Inspiration & Challenges

For my inspiration & challenges I looked at some games that either have melee fighting incorporated in their design or the focus of the game is fighting enemies in melee. From this inspiration I drew some challenges and skills I want to learn during the minor.

Inspiration

The inspiration projects on my moodboard are: Mount and Blade: Bannerlord II, Conan Exiles, Totally Accurate Battlegrounds, Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, For Honor, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Dark Souls 3, Vermintide 2.

I chose these, because I’ve either played them or know a decent amount about the games. All of them are also relevant to the things I want to learn this semester.

Challenges

Most of these games are fighting games or have fighting incorporated in their design. A big challenge in most of them is to make the player manage their offense and defense while fighting multiple enemies while still keeping it fair for the player.

Some of these games focus on learning combo’s that reward the player in some way, figuring out how to make intuitive combo’s and to make these challenging, but also rewarding for the player.

Other games focus on positioning, thinking about ways to force players to think about their positioning.

When fighting multiple enemies teaching the player how to figure out which enemy has priority and has to be dealt with first. This can vary per player as well.

Resource management, be it either stamina, consumables or skills on cooldowns or with costs. Figuring out how many of each resource you want the player to have to experiment with and to combat the games’ enemies.

Skills to improve

This semester I want to learn how to develop games with C++. I also want to learn how to balance mechanics and dynamics and how to test these. I also wish to learn how to present myself in such a way that I’m a candidate that stands out more when applying to jobs.

Mapped out

I want to learn how to develop games with C++ by making a fighting game where the player has to deal with multiple enemies and figure out how to prioritize.

I want to learn how to balance and test mechanics and dynamics by adding resources to the game that a player has to manage.

I want to learn how to present myself to companies so I stand out as a candidate when applying to jobs by following a course on GameDev.tv.