Draconic Destiny: A Dragon Simulator
Capstone Project
Done as a final year capstone project for my degree, my team decided to create a dragon simulator that would eventually evolve into Draconic Destiny.
As stated above Draconic Destiny is a vertical slice of a dragon simulator that shows one of the core game loops that we had planned. Showing the loop of exploration and adding treasure to your hoard. Within the prototype we had built you could find treasure in the wilderness, hidden in buildings or being carried by the enemy we completed the troll.
That however is not all the ideas we had for the game many of which had to be cut due to scope. These cut Idea's included invaders who would attempt to steal treasure from your hoard, missions that the towns would give and pay you for, so you could play a helpful rather than just a harmful dragon, and many more enemy and settlement types.
My Responsibilities
With a team of four people each of us ended up filling a wide variety of responsibilities, mine included Technical Art, Animation, Environment Art, Experience Design and Systems design, as well as being a backup coder for when we needed to get multiple systems built simultaneously.
Technical Art
Because of this project being a vertical slice I didn't get to use my technical art skills a huge amount, but I did use them to help outline gameplay and make the world feel more immersive to fly around and explore.
The most visible implementation of technical art skills is the water material that I created from scratch for use in the game. In our playtests one of the most common statements was how they loved flying close to the surface of the water, but this had less gameplay importance than it did, aesthetic importance.
Environmental Art
Out of my team none of us going into it had familiarity with foliage systems, but we felt that plantlife would add a lot of visual appeal to our world when we were polishing our vertical slice so I was put in charge with creating foliage.
I only had one week within which to learn and implement foliage as our incoming deadlines caused trouble and all things considered I'm quite happy with the results of my first foray into this specific of game development.
After doing my initial experiments and creating the array of bushes and grasses you see above, I proceeded to work on tree's and other miscellaneous elements you can see below.
Experience & Systems Design
The element I probably spent the most time on was Systems and Experience design. On this project as on many others no one design element was handled entirely by a single individual but the places where my influence is felt the most are the player controller and the plans for the settlement system, even if not all of that system was implemented within our timeframe.
With regards to the player controller I helped most after our first playtest, where after running the tests for my team I created an outline of the most common problems players had and some potential solutions. The most influential to our final vertical slice was the implementation of a sprint that would move your controls more in line with a flight simulator for aerial maneuverability and speed. In all future playtests the complaints of slow feeling speed and low maneuverability went away, while keeping the leisurely cruising speed that other playtesters has complimented our game on.
With regards to systems design I helped with the implementation of the treasure, and with the implementation of the bare-bones system our vertical slice had for the settlements.
Where my influence really shows though is in the unimplemented where I created the framework for how the settlements would work, including both how you would go about befriending them, and what benefits you would gain from it, and what benefits you would gain from succumbing to your draconic instincts to burn.
Takeaways
Draconic Destiny was my first time working on a longform game design project, and it taught me many things, including how to more cleanly lay out plans for design implementation. How to prioritize required features, and how to make the most out of a small team with a big idea. Despite ending the capstone year with a game quite different from the one we envisioned at the beginning, I'm proud of what the four of us managed to accomplish combining our skills.