— PROJECT NAME
Aeon Wars
— ROLE
Technical designer – Intern
— DATE
March 25th 2024 –
May 17th 2024
— SOFTWARES USED
Unreal
Confluence
Aeon Wars is a turn-based strategy game prototype developed by Soliton Interactive. In the game’s current state, players must pit their custom armies against each other, using their class abilities to either kill the enemy army or amass a larger amount of points by securing capture zones.
My involvement in this project at Soliton was the last step before graduating from UQAT. My main task was to come up with new abilities linked to pieces of equipment that units could equip. These abilities would encourage players to customize their armies to adapt to their enemy’s playstyle and make the gameplay more dynamic overall.
My work
- - Organizing the current game documentation regarding abilities with the help of another intern
- - Researching inspirations from similar games
- - Designing, documenting, and prototyping 4 new abilities in Unreal that focused more on defense and support than offensive power:
- Healing Field: a passive AOE healing ability
- Syringe Gun: a direct healing ability
- Cloaking: an ability rendering a unit untargetable by direct firepower
- Shield Deployment: a way to deploy protective obstacles on the battlefield
Initial ability Brainstorm
(By me and another intern, Rémi Perreault)
Ability documentation
(PDF version of the Confluence documentation I created)
Once activated, the ability heals 2HP of every infantry units in a radius. It ignores mechanized units. This healing will be reapplied at each start of a round without having to be activated again as long as one soldier of the unit is still alive.
I initially had trouble prototyping this seemingly simple ability because I felt I had to use Soliton’s UI, map and gameplay feature to simulate real gameplay situations.
When I finally let go of this notion, the prototype ended up much simpler and better as a result. It acted as a good learning experience for the next prototypes.
The healing ignores obstacles blocking line of sight and stacks on units within the radius of multiple healing fields.
Once this ability is activated by a squad, the player must select (within the squad’s shooting radius) a number of friendly targets lower or equal to the number of remaining models in the squad.
Each selected targets will be healed for 50% of their HP.
Learning from the healing field prototype, I went for a much more simplified prototype this time. Even then, this ability had more edge cases I had to watch out for and I tried to show every one I could think of (line of sight, elevation, target validity, etc.).
Unit 1 is out of line of sight. No model of the Syringe Gun squad can shoot it.
Therefore, it can’t be targeted by the ability.
Unit 2 is behind cover, but is within line of sight of the Syringe Gun squad.
It can thus be targeted by the ability.
Unit 3 is not behind cover, but has full HP.
As such, it is ignored and can’t be selected as a target of the ability.
The number of selectable targets depends on how many members of the squad are still alive.
Upon activation this ability renders the whole squad untargetable by enemy fire. AOE attacks and healing still affect the squad, but it does not reveal them until they attack or die.
This ability was much simpler to prototype than it was to design. I also had to think about how it could be combined with bonus provided by other equipment to complement each other.
In the end, I did my best to balance the ability so as to not encourage passivity while under its effect, but to instead use it as a way to decide when to engage the enemy. As such, cloaked units can’t capture control points and their effectiveness may be dampened if the enemy relies on AOE damage.
This final ability grants a squad a consumable cover obstacle that can be placed in its immediate surroundings, facing the squad.
While simple in appearance, I had to think about many aspects of its balance (range, number of uses, destructibility, etc.) to make it an advantageous gear to have, while not encouraging unfair strategies.
This ability’s documentation is also the one I tried to detail the most out of all, making me revisit every other documentation afterwards to attain the same level of quality.
The feature I’m most proud of is the spline guiding the placement preview. It allowed me to properly learn how to use splines, a subject I had only dabbled with before.
Furthermore, I also added multiple squad formations in the prototype to test different spline configuration for placement. These proved useful to Soliton’s main programmer. Finally, my prototype also covered multiple edge cases regarding the shield’s placement, including elevation and interaction with other obstacles.
All in all, this internship has been an extremely worthwhile experience. I learned valuable insights from the people working there and it made me better understand the thought process required of a technical designer.