Leyline Knights - Creative Director & Animator
September 2020 - April 2021
Leyline Knights is a top-down 3D roguelike where you play as a magic knight, Elizabeth fighting to climb the Great Tree to find magic for her brother.
I served as Creative Director for the project, working to create a room-to-room roguelite action game. |
Contribution Highlights:
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Setting & Thematics Design
Early concepts of the project started with the idea of Magic Knights as present in many fantasy themed games.
The knights would 'etch' on marks on their equipment that imbues them with magic. Perhaps in a setting with many fantasy people, humans would have to take extra steps to utilize magic in a manner of equivalent exchange. In game mechanics, the magic etchings would modify core player actions with an additional element effect. The initial actions for the top-down action game we envisioned were: Attack, Dash, and Magic Cast. |
A pre-production focus was a setting that supports a production pipeline that expects the following milestones:
The initial concepts were element-focused environments that would eventually become the Fire-Ice-Lightning biomes. Each biome would be represented by a corresponding knight with heavy visual elements of that element.
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Core Game Loop
Initial prototypes centered on a zoomed-out top-down view that allowed the player to have a constant view of the enemies and environment.
We wanted the player to manage the enemies that would attempt to rush them down while providing clear warning of incoming attacks. |
A key requirement of the game was that the critical path must be completable within 40 minutes. A run-based game felt like a natural way to meet that requirement while create interesting replay value in that critical path.
Thus, the core loop of Leyline Knights would be a room-to-room roguelite. The 3 biomes would be faced in a random order with a set number of rooms leading to a boss encounter. A constant forward momentum is encouraged with upgrades per room and upgrades the player could see before entering rooms. |
Upgrades
During a run, players could upgrade their abilities in multiple ways. Smaller upgrades could increase damage or increase health, but our major upgrades came in the form of elemental upgrades.
The player could upgrade the following abilities with Fire, Ice, Lightning, or Wind were:
The player could upgrade the following abilities with Fire, Ice, Lightning, or Wind were:
- Sword Attack Combo
- Magic Cast
- Dash
- Ultimate Attack
- Fire upgrades were explosive and often hit wide areas with lower damage
- Ice upgrades were hard hitting but slow and glacial
- Lightning upgrades struck at small points or arc across enemies
- Wind upgrades would blow enemies away or vacuum them inward
Initially we tried allowing only single elements per each ability, but found that pacing of upgrades was stretched far as runs were expected to see 20+ rooms. So we eventually concepted combination elements for Sword Attacks, Magic Cast, and Dash (requiring 4 basic upgrades and 6 combination upgrades). These 7 element upgrades could be paced more evenly within the full length of a run.
Enemies
A key ethos with enemy design was clear silhouette and animation from a top-down view. As the view of camera was zoomed out, the gesture of enemies must be exaggerated to convey their incoming attacks. Working on the animation along with the gameplay programmers allowed me to iterate on the animation of enemy to specifications of design team.
As the 3 biomes could be potentially encountered in any order, enemies had to be designed with varying difficulty levels.
An early concept envisioned was that enemies could mirror the player's ability of elemental upgrades. So in addition with the core behavior of our main 6 enemies, each enemy had 4 element variants that augmented their skillsets. |