About:
FPS Roguelike (Unreal Engine 4)
January 2022 - May 2022
Team Size: 23
Symbiotic is a fast paced FPS Roguelike where your gun upgrades with you as the more enemies you kill. The game focuses on making the player feel as powerful as possible as they slay their way through hordes of enemies. I was incharge of revamping and changing the old UI to fit the new theme and new mechanics. Along with doing a complete overhaul to the level philosophy, as we were going from open ended levels to small and compact arena style ones.
UI:
Here is a screen shot of the player HUD, the health bar is only displayed during a boss fight.
Upgrade Bar:
As the game is very fast paced and the player would be constantly jumping and running around. We needed a quick and easy consistent UI element that the player could quickly reference at any moment without it getting in the way or breaking up the gameplay flow in any way. I took heavy inspiration from the way Risk of Rain 2 tackled a similar challenge. This led me to design a semi transparent bar like system at the top of the screen that the player can quickly look at, at any moment to understand what upgrades they have.
Health, Ability, and XP UI:
As stated before being this face-paced nature of this game, I had a goal of making sure the player’s HUD was as simplistic and compact as possible. To minimize clutter on screen and allow the player to get a great deal of information by only looking at one area. This leads to the UI element you see above.
The players health is in the white bar and updates with the players health
Below that is the XP Gauge. The XP Gauge will have a yellow bar that slowly goes up the more XP the player gets. Resetting on level ups.
To the left of these bars is the Ability Circle which shows the current ability the player has and if it is recharged or not. If the ability is recharging the icon will be grayed out and the circle will steadily be refilled with color. When fully recharged there will be a sound corresponding with the UI element being fully colored in.
Level Design:
As stated before with the level design of this project we went in a completely different direction then before I joined. We decided to go with much smaller and compact levels that keep the player moving horizontally and vertically. Along with making sure they all work in a randomly generated method and can be entered in different directions. Here is one level as an example.
Example Level:
The goal with this level was to encourage the player to always be moving, by demonstrating the enemies strengths and weaknesses using the levels geometry. I achieved this by breaking the level up into three different floors.
The top floor is more of a balcony that gives a safe location from ground enemies yet makes the player very vulnerable to flying ones.
The bottom floor has a lot of overhangs to keep you safe from flying enemies but leaves you open to being swarmed by ground ones.
The center floor is a hybrid between the two other floors. With one side having protective walls to stay safe from flying enemies yet it being compact to increase the ground enemies danger, with the other side being open allowing you to run around ground enemies yet being open to flying ones. With doors also on either side where the player can possibly enter and exit.
This is of the center floor more walled and enclosed side, the walls and pillars seen help better protect the player form the flying enemies while the compact corridors makes it easy for the player to get swarmed. I also added a vertical drop down in the center to encourage the player to change floors when they feel like they are getting overwhelmed by enemies.
This is the more open area of the center floor, the lack of walls and smaller pillars makes it easy for flying enemies to hit the player. Yet the extra room makes it easy for the player to run around ground enemies and keep them at a distance.