Side View Action / Narrative Game

This was a prototype in creating some gameplay with a sideview camera. It consists of combat and some gameplay systems such as general object interaction (pulling levers, pushing crates), accessing computers, reading message boards and completing quests. Like most projects, I did everything myself including all the art and characters. A lot of the assets are reused in my current Roguelike project. You'll notice it has the same UI, character, FX, animations...etc.

The following video shows some combat. The functionality and implementation is very similar to the system used in the Roguelike project so I won't go into detail here. The main difference is the side view camera which restricts player and AI to one plane of movement. To make combat feel smoother I've completely disabled collision between all characters.

The following video shows some narrative gameplay with various object interactions. I also implemented a dialogue system with branching options. The quest, loot and dialogue systems can all interact with each other. For example, picking up an item or choosing a dialogue option can start, progress or complete a quest. Likewise, speaking to an NPC can directly spawn an item in the player's inventory such as a quest object or reward for quest completion.

I developed some blueprint tools for making buildings quickly, such as scaling without distorting and being able to easily copy sets of props and features from one building to another. Avoiding the need to customise huge amounts of background buildings seems beneficial, especially in a game with so much background art. I may explain this process in the future!