Summary of Aesir
Aesir is a cinematic game with the story being about a girl during the Viking ages, aiming to become the first female Viking and is spurred on by the actions of the evil God Loki . During her adventure, she discovers skills that she didn't know she had to help her fight off any evil that gets in the way of her finding Loki and punishing him for the chaos that he brought to her village.
Due to this being a university assignment, we were instructed to choose one section of the story that is an interesting part of the story to make. Therefore, the chosen section of the story that we decided to program and have come to life is the first encounter between Aesir and Loki when she visits an abandoned village.
Purpose of the Assignment
This is the second assignment from the Games and Media Creations Process module and is designed to help us learn how to create a video game that is story driven and how it affects the development process while also practing using the agile methodology that was introduced in the previous assignenment for this module.
My contribution to the project
As with my other group project, Rolling Trouble, I chose to be the programmer where I implemented all the game mechanics that we discussed as a group that could be implemented in the time frame that we had.
Implemented Mechanics
Player Movement and Animation
The player movement controls use the standard WASD keys to be able to move forwards, backwards, left and right. As this is a third person game, the player model has animations applied to it when moving to make sure that the immersion isn't broken and gives the appearance that the character is running.
The model and animations were found online from Mixamo.com as they had a model that suited the period of time that the game takes place in and had animations that went with the model. Once found, the model was imported into the game and the animations so when the player moves, the model plays the running animation.
Aiming and shooting
While playing the game, the user is able to shoot arrows at any time by holding down the left mouse button to firstly aim and then on release of the left mouse button, an arrow is shot in the direction that the player is facing. While the player is aiming, the appropriate animation is played depending on whether the player is currently standing still or moving around.
If the player manages to shoot the enemies that are chasing them, the enemy that has been hit will either have the health reduced or fall down and be considered dead. If the player manages to shoot the boss, then either the health or the shield will be decreased until the boss' health is fully depleted. Once the heal of the boss is depleted, the ending cinematic is played.
Sprinting
The sprinting allows the player to run away from the enemies that are chasing them to give themselves some space to be able to aim at either the enemies that are chasing them or the boss which is located on top of one of the buildings in the village.
The stamina system works by having the player be able to sprint for a chosen number of seconds before being tired. Once the player's stamina does run out or the player stops sprinting, there is a timed delay before their stamina starts to replenish.
Enemy Spawns, Health and Behaviour
After the opening cinematic has finished playing, a number of enemies are spawned into the map and can be spawned in one of the four corners of the map. Once the enemies have spawned into the map, they immediately start to run towards the player's position. If an enemy is close enough to the player, they will play the attack animation to try and hurt the player.
Where to go from here
If development on this game was to continue, the gameplay features that we discussed as a group at the beginning of development would be implemented. These features were cut from the game due to the time frame of the development for the game being too short. The feature that could be added are abilities such as special arrows that could slow down enemies when hit, lightning arrows which could possibly chain together the enemies and share the damage between all the enemies and a melee mechanic to attack the enemies from close range.
Obviously, as we only had to develop one section of the game, lots of other mechanics would be introduced to go along with the story such as a possible stealth section, a possible hunting section and a puzzle section could be added to give the user a larger range of activities to do during the course of the story.
Learning Points from project
Having to do this assignment helped me understand how developing a story game would work as previous to this project, the other games that I have worked on have been small arcade games.
Working on this project also helped me improve my group skills by having the chance to practice using the agile methodology once again, as the last assignment in this project was the first time that I had to use the agile methodology.