Caesura

Game Genre

3rd-Person Action Adventure

• When we began creating the concept for Caesura, our team consisted of majority artists, and we wanted to make sure that their art could be appreciated by the player.

  • In order to highlight our protagonist, along with her animations and interactions with the environment, we opted for a 3rd-Person POV, allowing the player to orbit the camera to see all the art assets

    
    

Game Engine

Unity 2023 & Unreal Engine 5.3.2

• Given the focus on art across the game, we used Unreal as our primary editor, allowing artists to utilize the tools and environments they were most familiar in to create the best work they could

• While our tech designers and programmers had a working knowledge of blueprints and C++, we did make use of Unity for rapidly prototyping game mechanics as a proof of concept during our earlier stages of development.

Responsibilities

Design Lead

• As design lead during the creation of our capstone game I needed to come up with the concept that would become our team's capstone game

  • After many iterations, we went forward with the idea of a protagonist using music to literally change the world around them

• Once we had our central theme, I needed to find a way to integrate the concept of music into the base mechanics of the game

  • While most music-based games utilize rhythm-based mechanics such as creating inputs to a beat, I wanted to try and create melody-based mechanics

    • The first attempt at this was an arc that flew out from the player as they alternated between the left and right triggers of a console controller, akin to the motion of a violin; larger intervals between triggers would fire a larger, slower arc, and smaller intervals fired smaller, rapid arcs

      
      
      
      

    • After the feedback that this made our game feel too much like a shooter as opposed to the non-violent combat we had been aiming for, we revisited our mechanic and eventually came up with a healing aura that emanated from the player depending on how well they followed a melody on a track using the controller's triggers

      
      
      
      

  • In order to supplement our base mechanic and provide a sense of progression for the player, we then had to create a set of related, secondary mechanics

    • Initially, we had a set of mechanics based off of different organisms, with the idea that different melodies from the player would cause these organisms to do specific actions, helping the player to navigate/alter their environment

      • Fungi abilities went through a multitude of changes early on:

        • Initially, they would emit spores to stun enemies or grow mushrooms to grow from the player's position and emit light

          
          
          
          

        • These then evolved into using mycelium networks to travel and activating different types of mushrooms for a variety of environmental uses

          
          

      • Plant abilities would pull entities to a central point or allow the player to grapple to out-of-reach places

        
        
        
        

      • Animal abilities, while never having reached the prototyping stage, were intended to be used to 'trigger' a given animal, activating them to perform a specific action, somewhat akin to the "Cappy Possession" system in Super Mario Odyssey

    • However, after multiple rounds of deliberation, we found that this ability set didn't incorporate any relation to music outside of the initial melody used to trigger the organisms, and went back to the drawing board. After some collaboration with our content/narrative designer, we found a way to incorporate music into three main mechanics, while also tying into the Irish mythological inspirations for Caesura's storyline

      • These took form of musical "strains" that the player would learn as they progressed through the story

        • The strain of joy could be used by the player to draw nearby enemies into their healing aura, and would increase the player's movement speed at the cost of a faster drain on their aura

          
          

        • The strain of sorrow could be used to disengage with nearby enemies, and boosting the player into the air to reach higher ground to recuperate, but had the caveat of using the entirety of the player's aura

          
          

        • The strain of sleep could be used to incapacitate an enemy targeted using the camera's lock-on feature, along with any enemies in a nearby radius; the casting used a set amount of aura over a small time duration, but would drastically reduce the player's movement for the duration, leaving them vulnerable

          
          
          
          

  • Finally, to ensure that 'combat' with enemies felt as robust as traversal in the environment, I worked extensively with the rest of the design team to create a form of nonviolent combat through a war of attrition, balancing between the player having to heal corrupted enemies and then shepherding them around obstacles and hazards created by the remaining ones

    • In order to provide the player with a means to avoid being endlessly stuck as they tried to heal every enemy, I opted to add a primary target to heal; a source of corruption in each combat area

      • This allowed us to tweak the values for the player's healing rate and enemies' corruption rate to allow the player a slight advantage over enemies, which would increase logarithmically with each healed enemy

      • In our combat playtests, we found that we were able to get a consistent combat length of about 2 and a half minutes per arena, even in players not used to our unique control schema

Duration

9 Months

• Caesura's development lasted a total of 9 months, split between 3 semesters

  • During the first, we assembled our team and spent a month deciding collectively on the game idea we would pursue, and establishing a skeleton framework for the narrative and worldbuilding in order to establish the core pillars of our game

  • During the second, we worked towards a vertical slice, leading up to a mid-year review. This period consisted of creating our first iteration of mechanics, centered primarily around using the environment to the player's advantage and establishing a consistent art style for the game

  • During the third, we revisited the design of our main mechanics to better fit our pillars after receiving our critiques, focusing more on the strains and the aura around the player to both integrate Caesura's pillars and have them work more in harmony with the enemies they heal. Additionally, we completed the development of our levels, integrating both art assets and production value where possible

    
    

Lessons Learned

• One of the biggest challenges that I learned during the development of Caesura was learning how to centralize the design of a game around a central theme

  • From there, it was a matter of learning how to branch off of this central theme into core pillars of game development, and using those as the basis for our mechanics- and learning why our second set of mechanics worked better than the first

• As a design lead for this project, I also learned the value of both making decisive decisions on points of contention between other designers (using as much existing design philosophy as I can to support my decision) in order to minimize dependencies and keep production in motion

• Finally, the time spent revisiting our mechanics after our critique made me realize the importance of avoiding over-scoping a project; even if a design idea may have significant merit, it isn't worth pursuing if our team doesn't have the resources to pursue it