Blood Maiden

Genre: Hack n slash, 2D Platformer

Team of: 16

I helped with early conceptualization and I was mainly responsible for the UI design, and later tasked to do the animation implementation and logic.

Initially, I focused on building the game's UI, including the blood meter and ability icons.

And then i started building the menu, where i challenged myself to make a menu that changed camera positions for every window.

Optimization

As the project progressed, I also contributed to level dressing and game optimization by reducing texture sizes and using Unreal Engine's statistics tools to improve performance.

Animation Blueprint

Later in development, i took over the animation blueprint, It took a while to understand how the system worked. I spent time navigating and learning the structure of the existing blueprints and managed to get a good grasp of it by the end. but not without some hardships on the way.

Itch Page

About The game

During GP3, I was part of Team 7, Studio Snackbar, where we developed Bloody Maiden, a fast-paced 2D side-scrolling platformer with Hack and slash combat. We we made sure to get everyones imput on what they wanted to do and what game we could create that combines most of our intresst.

Our core design pillars focused on:

Fast-paced gameplay
Heavy combat focus
A “die and retry” gameplay loop
A brutal, bloody aesthetic

Iterations

The goal was to create an experience that encouraged players to learn through failure where dying is the norm and try to go through the game as fast as you can. how we achived the urgensy to clear the level in a short amount of time was to make the health drop every second and you can gain health by killing enemy's so you have to finnish it before dying. we later found out how hard that would make it for the player after some playtesting so we switched it to that that you had to get damaged by an enemy when the health was depleted.

We of course had more ambitios ideas that we had to scrap beacuse of time constrictions, and that was us game designers who had to tell them that we should just have the bare minimum as the set goal and if we had the more time we could add some more features. We also had a set date where we should stop implementing more features and start polishing the mechanichs we had.

My Role & Responsibilities
Although I participated in early conceptualization, my primary responsibilities were:

UI Design & Implementation
Designed and implemented the Blood Meter UI. I used Krita to draw the blood meter and also took the time to animate it with the help of Blueprints. This was my first time doing something like this, as it is more of a VFX job than a designer’s role. However, our VFX artists/animators already had their hands full, so I was happy to take on the challenge and try something new.

Created Ability Cooldown Icons

Later in development, I had to implement the cooldown icons to help players know when abilities were available. I had to go through other people’s Blueprints and understand how their code worked in order to implement it correctly, as well as draw and design the icons. We initially thought players would instinctively understand when abilities were available because of the short cooldowns, but during playtesting we received feedback that some players were irritated by the lack of clear indicators.

Main Menu
I created the game’s main menu and tried to be ambitious by having the camera focus on different walls of the room depending on which window was open in the menu. I made an actor with widgets and had the player possess that camera and UI depending on which button they pressed.

I also implemented all the settings functions, including graphics and sound settings, with help from David, our sound designer for the project.

One issue I encountered was that the way I structured the UI caused several problems when implementing controller input for the menu. The controller would usually continue controlling the first window. Due to time constraints, I couldn’t fully resolve the issue, so the fastest solution was to make the controller move the mouse cursor instead.

Collaborated with teammates:
Victor – Game Over UI
Oskar – Low health visual effects (red hue on the camera when the player is about to die)

Animation Implementation & Logic

Implemented animation logic

I had to take over the animation implementation from David who had his hands full with the sound design. I had to understand how everything worked it was my second time using the animation blueprint so that was a good experience and could get more used to it. I

There where many thing i stuggled with sometimes it didn't want to change animation and sometimes broke beacuse of the rigging witch we didn't know at the time but with comunication and perseverance we solved most of our problems.

To leaway the job for our animators and a quick fix i had to change so that the top part of the characters body could play another animation (the attack animtation) while the walk and dash animation played on the bottom part of the body which was something i was glad i learned.

Optimization & Level Support

At the end of our project i assisted with the level dressing for the last level of the game and had to Delete some that were to big for our project.
I alsot had to reduce the texture sizes to improve our performance and file size and learned to use the "selection property matrix" and navigate the "size maps" Using texture Resolution to find big assets, light complexity and more.

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