Lichgate

Lichgate is a top-down action rogue-like where you fight hoards of enemies and upgrade your power to emerge victorious. It was made with Coral Engine, a custom engine me and my teammates made, but I talk more about that in the Ability System V2 in Coral Engine project, now it’s about the creation of the game itself.

I had to adapt my Ability System to the needs of our game and development and I upgraded it with a Weapon System.

After discussing with our designers what exactly the main abilities of the player will be, I decided that a more specialized system is needed.

Weapon System

I build the Weapon System on top of the Ability System, since we knew that the player’s main combat abilities will all have the same structure of a weapon, but still kept the base system for general-purpose abilities like for the AI.

I had previously gotten the feedback that it is sometimes hard to keep track of all the variables of an ability, and the player abilities would need a lot of tweaking, so I made this new interface.

Using the weapon system I then created two of the player guns.

Arcane Surge Weapon:

Arcane Surge was more complicated than initially planned because the designers had a vision that did not align with the system’s capabilities at the time, but were adamant that it is essential to the core of the game, so we had to discuss the matter. The issue was that this weapon needed different input - instead of shooting on button trigger, it would have to shoot on button release, the projectile getting bigger and more powerful the longer the button is held down.

It could be done, but it would take time. I gave an estimate to the design lead of 3 days for making this change in the system, which was a considerable amount of time in a short project and because I, as the main gameplay programmer, would be unavailable for that time. After weighing the different sides, we eventually concluded that having weapons that feel unique makes my time worth investing in this change, so that’s what I did.

In the user end this was only reflected as a simple checkmark, but I had to considerably change the logic of the weapon activation to account for this.

After the initial implementation, designers were able to seamlessly work with my tool and make the necessary tweaks without the support of a programmer. That was often not the case for some of our other engine features, as it was all new to them, so I am proud of this achievement.

Ability/Weapon Assets in-engine:

For a breakdown of abilities refer to this project page - Ability System V2 in Coral Engine.

Upgrade System

Following the Vampire Survivors/20 Minutes Till Dawn structure, we also needed upgrades in our game, which I implemented.vThe upgrades used a power level system - the higher the level, the more powerful the upgrade, and new ones get unlocked depending on your choices.

So I made a system that works with that concept, again making sure designers can work without programmer input, so I also created how-to documents.

When it came to the upgrade gameplay logic I implemented a part of that alongside one of our designers that was able to contribute as well through the use of our visual scripting and the explanations I provided.

In-game upgrade selection menu:

Runtime Data Issue & Resolution

Having upgrades meant that the abilities settings needed to change at runtime. That was an issue because my system had not initially accounted for this scenario when we did not know the specifics of the game.

The impediment was that I was storing the abilities as assets, which is compile-time data. We unfortunately discovered this issue very close to our first milestone deadline, so just for the deliverable me and our main engine programmer decided we will do a workaround and make assets run-time editable. We were aware that is not the solution, so after we delivered the build we reverted the changes and I properly implemented the feature.

Now the Abilities On Character Component holds an Ability Asset to derive the base values from, as well as a Runtime Weapon where the values can be modified for the upgrades.

UI

I created most of the UI/HUD elements in Lichgate using the UI system made by my teammates.

Showcase: