Echoes of Crius - 2024
Genre: Action-RPG, Mecha
Engine: Unity
Platform: PC
Production period: Mar. 2024 - Apr. 2024
Team size: 7 (4 narrative designers, 3 technical designers)
Full team credits: Canon Coker, Isaiah Swinton, Dylan Fair, May Wilkinson, Achmed Baba-Alonso, Ian Cooke, Skylar Isaacs
Developed over a short 6-week period, Echoes of Crius is a prototype meant to demonstrate a unique narrative-combat system that I designed and pitched to a small group of designers and programmers.
Utilizing tropes of the mecha genre, we explored how both combat actions and dialogue choices can affect character attitudes, which in turn determine combat behaviors and narrative outcomes.
In a fight to the death, words can be as vital as blows.
My contributions:
The core concept and initial prototyping began as a solo project of mine within Articy Draft, as part of a narrative design class. I pitched a Unity port with real-time combat to the rest of the class and managed to capture the attention of 6 other designers, who all worked alongside me to expand the narrative content, branching paths, and realtime combat system within both Articy and Unity. In other words: it began as a solo project, and transitioned to a team project where I led as creative director.
Conversation and Combat:
Both are a form of communication, where individual wills meet and interact. Echoes of Crius revolved around one key idea: inspired by games like Armored Core and Ace Combat, the player should be able to engage in real-time dialogue with their opponent during a duel.
The player’s main opponent, a mech pilot named Orpheus, was designed to have different attitude values which can be affected by both the player’s combat actions and their dialogue choices. These values not only affect Orpheus’ dialogue responses, but also seed the decision-making within his AI behavior tree.
In summary: Orpheus’ branching dialogue can be reactive to the player’s attacks and play style, while his own attack and defense patterns can be influenced by the player’s choice of words.