CHARACTER DESIGNS | GAMEPLAY VIDEO | POSTMORTEM

Deicide is a 3rd person team arena combat game featuring unique characters and fast paced, ability based combat where teamwork and timing triumph.

Date: March 2019

Team Size: Solo

Role: Creator

Engine: Unreal 4

Deicide is an attempt to explore what an arena brawler would be like from a 3rd person viewpoint and with variable elevation levels. I took inspiration primarily from Battlerite and Bloodline Champions for core gameplay and from Heroes of the Storm, Dota 2, and League of Legends for character design.

A few features include:

Networked 3v3 play
Unorthodox character designs
In game scoreboard with stat tracking and end of match MVP
Spectator Mode
Dynamic UI elements
Behavior tree based AI

Character Designs

D.Characters

Aliax

Abilities

Fractured Memories - Fires 3 projectiles in a cone, damaging and slowing the first enemy hit by each. An enemy can be hit by multiple projectiles.
Maddening Delusions - Damage and stun all nearby enemies for a short time.
Mind Over Matter - Teleport in the direction you're looking.
Psychosis - Damage all nearby enemies for the next few seconds.
Impulse - Damage and knock back all nearby enemies. Only usable while weakened.
Mania - Every few seconds, alternate between an empowered and weakened state, dealing and receiving more damage respectively.

When designing Aliax, I took inspiration from Kassadin from League of Legends. He has a short cooldown teleport as well as very short range. He jumps in, deals his damage, and gets out. I liked the play pattern but wanted to put further emphasis on the window of opportunity concept as well as providing a clear window for counterplay so I designed Mania.

Mania has a flat timer that is always ticking, so everyone in the match who pays attention knows when Aliax will change states. This both allows his teammates to set up engagements as well as allow his opponents to back off and wait for him to become weakened. This creates a sort of cat and mouse gameplay where Aliax wants to get to his target right before he gets empowered and they want to get to him right before he becomes weakened.

During gameplay, if the Aliax player wasn't keeping track of their Mania timer perfectly, there were times where the enemy team turned and killed him before his team could help. Impulse was created to give him a short buffer window where he could gain a second or two's respite against a full team's wrath.

Aliax preys on grouped up enemies, as his abilities do high damage and are area of effect, but he is fairly fragile and Mind Over Matter doesn't come off cooldown fast enough for him to use it as both an engage and disengage tool in the same skirmish. He relies heavily on his teammates to follow up with additional crowd control or enough damage to kill a player so that he can retreat safely.

Gameplay Video

Postmortem

Design Queries:

What does traversable verticality add to an arena brawler?
How do short cooldown "ultimate" abilities with no requirements affect gameplay?
How does a varying number of character abilities change balance?

Observations:

Verticality provides an additional axis of skill for projectile based characters as well as new avenues to approach enemies or evade them. It creates the concept of high ground advantage, which many players defaulted to when using ranged characters. It also led to the creation of Asheria and Silus' core mechanics.
I'm not sure if short cooldown ultimates works or not. Sometimes matches involve everyone dogpiling on a character and then retreating to reset cooldowns if they get the kill. Teams with really powerful engagement abilities can dominate, but I'm not sure if that's necessarily a bad thing. There are characters who can counter engage against those teams, so I think it's healthy, but I wasn't able to gather enough information to say definitively.
I think having a variable number of character abilities was very freeing. I didn't need to create filler spells for characters who didn't need them and I didn't need to overload any abilities to fit all of the characters thematics and identity into their kit.

What went wrong:

I didn't realize the scope of what I was getting into.
- This game was huge. It was my first multiplayer project and my first solo project. I didn't design with multiplayer in mind from the beginning, so there were a ton of issues I spent days or weeks trying to solve because I just didn't plan ahead. I also used tutorials to do some things which I ultimately should've learned from and done myself.

Finding testers was very difficult.
- To test certain features, I needed to have a full match of 6 players, which I struggled mightily to find. Without an existing fanbase, I need to be able to do most of the testing on my own.
- Moving forward, I've decided to focus on smaller scoped games that require less players to test, so that I can either test alone or with 1-2 other people.
Players could kite forever around the map.
- Originally, players could walk backwards with no speed loss, so Arlen was able to kite players near infinitely. I reduced backpedal speed by 25% but the issue is still there. Razia's Turn Evil is so powerful that people won't go near her, so she'll hang out on the edge of the map, daring people to approach. I could've implemented a mechanic similar to those in Battlerite or WoW. Either a circle that closes on the map and damages players outside or a stacking healing reduction/damage taken buff that affects all living players. I don't think either of those mechanics make thematic sense, but sometimes theme has to suffer for gameplay in a player vs player game.

What went right:

Designed interesting characters.
- Each of the characters has a unique mechanic or concept that doesn't exist or fit in any other game in similar genres. I think each character has a clear identity and role in a composition as well as their own strengths and weaknesses. Players felt like they had to learn a new playstyle with each character they tried.
Learned a lot, both about Unreal and arena game mechanics.
- I gained a lot of confidence in myself and my ability to create systems and mechanics. I also have a huge amount of reference code and assets for future projects. I now understand multiplayer PVP systems and what challenges go into creating and balancing them much better.
Gameplay was fun when I was able to get a full group.
- Repeat testers were able to have a lot of fun as they learned synergies and counters. Players created tier lists and had "mains" that I would have to beg them to switch off of when new players came in.