Incursio
A Top-Down Action-Roguelike with reactive dialogue
- Rubika 2nd year
- Team of 9 people,
- Narrative Designer, Game Designer and Programmer,
- 4 months (2021 - 2022)
- Team of 9 people,
- Narrative Designer, Game Designer and Programmer,
- 4 months (2021 - 2022)
Game Pitch
In this 2D brawler, you play as the only representative of an alien species capable of replicating other creature's DNA. Throughout your journey through Ancient Rome, you will defeat legions of humans and aliens alike, encounter exotic characters who react to your feats, and learn to use your powers to your advantage.
This project provided me with a space to experiment with complex systems such as a non-linear narrative structure.
Narrative Design
Narrative Direction As the narrative designer, I made sure the story had a significant presence in the game, while not being a burden for players focused on the action and challenge. The system is inspired by Hades and other roguelikes with narrative components : the dialogues reacts to the player’s actions and stats, with an ounce of randomness to make every run unique.
Technical Narrative Design I programmed and implemented the dialogue system, which uses priority tiers and randomness to launch dialogues.
Tutorial Design I designed and programmed the game's tutorial along with the level designer's instructions and my own drafts of storytelling, to teach the player about the world, characters and mechanics.
Writing I wrote a high number of dialogues to fuel our reactive dialogue system, and also some flavor texts. I designed the characters with our artists, and the story to fit the type of game we wanted.
Quest Design The Vestal asks the player to light the flames of Vesta across the dungeon. For each fire lit, the Vestal unveils an aspect of the dungeon's history and her personal background.
For each character, I write a sheet with their background, utility to the main character, goals, personality, and a 'Conversation Sample', an example of conversation happening between the player and the npc, that covers their personality and implication in the story.
Rullus, for example, is crazy and unpredictable, yet ridiculously intelligent. He represents the progression of the alien invaders and the fall of society, but he's also a comic relief. He's not particularly interested by the Collector (player) but feels terribly lonely in the dungeon.
His dialogues are mostly about the player's actions, the powers they've uncovered, but also his lost dog and the alien parasite attached to his head.
Combat Design
Player Attack I made sure the player's attack felt good and adjusted many of the variables to make it as enjoyable as possible. One of the main challenges was making the melee attack as reliable as the ranged one. I had some playtest sessions and gathered the opinion of the team to make the best design choices.
Enemy Design I designed most of the enemies' behaviours and their player detection system, that I also programmed using raycasts.
Prototyping I designed the attacks with an iterative approach : I tested many different approaches for both the melee and ranged attack to only keep the best results.
Takeaways
Incursio was really like a sandbox for me, where I got to create things I cared about. It is clear, at this time, that we lacked a large project vision and a rigorous planning, but we always knew it and accepted it early-on because we weren't experienced enough. Incursio was like a test-drive, in which every member got to challenge and expand their trade. This chaotic management is what led our team to tackle a really more structured approach with Memory of Hope (yes, it was almost the same team !).
Full Game Walkthrough
Trailer
The "Malveillant" Team
