Slay the Galaxy
It all begins here, my first contribution to a shipped product.
Presented by Dream Team
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Contribution:
AI Programmer
Boss encounter designer
Level Designer
Gameplay Designer
AI Programming
During this project I was in charge of making all the enemies and hazards that could harm the player. This also includes all the bosses in the game.
Turret
This is your basic AI that is planted on the ground, and shoots towards the player. The projectile speed of their shots vary depending how far in the game the player is.
Moving Lasers
The purpose of these lasers is to force the player to use their moving mechanics like the barrel roll, speed up, slow down, etc. Do damage on hit.
Flying AI
Much like the turret in simplicity, however as a flying unit. it sticks to the screen until the player shoots it down. Reason for this is to force the player to not ignore this unit
Carrier
This was a fun unit that punished the player if they ignored this unit. The carrier summons many smaller flying AI that disperse on the player’s screen, making it harder to shoot at the carrier.
Level Designer
My job as a level designer for this project was to make the medium to hard difficult levels. I worked on levels 6, 7, and 11.
Level 6
This level was the beginning of the space levels in the game, therefore I had to make sure the player could get used to the new enemies and mechanics that start appearing in this level. Hazards like rocks and the lasers are introduced here.
Level 7
This level features the same mechanics and enemies introduced in level 6, however it also brings back enemies from previous levels and meshes everything together, making it harder.
Level 11
This is the last level before the final boss, I had to make sure it was packed with everything we had to offer. This is the last level with regular enemies and hazards as the boss encounter has none of those. I had to make sure to use every mechanic possible and let the player show their mastery to these challenges.
Boss Encounters
This is by far the most fun I’ve had designing and programming ever up to this point. I was very happy that the team put me in charge of this task. They put their faith in me and I really wanted to show results.
Slippy Boss
This is the first boss in the game, and all I wanted to showcase for this one is its funny way of shooting projectiles and introduce to the player what weak spots are for the bosses. This is shown by adding an AI that holds the shield for the boss. In order to do damage to the boss they had to focus the AI first.
Peppy Boss
This boss still has the same Weak area mechanic as Slippy, where in order to do damage to it, you need to destroy all of its armor first. However there’s a couple of new things that the player has to watch out for. Throughout the space levels, the player was taught to dodge certain hazards and learned to deal with certain enemies. Well this boss only runs! The player has to destroy them before they are able to escape and forcing a game over. The difficult part is, that all the hazards and enemies make it harder to focus the boss.
Last Boss
This boss has most of the mechanics that the other 2 had. It even has multiple phases! I needed to make this boss somewhat harder than normal as I needed to make sure that players with the wrong upgrades were punished. Even the most skilled players would have trouble getting through all the damage to beat it.