Battle Mech Arena
How it started
Around the beginning of the 2nd academic year I’ve been assigned to a team and we’ve been given the milestone to work on a digital version of the board game produced during the previous year
After a couple of months we managed to pitch an early version of
the design and we recruited 2 modelers and 1 programmer
It’s been a 6 months long development and we decided to try our best even though it was clear that we were not prepared to work on such a strcutured project
The first step was to rescope the design in order to fit it in a digital gameplay concept
We did a breakdown of the design variations to analyze pros and cons of the strategies we came up with, aimed to develop such different products and compare the requirements in terms of time, resources and budget
We were confused at the beginning about the aesthetics so we did a research and we oriented the list of choices towards some already existing packages from the Epic Marketplace in order to find inspiration at least about the style
We decided we’d give it a go with the contrast between nature and tech, so we studied and implemented a few versions of the level design
The solution we stuck with wasn’t the most efficient nor the most visually appealing but it allowed us to keep working without having any particoular blocker
Turn System
The turn system is the USP of the gameplay and the pillar of the board game around which we built the structure of the game mode.
Each player is required to play cards basing on a strategy that has to be built with the team mate.
Every player participate to other players game phases
The Main Objective of this turn system is not let any of the players have nothing to do while the other player act, so we divided the turn system in 2 phases and did 2 set of cards for each phase
User Interface
The UI has been designed to give a constant feedback of the informations players need to know in order to build their strategies
Beside the resources feedback the UI design includes the 16 chosen during the deckbuilding phase cards divided per type:
- Active
- Utility
- Ultimate
Cards sets are stacked and players can switch at all times between the set displayed in the front and in the back
The switch is designed to provide both an acustic and visual feedback, and a twitch element as well
According to players turns phases the cards set that can be used is highlighted while the other has less visibility (desaturated colours)
We decided that for the digital version of the game we could have used the concept that would let us work more on the artistic side of cards, so we designed the layout to display in a clear way the artwork and the body of the cards:
Type -Range -Damage -Energy required - Cooldown
The central part contains a description of the specific mechanics related to the card. By dragging the card out of the set layout players can have a preview of the applications on the board, then press the confirm input to play the card uncovered on the board. Once played all cards are visible for all players
Optimization, Moodboard and Concept Art
Optimizing Materials and Texture was one of my duties, i would go trough all the bundles that we had bought trough Unreal Market Place and Optimize it, to be fast and efficient i would execute the work in the following way
Folder Organization > Materials > Textures > 3D Model Polygon Managment
Using my Photoshop and Blender as the main Tools and retouching some material nodes in Unreal
while doing this i Helped 3d Artist by doing a concept art of the character head and managed some moodboards
We designed the character
around the gimmick
and the desired gameplay dynamics
Since we didn't have an official concept artist we tried to figure out the aesthetics by ourselves and we started looking for inspiration
Moodboards were then created for specific Assets:
-Generator
-Spawn
-Map
-Traps
With Each Detailed Documents with a description on what we wanted
During the creation of Moodboard i would usually try to research and imagine a Futuristic Forest, the first thing that come to mind where how japanese mecha anime would try to Emulate the sensation of Gigantism that you feel when you see a giant robot surpassing on sizes Trees and Mountain, then we mixed a little bit of Star Wars and Horizon Zero dawn, and we acquired or directions for the moodbards
A Scientifict Bio-Organic Forest forgotten about time itself. with technology once used for the protection of nature.
Enrichment and Level Design
Close to the end i was switched from my Optimization of the Project to aid the Level Designer,
once he completed the blockout and landscape i started to decor the maps with the assets
The Grid was Designed with the Ultra Token in Mind, a trangolation of Spawn, Generator and Traps
Each of this Maps Elements had his own feature
The Traps if steped on would activate an Hazard effect to Punish the Player
and the Generator was a timed Capture Point, if conquered random map event would activated to dmg the opponent and give bonuses to the one who captured
This was the end of B.M:A. Digitilization project from board to videogame, the teacer were satisfied with the project and we passed the second year Big One Competition