During my time working at various other independent studios I wanted to work on a project for myself. This led to the creation of Codename: Blazer, a side project that I worked and prodded at on the side in my free time. There were a large number of scope considerations I had not made when starting the project that would eventually sink the project, but while I was working on it, I learned a great deal.

I designed a gameplay loop, developed the combat engine & the investigatory mechanics, and animated several characters for the game.

Gameplay Loop

During my research and play of other roguelike games around 2015, I noticed that they all had a distinct lack of engaging narrative structure. Games like Rogue Legacy, Risk of Rain, Binding of Isaac, would provide a subtle drip-feed of narrative content, but not in a way that had players engaged with it. Players would often completely ignore story elements, or outright forget they exist, because they didn’t carry gameplay or thematic significance.

To solve this problem, I came up with a solution: make each run through the roguelike give the players more clues to solve a grand overarching mystery puzzle. This puzzle would have to be non-trivial to solve, requiring player understanding to unlock further elements of the game, while also immersing players further in the world of the narrative.

While the project never reached the testing phase despite the long time spent on it, I fully believe this idea to carry significant power, and will likely revisit it in a future project.

Combat Engine

The combat engine was using the ability system from Risk of Rain 1 taken wholesale. I really liked the game, but I knew the system had substantive design weight behind it, and could work in a lot of different contexts. It also freed me up to spend my time re-engineering the core game loop and the narrative design of the project.

This isn’t to say there were no technical hurdles to be overcome. Unity’s physics system does not play nice at the best of times. There were several combat challenges I had never tackled before, such as how to allow the same attack to both not hit the same enemy each frame of animation, but still allow that attack to hit other enemies.

Animation

I spent an embarrassing amount of time on the animations, and actually became decent at spriting because of the project, despite my lack of time to work on the project(which I will post here as soon as I find the original files).