Pre-Production

Since we based the entire game on Diablo, we mostly focused on how the game should play and which abilities the player should be able to use.

We decided to create a combat oriented experience where the player can upgrade their abilities in a skill tree. I was part of the taskforce responsible for coming up with upgrades as well as balancing the abilities once in the game.

Prototyping

During this project our programmers developed our first 3d engine. While the engine was being developed Ofelia and I created a prototype for our game in Unreal Engine. The prototype features all the abilities that we planned to include in the game, as well as their respective upgrades.

We then performed internal playtests and iterated on the abilities until we felt satisfied with how the game played.

Depth and verticality

In order to create more interesting environments I wanted to use depth and verticality as much as possible. This was challenging to achieve with a fixed camera angle but the result turned out great!

Combat Design

An experience I gathered from this project was to respect the camera angle. When designing combat encounters I found it to work the best having the enemies approach from either the top or to the right of the player since this allows the player to spot enemies from farther away.

This also opened up possibilities to create surprise attacks and increase intensity of fights by giving the player a shorter time to notice the approaching enemies.