By The Blade Details
At its core, By The Blade is a first-person melee action game. The goal of the game is to retake your family’s castle without dying and before enemy reinforcements arrive after 7 in-game days.
The game loop revolves around starting each day at your base camp, where you can upgrade items and restock before loading into your last unlocked area of the game. Each day, you fight your way through the map and eventually unlock new areas that serve as your next starting point. There is a day/night cycle with the current day gradually transitioning to night. At night, fighting enemies and making progress is more difficult due to reduced visibility, stronger enemies, and increased enemy squad numbers.
The push/pull of this loop is that you have limited health and health regeneration options. If you are forced back to base camp to heal and resupply, the day ends and a new day begins. If falling behind on progress, you can try your luck by pushing further through the game into the night but face a higher risk of dying.
Story
For generations, the realm of The Lion knew only peace and prosperity. King Edmund MacEllan, the current ruler born of a long line of honorable royals, was well-respected by his people. Edmund’s younger brother, Norris, served as his commander, having forfeited his right to be a general in Edmund’s army due to a past crime. Consequently, Edmund chose his old friend, Dalax Thorne, to lead his armies and serve as a close confidant. Dalax was a cunning and highly successful general, known best for never showing his hand until absolutely necessary. It was this trait that allowed Dalax to hide his sinister thirst for power as he amassed an army of his own in secret.
Born from death and subjugated by evil, the army consisted of beings from the darkest parts of the world that few men had ever known.
Within just a few days, the Lion was overrun. King Edmund was killed, his army was in pieces, and his people were either scattered, captured, or dead. Edmund’s heir apparent, his nine-year-old son Aaron, and Queen Salanna, survived the attack by fleeing the castle in a group led by Norris. For twenty-eight years, those who survived the attack lived in the mountains east of the Lion’s realm, a difficult life with few of the comforts they had before. Having spent nearly three decades gathering strength, the Lion is ready to return home and fight once again.
The environment is loosely based on The Highlands in Scotland. The map features 5 main areas for the Player to discover as they play through the linear game.
1: Base Camp (starting area for setting the story and introducing the player to some of the game mechanics)
2: Forest Path (first taste of combat with the help of supporting troops)
3: Fishing Village (ramp up intensity with new enemies, large squads and the first boss fight)
4: Main Town (larger scale area with new mechanics and an emphasis on reinforcing the storyline as well as a second boss fight )
5: Castle (separate level from the rest of the game with multiple boss fights and tighter quarters that test the players mastery of combat mechanics, wraps up the story and ends with a grand finale boss fight)
Attacker/Victim Communication
Map Prototype
Here I break down some of my process for adding new features to the game, in this case it’s a very basic Sparring Arena
I do some general prototyping for the shape and scale of the arena as well as list out some goals to help define its purpose in the game, I also weigh some pros and cons that help clarify any repercussions this feature can introduce to the game. There is also some consideration on the burden of developing this feature from a coding standpoint.
Basic wireframe describing the logic behind performing and receiving an attack. The attacker gets the result of their attempt in order to trigger logic for being parried, as well as leaving the door open for running logic based on successful attacks. The victim triggers logic from the attack based on their current state in combat, and reports that state to the attacker to support any conditional logic
Player Weapons Table
Player weapons are predefined in a data table. They have base stats that can be increased as the player gains more power such as increased critical hit chance or attack speed. This approach allows for easier balance tuning, as adjustments can typically be made within this table alone.
A major drawback to this approach is its rigidity, each weapon’s stats are fixed. Another approach that’s harder to balance would be to randomly generate weapon stats within a min/max range. This method adds an element of luck and also encourages the player to seek out as many weapons as possible in hopes of finding a better version of an existing one.
This demo showcases some of the systems and gameplay such as locomotion, combat mechanics, AI behavior, and game flow. There’s plenty of room for improvement especially adding more dynamic elements to combat to reduce the repetitiveness. Currently, all enemies share the same animations, combat mechanics, and AI behavior. We can tweak this in a simple way by adjusting cooldowns for actions like blocking/parrying but a better approach is to use the enemy base class to create separate classes for different enemy types. We can then switch out animations, behavior and mechanics with more flexibility.