: The Ice Break mechanic is a child of the tile and works as follows. Once the player steps on the ice tile it will crack and there will a visual and audio feedback for it and the player will continue to move along and see that the ice keeps cracking, however if the player steps on a cracked ice tile the tile breaks and the player falls and the level restarts. The goal is for the player to have to step on every ice tile only once to unlock the win tile and beat the level.
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PROJECT POST MORTEM
What Went Right:
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Ideas - Due to the vast number of games I have played, most of which were either puzzle or tile-based games, I was able to come up with quite a few ideas in a short time frame.
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Driver Sprint Mechanic Process - Due to the clearly provided instructions for the mechanic, I was able to quickly and efficiently create and implement the Ice Break tile mechanic in a short span of time.
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Copycat Mechanics - I was able to understand extremely well how the player moved in the game. This was because of how clear and concise the blueprint code was. As a result of this, I was able to make the copycat entity mimic the movements of the player as I had originally intended.
What Went Wrong:
In truth, there was surprisingly nothing that went wrong in this project. Having learnt from my previous experiences of improper planning and misinterpretation of blueprint code, I had spent the first few days going through the entirety of the project in order to ensure that I make little to no mistakes on this. As a result, my attempts at making both my mechanic as well as a colleagues mechanic went fairly smooth.