Rune Summoner
Rune Summoner is a game developed in Unity Engine for my honors capstone in game design and development at the University of Arizona. It is a basic prototype for a tactical RPG game with substantial unit progression and customization.
Design:
As the designer for the game, I conducted interviews with friends and classmates to determine expectations for the genre and guide core mechanics. I found that the most important element was a diverse pool of units that fulfilled different roles to make progression of each of them feel meaningful. Based on this, I wrote a design document with a focus on maximizing the diversity of roles units could play, enabling players to find and explore those roles for each unit via customizability, and delivering a strong sense of progression.
I needed to deliver this while keeping in mind my limited time to get a playable prototype for the capstone. As such, my main focus with the design was reusability and replayability. For reusability, I focused on developing unit skill trees with sensible overlap. I aimed to create skills such that different units could leverage the same skill in different ways. I designed a bevy of core stats, giving me many nobs to twist to make each unit statistically unique. I planned to use the same units for both enemies and the player via a creature-collector style system. All of these enabled me to create a deliverable with a wide breadth of combat in limited time and with high extensibility.
Programming:
As the programmer on the project, my focus was on writing code that was highly modular and extensible.
I split the code into separate modules for movement, units, abilities, and AI with public methods to allow them to have simple interfaces to one another. The unit, as the core of the system, exposes several events to allow units and abilities to respond to one another while maintaining a level of separation.