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The Swordsman is a Single-player VR Roguelike where the player traverses through a dungeon, facing off against waves of enemies until they reach the dragon boss. The player wields a longsword deflecting bullets back into enemies and creating custom spells.
Players play with either a standard VR controller or with our custom-made longsword controller.
The Swordsman is a passion project made by myself and Isaac Williams.
Role
Lead Designer & Level Designer
Project Length
4 Months
Team Size
2 Developers
Engine
Unreal Engine 5.4
Lead Designer
Lead Designer
As the lead designer for The Swordsman, responsible for:
Gameplay & Combat Design
Designing the combat loop around sword deflection and spellcasting.
Balancing data table for waves of enemies. Each level challenges the player with 2-4 waves of enemies before allowing them to progress forward. I was in charge of balancing what enemies were in each wave based on their abilities and what the player needed to do to defeat them.
Designed how the spellcasting system would work: players have to select 4 runes in certain orders to create different spells or affect spells in unique ways.
Designed bullet paterns of enemy attacks, as through playtesting, we found that players enjoyed swinging the sword in familiar patterns.
Systems Design
Creating the technical systems for sword velocity and direction, an extremely important gameplay aspect of the game.
Created the AI for all basic enemies (not the dragon boss). I utilised a grandparent class that then split into three different types of parent classes (ground, air, boss), and built enemy logic from there.
I made the following enemies:
- Bug: small, quick speed, single firing
- Treant: Stationary, fires in large directional lines
- Skull: medium speed, fires un-deflectable bullets, flies at the player to bite them
- Ghost: slow speed, fires large directional lines of elemental bullets, players must quickly enchant their sword to deflect.
- Skele-bomber: Stationary, fires single bombs that explode when players hit the wrong direction.
- Knight: Stationary, swings sword towards player or fires large directional lines.
Playtesting & Iteration
I hosted many playtesting sessions with my course peers, gathering qualitative and quantitative data. I tested how enjoyable the overall experience was, how difficult each enemy was, if the spellcasting system was too complex for real-time action, how players physically reacted to parts of the game / if they felt any motion sickness, if any part of the game was too difficult due to the VR platform, etc.
Feedback was extremely useful, allowing me to iterate enemy designs or completely redesign them.
It also showed me the importance of accessibility in games; one of our playtesters was colourblind and found it difficult to identify which direction to hit bullets in. I then added the accessibility option for arrows to appear on bullets during the game.
Player Progression
Designed how the player traverses through the levels, using teleporters to decide which direction to go; similar to Super Hot VR.
Designed upgrades for players at the end of some levels to upgrade health, stamina, etc.
VR Interaction
VR Interaction
During the pre-production of The Swordsman, we decided to test various VR equipment (provided by University) and discovered motion trackers; this quickly gave me the idea of creating a custom controller specifically for this game: A longsword controller.
As designer, I was responsible for ensuring the longsword controller was fun to play with, introducing moments of rest during combat, ensuring that enemy attack patterns weren't too difficult with the physical weight and adding physical vibration on deflection. This was easily the most enjoyable part of development.
Another aspect of gameplay & combat design that was affected by the VR platform, was how the player aimed deflected bullets back into enemies. The Swordsman features a semi-transparent crosshair in the centre of the screen that turns red when a player looks at an enemy; when a bullet is deflected, a larger trace from the player pawn will be fired to detect enemies and send the bullet towards the enemy, offering extra help to players.
Later in development, we added the option for players to use the standard VR controllers for larger accessibility and personal preference, as some found the physical longsword too tiring to play for long periods of time.
Level Design
Level Design
Additionally, I made all levels and environments using free asset packs found in Unreal Engine's FAB market. Each level environment was designed to naturally lead players towards important locations using composition, allowing players to understand where each path option would take them without explicit instruction. Since The Swordsman was developed for VR, I had to consider how players would physically move in the environment and where their attention will naturally turn to, which was important to guide so players understand where enemies come from. I ensured that the composition of each environment had enough affordance for players to understand where danger is and ensuring that spaces still felt comfortable whilst maintaining immersion and dungeon aesthetic.
Extra Credit
Extra Credit
During the latter end of development, we asked for some additional help from some university peers:
Sam Shaw - Helped with sound implementation
Kal Ansah - Spell rune VFX creation
Klaudia Kiernoziak - Spell rune icon creation
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