Hammer Hell

Game Genre: 2.5D Side-scrolling platformer, Hack & Slash.​

Gameplay summary: It's very simple, take your massive hammer and SMASH! smash everything in your path. Use various techniques and attacks to get XP bonuses and combos.

Platform: Windows PC.​

Engine: Unity.

Time spent on project: May - June 2021 (7 weeks)

My job role(s): All. I developed this game solo.

Software used: Unity. MAYA. Bolt. Substance Painter. Photoshop. Audacity.

Hammer Hell was an interesting experience. We had to learn how to use psychology in our game design, and learn how to use and balance game economies.. after my brain fried from this crash course.. I did end up making a fun little game.

​

And while this subject didn't ask us to make an actual Unity game - because a paper/board game was adequate - I couldn't resist and made a Unity game anyway 😄

I went through around 3 main Unity prototypes. (5 if you include the board game versions), each time I'd balance out the variables after observing others play the game, 

​

My psychological goal was to let the player feel powerful and destructive and rack up as many points as they could in quick blasts of gameplay, like the Hulk on a rampage. Kept deliberately simple for scope reasons.

My economy goal was to have a balanced variety of enemies, their health, their XP drops, their damage dealt, balanced against the players health, strength, XP costs for special attacks etc etc.

​

My contributions to this project:

• Game design.
  - I first designed this game as a board game (see screenshot below), to learn how to create a game economy and then balance it based on feedback, observation and calculating statistics.
  - But I realized pretty quickly a board game with so many variables took forever to play and calculate the math yourself, making balancing very slow and inefficient. - So I took it upon myself to just make a Unity version of my game to do all the math for me, this resulted is much faster iteration and quality feedback for balancing.
  - The game was kept simple on purpose due to our very small time window, so I made a fast paced hack & slash enemy hell type game using just one weapon, hence the title.
  - The final prototype sadly didn't get the XP Store fully implemented, but at the end of level 1 you can see the store & prices etc, this would let the player buy new attacks and upgrades, further expanding my economy design.
  - I would have also expanded the enemies, the level biomes etc.
  
  

• Art.
  - I created everything you see. I kept it very low poly, and tried to add distinct character to all the enemies even if they were just cube models.
  - I made several different particle FX to make it more visually appealing and give visual feedback to the player.
  
  

• Programming.
  - I programmed everything you see.
  - I learned how to have so much going on at the same time but still register every collision / attack to avoid possible exploits.
  - Every enemy has an A.I. of sorts, always tracking the player and changing it's state on the fly.
  - Each enemy also had a slight randomisation to it's detection distance, speed of movement etc, so as the player can't learn a specific enemy's pattern to exploit it.
  - I randomize the audio pitch for every hit SFX so as to avoid obvious repetition. (The little things count!)
  
  

• Audio.
  - I sourced, modified or created all the SFX in the game. 

​

​

Highlights from this project:

• First game where I programmed in editable variables for the player to set before game start, as this game was a prototype for testing economies. (Not in this downloadable version sorry, it was for the WebGL version in my classes)

• First game I learned how to use WebGL (itch.io) to upload and play the game in a web browser, saving players the hassle of downloading the exe file. (though this pages copy is an exe file sorry!)

​