Hey all, this is my game I created after following Ben and Rick’s RPG course. Its a full level play through found here:
Aelion Prototype
I hope you guys enjoy and look forward to any feedback!
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Love it!
Hi @Macellari the level design is great and the lightning looks really good. It looks very professional but I have some suggestions:
- I feel there is big difference between the design and the sound effects, as I said the level and lightning looks professional but I feel the sound sounds more amateur. If you can change the voice over or use sounds from the asset store, your game will look and sound professional. You can add more “hurt” sounds as well, this ways it feels more natural.
- I would add hurt animations as well, that will make the combat more natural and dynamic.
- I would make the life bars smaller, I feel they are too big for the scene.
Hope it helps! The game looks great!!!
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I found getting good audio really difficult, to be honest. I tried recording some of my own (with my son) - but didn’t have a good microphone and our first attempts kind of showed that our voice-acting skills simply weren’t worth the investment for a better mic ! Instead I decided to go with text-based dialogue (and built a very basic ‘placeholder’ for it.
Even though - I still struggled to find worthwhile sound effects for impacts/grunts/ability effects etc…
I have to echo the above comment though - the level looks fantastic.
I do have one small criticism (and I know its a difficult one to solve) - its around timing the animations with the particle effects - especially the aoe-type attack you use a lot. (nice particle effects too, btw - another area I struggled with).
It looks like the intention was for the swing to leave a fiery trail - but sometimes I’m not seeing the swing at all (possibly already in the auto-attack animation?) - and other times it isn’t aligned with the trail.
I had choices to make with this kind of thing… ie. Do I want the ability animations to fire instantly - and if so, should they stop the current animation and play their own? Or do I want the next auto-attack to be replaced with that special ability instead… so hitting the ability button is more like an instruction saying ‘next time you attack - I want you to do this instead’… I went with the first - but also have instances where my special ability attack isn’t happening every time.
On a side note - I added blocking animations too (but did not add animations for getting hit) - and found that they interfered with the attack animations too (especially when attacked by multiple enemies) and added a whole bunch of problems to try to work around.
The result was that my animator started to get really complex - with extra states for special abilities, blocking, different attack types - and blended transitions between them all. And I’m still not totally happy with the result!
So if you do decide to add extra animations - prepare for a lot of work!
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Hey all, thanks so much for your feedback. I agree with all of you on what could be done better. I’ve only been making this project for 2 weeks so there is a ton to improve on. As far as audio, it is extremely difficult to find audio to match what you are looking for… For example, I have triggers for blockades, druid rings, unique monster reaction etc. Only way to get that is to do your own audio. Unfortunately, I only had my wife and myself for audio and a basic Logitech headset microphone!
As for animation and particles, I have been having a really tough time trying to coordinate them. Also, I had animation for my power attack to where the particles would light up my sword… In editor, they would attach the the mesh of my sword perfectly, however in game, they were spawning in the base of my player. I just couldn’t get it to work.
I intentionally avoided damage animations as I felt with the amount of bad guys in my scene, it would make my character look like it was spazzing out. I could always add it to bad guys.
This project for me was more of a learning experience and to have something on my portfolio in order to find work. I plan to continue tweaking it, however I’m pretty happy where it is for just a prototype created in two weeks. If I felt there was sufficient interest in the project, perhaps even look to creating a full game out of it with various classes, who knows!
Holy ****, this is awesome! Really well done for putting so much detail into your world and having the game feel coherent and well put together. I think this will make a stellar portfolio piece… and hopefully when we start shipping content for the next part of the RPG series you’ll be able to make it even more detailed and richer.
Great work.
@ben @sampattuzzi Cool RPG implementation to check out.
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Really nice. The dialogue is great. Very much a diablo feel to me, love that.
Very well done, considering where you started! I’ll echo the level design looked very nice. The sound effects and dialog were the weak part, as you know, but in the context I found them amusing and even endearing. As an improvement, I think you could find better sounds for common RPG events like being hit, dying, etc, even if you wanted to stick with custom voice work for dialog and events.
Great job!