Shizen
For this school project we had to work in a duo to make a game (no target audience, so just whatever we liked to make).
Concept
The game is a small Open World adventure that focuses on combat and a few puzzles. Combat is based on elements. The idea behind the combat is to make an easy combat system with many possibilities. The goal of the game is to destroy all Chaos cores to bring back life to the world.
Story
The story behind the game is that you're the god of nature Shizen who has awakened from an extremely long sleep that was caused by being weakened. While the god's part of the land still looks good and alive, the rest of the land seems to have decayed thanks to the Army of Chaos. They've planted these chaos cores across the land to flood the land in a deadly miasma. As the player is supposed to clear the chaos cores the god also would need their powers restored.
Itch.io project link
Play our game at:
Shizen (main character's name) model
Because we did not want a realistic or cartoony style, we went with a stylized one. It was also easier to find assets that could fit with this for the scene.
The images below are the high poly model.
Here the clothes are added on the low poly model and polygons that were invisible (underneath the clothing) are not in this model anymore (saved it in another file to re-use for the villagers in the scene who will have even less polygons).
Here I let Substance painter bake the high poly model on top of the low poly model for the normal map. Substance painter does it way more seamlessly in an easy way than XNormal or 3DSMax.
The left symbol is supposed to be a more abstract version of a leaf which I used on Shizen's boots, belt and shoulder pad.
The right side shows the Japanese signs that seem to be spoken out loud as "shizen" which means nature.
Shizen mood board
We decided to show a different side of this nature. Usually people seem to imagine the god of nature is a beautiful woman (just try searching for "god of nature" in google images), but we decided to go with a muscular bald man.
Nature is powerful and sometimes gentle, sometimes definitely not so gentle. The baldness seemed to amplify the existence of the muscles visually and it saved a few polygons (we had to export it to WebGL to post it on itch.io without exceptions).
Nature is powerful and sometimes gentle, sometimes definitely not so gentle. The baldness seemed to amplify the existence of the muscles visually and it saved a few polygons (we had to export it to WebGL to post it on itch.io without exceptions).
Shizen in action
Most of the movement works as intended. Shizen may walk jittery on some slopes, but there should not be a way to climb a slope that is too steep.
The combat is mostly animation event based, which I will change to a little animation event based the next time I do something like this. Animation events at the end or start of some animation sometimes trigger and sometimes don't so I had to put the events further in the animation as well, which is inconsistent and inconvenient.
While working with many animations, the animator in Unity started to get really messy, so I started to group animations in layers. The right image shows what is in the Jump&fall layer.
The player movement can be altered quite easily through the inspector. I used a Character Controller component for the moving, but I made my own gravity and grounded checks so I had more control over them. There were a few details I could not finish (hence the jittery slope movement), but similar issues seemed to be worse in our case with Unity's own grounded checks and gravity.
A few projects ago I learned about [SerializeField]. When this is put instead of the usual public/private, it will make the value private, but visible and editable in the inspector.
It really helps keeping other scripts from touching values when it needs to be visible in the inspector.
Environment mood board
Our inspiration sources
Elden ring
-Dodge
-Stamina
-Boss fight
The Legend of Korra
-Elemental combat
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild
-Open world (but smaller)
-Free to go wherever you want in the world
League of Legends
-The 2D art style to 3D (God fist Lee Sin as one of the inspiration sources for our main character)
God of War
-Kratos as inspiration for our main character
Scoping
Because the complete idea is way too big for the time we have, we had to pick a piece of the complete project we were going to work on.
The main character:
-Moving
-Jumping
-Dying & hit points
-Dashing (also available while in the air)
-Earth normal attack combo
-Earth heavy attack combo
-Water normal attack combo
-Water heavy attack combo
-A few voice lines
-Custom model, rig & textures
-SFX (footsteps, jump, landing, attack element sounds)
The enemies:
-Vision range with cone
-Vision range increases while provoked and decreases after with a delay
-Chasing
-Attacking (both long ranged and close ranged types of enemy)
-Patrolling
-Dying & hit points
-Free asset store model
Environment:
-Kitbashed flora (as in free assets from the asset store in Unity)
-Custom Japanese style houses
-People (one model, one texture and Mixamo rig + animations)
-Custom terrain & level design
-The enemies
-Dungeons will have a chaos core without any damaging properties
We do not have the time to include a boss so many enemies will spawn in its place.
There will be a simple puzzle in the dungeon.
Music will be copyright free music and sound effects will be a mix between recorded and downloaded free.
Leveling up/unlocking elements for such a short experience is too much, so we won't implement that.
The final scene for now in which the player can wander around and explore locations they have been in before in the chaos tainted land.
Thank you for watching!
