""Become one with the desert sand to reach the far reaches of the corrupted ruins by getting rid of the guardians on the surface.""
Dune Diver is a 3rd person brawler (action game) in which you incarnate an Earth spirit destined to free the world from its corruption.
In this game, you'll need to play between the two states of your elemental character: the Dive state and the Out state.
When Diving, your character becomes one with the sand, gaining movement speed.
When Out, your character uses the power of Earth to fight the evil guardians of the corrupted ruins, but walks significantly slower than when it's diving.
GAME DESIGNER
During this project, we worked as a team of five game designers.
Since we had no programmers, sound designers, or artists, we were already aware of our technical limitations. We therefore quickly defined the scope of the project and the USP. We decided that you can dive into the ground to gain move speed, and when you're on the ground, you can strike the ennemies with powerful strikes.
LEAD MUSIC & SOUND DESIGNER
During this project, I worked on all the music and sounds for the game alone. I used flutes, violins, and war drums to create desert music. I wanted the music to be both powerful and calm, so that it could easily transition between the combat and rest phases of the game.
As I continue to create new tracks and sound effects as the project progresses, I will update this section regularly.
The main theme of the game is already available on YouTube, and all future tracks will also be available in my “Dune Diver OST” playlist. As for the sound effects, I will create a separate compilation on YouTube once the game is finished.
MAIN PROGRAMMER
During the two and a half months I spent working on this project at school, my main task was to code the game in visual scripting. It wasn't a language I was used to, but my basic knowledge of C# helped me a lot with this simplified version of C#.
So I started by creating an AoE system to model AoEs according to our needs. With this system, AoEs can be rescaled, rotated, and accompanied by a warning before they hit.
Then I worked with Marie SEMERCIYAN on a basic enemy behavior system with three states: Passive (doing nothing or patrolling), Chase (the player), and Attack (when they launch their attacks).
Once the states were created, I added five attack behaviors to the enemies:
- Attack on pre-assigned position
- Attack in front of them (in the direction of the player)
- Attack on the player's future position (predicted based on the player's speed and direction)
- Attack in front of the player
- Attack on the player
I continued my work with the player's attacks. Initially, we wanted to give the player an auto-combo, so I created the script, but we ultimately kept a basic attack with a delay between strikes to avoid spamming.
Another mechanic we wanted to add was the ground pound attack. We wanted smooth gameplay between the Dive (in the sand) and Walk (on the sand) states, so we came up with a diving system similar to that of dolphins. When coming out of Dive, the player jumps into the air, and if the jump is high enough (there would be feedback to know this), the player could charge towards the ground and inflict heavy damage around them. I coded the entire mechanic, but we couldn't find a good way to implement it in the current game, so we decided to postpone development of this feature until later.
After that, I worked on the menus. It was the first time I had to code navigation with a controller and Unity's new input system. It was a big challenge for me, as I had never coded menu navigation in Visual Scripting before, but I'm glad I did it, because I learned a lot from the experience.
As the sound and music designer of this project, I created an audio manager that plays all the sounds in the game and controls their volume.
Finally, I created a trigger zone that plays different music when the player enters a combat or rest area.
MAIN VFX ARTIST
As main VFX artist, I was responsible for all the juice in the game, except for the shaders and the particle trail of the player. You can see most of the juice I realised in the short trailer.
Fighting juice:
When enemies take damage, they display numerous effects such as scaling, an emissive orange material, knockback, tilt, or particles. When they attack, they all have different particle effects before and during attacks. When the player takes damage, the effects are almost the same as those of the enemies, except for the particles. Finally, when the player attacks, you can see a particle effect with the same material as the enemies taking damage to make a reminder.
UI Juice:
I am currently working on the UI juice with effects such as stretching, highlight and particle effects when a button is selected. You will soon be able to see the results on my YouTube channel and in this portfolio.
Ambience Juice:
I will also be working on the game's atmosphere soon. I'm going to add floating sand particles and visual effects such as sunbeams and more detailed shadows.
LEVEL DESIGNER
As a level designer, I worked in team with Marie SEMERCIYAN and Elyan DA SILVA. My job was to renew the player's experience through new rests, interesting situations and by helping to improve the already existing ones. When I made every situation that you can see on the left, I always thought of finding the best USPs to mark the spirit of the players, so they can remember the different situations as "the maze in the cave" or "the fight under the wall".
I designed the first tutorials using the engine tutorial, followed by the two main mechanics: diving and attacking. Then I let them explore a large sandy area to give them a sense of freedom before moving on to more linear levels.
After the first three fights, we needed a break, so I decided to keep it simple and play with the diving mechanics and movements by creating a winding course on the sand, like a slalom.
After discovering the new enemy type (the “Rusher”), I wanted players to use the diving mechanic more, because speed is essential when fighting this enemy. So I added a tutorial showing the walls that can be dived under before a battle with this wall that enemies cannot cross. I wanted players to use obstacles during combat to defeat enemies while taking as little damage as possible.
A little further into the level, I designed another rest area using a wall that you can dive under, like a sort of mini maze. The wall obscures the player's vision, and with a turn, the rest area remains simple, but you can't just pass through by going straight forward.
The next arena I designed uses walls to create a safe zone from enemies, with a stone floor to force the player to stay off the ground and avoid dynamite thrown by the enemy standing at the back of the arena (it only causes damage if you dive). The goal here is to force the player to go back and forth between the safe zone and the enemies.
After that, I reworked the following situation with Marie SEMERCIYAN to make it more understandable. The goal was to use rotating AoEs to force the player to slalom between them before attacking enemies.
Then, I used the cave setting to hide the maze and the boss so that they wouldn't be revealed before entering the cave. This also serves as a break from the rest of the game, as the maze is the only arena of this style, so it's easier to remember it as the “maze in the cave,” as I mentioned earlier.
Finally, I worked on one of the last battles using dynamite explosions to protect the enemy with spinning attack, so that the player is forced to move to the rhythm of the spinning attack and kill the dynamite-throwing enemy before the one attacking with the spinning attack. I used a different form for this spinning attack to suit the gameplay I designed.
TRAILER EDITOR
I worked on the trailer as an editor, using a walkthrough video and other footage from the game. I wanted to create a dynamic trailer that reflected the content of the game, so I played around with the music to assemble all the shots in Premiere Pro, following a storyboard I had created beforehand.
I mainly used quick cuts and fades to make the trailer more dynamic, and I played with the scale of the images to zoom in on the rhythm and emphasize the fights.
I also left a few slow-paced clips to show the game's rest phases, with panoramic views.