KorpKill

My core concept for KorpKill was having the tools at the player's disposal refresh/replenish each other. This concept was inspired by the game KILL KNIGHT. I wanted each tool to feel useful in their own right, and for the player to be rewarded when using them in tandem.

By having kills with the sword replenish health and having the parry refresh when timed correctly, I tried to incentivise an aggressive but attentive playstyle. Initially the gun was supposed to be for dealing with the sentry enemies, but as the sentry enemies didn't make it in for the university assignment's submission, we pivoted. Instead, I thought we could have the bullets of the gun pierce, making it effective at dealing with larger groups of office grunts. As only sword kills gave ammo to the gun, the player was prevented from spamming the gun recklessly. Though the sentry was added later, the snap aiming of the gun was clunky, making it hard to use against enemies that weren't directly in front of or behind the player. Parrying the bullets from the sentry remained an effective method of dealing with them. Finally, the dash was intended as a distancing tool to be used when a parry is mistimed or to let enemies group up to then be shot with the gun.

Only one of the three enemies I had designed made it into the game by the submission deadline, which left me feeling fairly dissatisfied. The complex combat system didn't work with only one enemy type, and the game felt too repetitive. In hindsight I should have gotten the 3D modellers to create basic blocky character models early on instead of letting them worry about topology and textures, as this would've given us more time to refine the core mechanics. There was also dialogue I had written that I decided to cut, as I wasn't able to implement it well in time.

Following the second stage of development, however, the game was in a very different state. We were able to implement everything that was scrapped for the initial assignment, most notably the sentry and security enemies, and my dialogue. There were now more uses for the different tools and more thought involved in the combat overall due to the enemy variety, as some tools were effective against one enemy type but not another.

In the last stretch of development, I made numerous balancing adjustments based on repeated playtests of the level and then posted the game to itch.io. While the game's visuals were still not as polished as I would've liked, I largely achieved my vision for the mechanics by this point, and I was happy with what we had accomplished.