Recursion

Project Description and Goals

Recursion is a stealth based single player extraction shooter set in a abandoned space station. Sneak your way around enemies, find upgrades and defeat the boss to escape the cycle. This project was created in 4-months, by working with 4 mentors from Bungie, meeting with them on a weekly basis and incorporating their feedback into the game.

My Role

I was the lead programmer and designer for the boss, along with creating some of the boss's vfx effects.

My Contributions

Destructible Arena

I created a fully destructible procedural arena for the boss fight. The boss's various attacks destroy sections of the arena as the fight goes on and leads to a smaller arena to maneuver around.

Stealth Based Boss Fight

The boss itself has been designed and programmed to be a stealth based cat and mouse boss fight, where you need to sneak around the boss to shoot him in his weakspot on the back.

VFX effects for special attacks

Several vfx effects were created for various boss attacks to help provide additional visual clarity.

Early Implementation

Early boss Design

The initial design of the boss was going to be significantly less of a stealth boss and more of a traditional first person shooter boss fight experience. Initially the boss would have changing health depending upon how many enemies you defeated and would rotate the boss room onto different sides

Challenges

There was a lack of documentation for Unity's pathfinding system that made debugging quite difficult. Additionally there were some bugs involving colliders on the boss that took many hours to resolve. Finally there were various issues with ensuring the boss didn't break his own code procedurally sections of the boss arena, that required several fixes to prevent.

Final Implementation

After the design philosphy for the game was changed to have more of an emphasis on stealth the boss was partially redesigned. The fight shifted over to being more focus on stealth and to be more of a cat and mouse fight, where you are attempting to sneak behind the boss and shoot him in his weakspot.

Finalized Version of the Boss

The boss was reworked to follow a simpler behavior pattern that encouraged stealth gameplay. A more simple loop of searching for the player while the player attemps to sneak around the boss was introduced, with special attacks at specific health intervals to still keep the fight unique.

Cut Content

Rotating Room

Originally the boss was supposed to flip the arena onto it's sides as the fight progressed. This ended up getting cut due to it conflicting with the stealth gameplay.

2nd Phase

The boss was initially designed around 2 phases, where the first phase would handle destroying his shields and the 2nd phase would be fighting the actual boss. This was cut early on due to scope.

What I learned and Future Goals

Throughout this project I expanded my knowledge about programming smart enemy AI and programming more complex pathfinding algorithms. I also got some industry experience, via working in a small team with several bungie employees as mentors for 4 months. Finally I learned a lot of designing smart enemies and designing a boss encounter. My future goals are to continue honing my AI prgramming and design skills.

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