Legend Of The Vampire Hunter-Hunter (Player Progression)
Type of Project: Academic Team of 6 | Role: Systems Designer | Genre: Top-down Shooter | Duration: 5 weeks | Year Created: Late 2024 | Software: Unity, C#
Role & Contributions
Collected and parsed playtest data to identify player tendencies and frustration
Designed player progression system to reinforce player playstyles and preferred combat loop
Prototyped and removed Mana system, gave players Health-based abilities to streamline resource usage
Health-based Player Abilities
Players learn to dash and slow down time in the first level. Dashing allows players to both reposition aggressively and defensively, increasing player expression and allows players to find their footing and preferred playstyle.
A core pillar of the game was to have fast-paced, high-tension precision gameplay. Having enemy bullets travel fast served this goal, and we gave the player the ability to slow down time as a countermeasure tool. This helped sell the power fantasy of being a strong vampire in the game.
Both of these mechanics cost some of the player’s Lifeforce.
Dash and Timestop
Player Progression
Bloodthirsty Upgrade
When the player killed enemies, the enemies would drop souls that the player could collect to recover Lifeforce. The Bloodthirsty upgrade gave the player a stacking move speed buff for each soul collected that would decay over a few seconds. Collecting a soul would reset the decay timer, encouraging players to play more aggressively and chain kills.
Piercing Bullet Upgrade
Piercing Bullets let the player’s bullets pierce through enemies in a straight line, allowing for strategies that involved triggering aggression from the enemies, grouping them and funneling them into a corridor, then unloading unto them. This helped us upscale the numbers of enemies in further levels without the difficulty increasing exponentially.
Range Upgrade Choices
At mid-point of the second level, players could choose between damage boosts at long or short ranges. The Long Range upgrade would ramp up damage the further the enemy was from the player, and the Short Range upgrade would have extremely high damage to nearby enemies but have the damage fall off for further enemies. This gave players agency over their playstyles, and reinforce the gameplay loop they preferred.
Chronobreak Upgrade
The Chronobreak upgrade made the player invulnerable to enemy bullets when in the time-slow state. At this point in the game, the challenges were harder and we wanted players to pass a skill check depending on how well they could use the time-stop mechanic. This upgrade, along with the increased difficulty heavily incentivized players to master the core mechanics and get better in timing abilities.
Last Stand Upgrade
The player’s Last Stand kept the player alive for a few seconds after death, allowing them to swiftly dispatch of an enemy, regain health, then return to battle. As the final ability, we wanted to make it strong, and feel like the pinnacle of vampirism in our game fantasy. This also interacted well with the boss mechanics, where the boss would summon smaller enemies that increased the perceived difficulty of the boss level, but actually helped the player stay alive longer than if there were no additional enemies.
Learning Outcomes