Cyberdive
Cyberdive is an action roguelike game with minimalistic gameplay called "cyber-diving". The player only needs to use WASD keys to play through the procedurally generated levels in a treacherous but dangerous cyber world.
Genre: action roguelike
Team Size: 6 students + 1 composer
Duration: June. 2023 - Dec. 2023
Engine: Unity
Target Platform: Windows, Mac
MY ROLE
Game Director
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I worked closely with everyone on the team, envisioned the stimulating nature of a minimalistic roguelike game, and took the project from concept to the vertical slice stage.
Gameplay/Skill/Level Designer
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Working with another game designer, we designed and prototyped a minimalistic basic gameplay for players to move and interact in tile-based levels, hitting a spot right between continuous and discrete states.
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I designed roguelike power-ups and how they are unlocked and emerged to the random pool progressively, incentivizing players to make use of the basic gameplay in various ways. I also designed the enemies in the game.
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I designed all the tile-based rooms, and procedural generation rules for how different rooms get spawned and interconnected to form a level.
Playthrough
Gameplay Design
Cyber-diving
When we were prototyping, we set "only use WASD" as the initial prompt, just like Vampire Survivors. Yet using WASD to move is too universal, so how about making an auto movement mechanic while only using keys to determine the next direction? That's cool but everyone has played Snake.
Apart from not having a super long body, we want more space for strategy. Realtime games tend to test players' reflexes while turn-based games give you more time to strategize. Yes, we want the world to be somehow turn-based, and we use this prototype, a discrete auto-movement system to find the answer.
If we were to visualize the breakdown of this process, Within a fixed time window, the player can freely change the direction of the character multiple times. The character will automatically detect obstacles in front based on the direction.
At the end of the time window, if the obstacle is a cube, it will be automatically hit once. If the obstacle is a trap, the character will become stunned for one time window after moving. If the obstacle is a wall, the character's HP will decrease by one.
Skill Design
Skill Hierarchy
On the right side are all 9 unlockable skills in the game, their hierarchical relationships, and the conditions for unlocking 3 higher-level skills. If a basic skill can be upgraded to the maximum level, it must be fully upgraded before unlocking the higher-level skill.
Design Process
Initially, we wanted to have multiple skill builds in the game, but we scoped down to only one build to catch up with the production schedule. When designing the skills for this build, we aimed to achieve mainly 3 goals:
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Enhance players' basic attacking power and efficiency.
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Give players a powerful slashing & high mobility experience.
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Players will try to stay in FEVER TIME(FT) with this build as much as possible.
At the beginning of the game, FT has pros and cons for the player. Players need to sacrifice some mistake tolerance for higher speed. However, by utilizing this build, players can outweigh the disadvantages of FT: They can increase the frequency of triggering FT, enhance the efficiency of experience gain during FT, and indirectly trigger AOE brick harvesting at the end of FT. Additionally, a high-level skill in this build improves the player's mistake tolerance.
Level Design
Random Tiles & Room Shape
During the initial attempt at creating the first version of the levels, the concept of 'rooms' was not yet present. I initially aimed to achieve a highly random layout for a non-repetitive experience. To achieve this, I developed an algorithm to generate random convex polygons for the level. After generating the level's shape and boundaries, various cubes, traps, and enemies are randomly placed.
The advantage of this level design is its strong randomness, with potentially hundreds of different combinations in terms of level shapes alone. However, the downside is the extreme unpredictability. In many tests, situations arose where the player spawned near the exit, viruses spawned next to the player, or the player spawned in a dead-end. Even in simulations where the player avoided all edge cases, it was challenging to guide the player to thoroughly explore the level or experience a progressively challenging difficulty.
50% procedural, 50% manual
The final level design solution I adopted was hugely inspired by The Binding of Isaac. I used squares and rectangles as rooms that were pieced together to form a larger level. The design was divided into room design and room layout design. Room design specified the number and position of doors, with different rooms connected directly by doors. Room layout design provided the distribution patterns of the most common green cubes, such as an X-shaped diagonal across the room.
Rooms and room layouts were randomly combined, resulting in a variety of room layouts. Additionally, this algorithm made it easy to adjust parameters for the internal cubes and enemies based on their distance from the starting room. Compared with the first design, I was glad to find a balance between manual design and procedural randomness.