Not too long after my time at Harmonix ended, myself and a few friends got together to start a personal project while we each continue our job hunts. And now that we've been working on it for a little bit, I wanted to do a blog post about what I've contributed so far. The working title of the game is "Evolia;" a side-scrolling platformer about combining different abilities of animals to overcome obstacles.
The Team
Following the end of my time on Fortnite Festival, I found myself back in complete control of what games I make, and with all the new knowledge I gained on Unreal, I knew I needed a project to occupy my time in between job hunting. As it turned out, I had quite a few friends that wanted to do the same.
It started out with a conversation with my friend, Brynn Janssen. If you're familiar with my games, Arachnotron and Rolling Thunder, you probably recognize her name as someone I've worked with before. She had been wanting to start a new project after being out of the games industry for a little bit, and asked me about a team project since we had worked so well together in school.
From there, we brought in a few more folks to join us; our close friend and fellow designer, Joe Martellucci, Brynn's significant other and artist, Cain Rodriguez, and my former roommate, Jon Nickerson, who was looking to move from design to programming. Unfortunately though, Jon had to leave the project since he's currently going for his masters in programming and needs to focus on that. That said, we've left the door open for him if he ever wants to come back to the game. So in his place, we brought in our friend, and awesome indie dev, Matt Roy, for some extra coding support. And that's the team as it stands so far.
Humble Beginnings
We started out like most projects with a brainstorming session to flush out concepts and ideas that we wanted to make/thought would support our goals for the project. I believe Evolia started out as one of Cain's ideas, which was "what if we did Kirby copy abilities combined with Cappy from Super Mario Odyssey," and then I think Brynn suggested that we make it wizard themed cause WIZARDS ARE COOL!!!
It was one of 6 concepts that we decided to flush out, which the designers divided up to take care of. We each took 2 concepts and wrote a one-page design doc that explored them more in detail. I was the one that got Evolia, and in all honesty, I kind of struggled at first with that initial concept. I felt like there wasn't a way to make a design without it being an exact copy of either Mario Odyssey or Kirby, so I brought in some other inspiration. When I thought about wizards with a bunch of different powers, one thing that instantly came to mind was a very early episode of Adventure Time simply titled "Wizard." In the episode, there's a scene where Finn uses a bunch of different spells to transform his body, such as giving himself a tiger claw for a hand and dragon eyes. I always thought the premise of the episode was a really cool concept, and the more I thought about it, I realized that it could work well with the concept I had for the game.
So I changed things up a bit; instead of getting one ability at a time, you can have multiple abilities tied to your different body parts. And as far as throwing a hat goes, I thought a better way to contextualize that would be that a wizard takes an animal into their cloak and then chooses what part of their body they want to transform based on that animal. And to make it a little more fun, I thought it would be cool to have the character be just a cloak, so that when they get a part of an animal, you actually see that part of the animal grow out of the cloak. So with that put together, I needed a name for the game. I wound up going with "Evolia" as a play on the word "evolution" since you're grabbing the evolutionary traits of an animal in the core gameplay loop.
Prototyping
With the design flushed out, I brought it back to the team. Overall, there was a lot of enthusiasm around the idea, but some concerns were raised. The biggest issue was that there would be a lot of animations with transforming the player, but also that different combinations could lead to ability overload and make it hard for players to remember all of their powers. Nevertheless, we decided that this was one of the concepts we wanted to prototype. I decided to build out the prototype in UE5 since I had all this new experience with Unreal Blueprints. I'm actually planning to do a more flushed out technical blog in the near future, so I'll stick to the basics here.
The main thing I wanted to communicate with the prototype was needing to combine animal abilities to overcome obstacles, but I also wanted to showcase the idea of having abilities that are passively active, and abilities that require a button press to use. With that in mind, I decided to have 3 animals to work with; a tiger that has night vision, a cheetah that can run fast, and a gorilla that's super strong.
I found a side-scrolling template for Unreal 4, and converted it over to Unreal 5 for the prototype. After that, I decided to start out with more of a sandbox level instead of designing one from scratch. This way, the prototype could be more contained and focus on showcasing different abilities. Once I got that set up, I made some modification to the inputs and functionality of the player character, built each animal from a parent class, and also created some obstacles to showcase each of their abilities.
Since the cheetah was a simple increase to the player's speed, I added in a long distance jump to show how more speed would allow you to get over the gap. Then for the tiger, I needed to have a way to portray night vision, and the simplest way to do that was to have a black plane covering an area that becomes transparent if you have the tiger equipped to your head. The gorilla was probably the most complicated, as it was the animal that requires a button press to use its ability. To get that working, I took some time to learn about the ability system in Unreal, which allowed me to do exactly what I wanted; give the gorilla arms the strength to destroy a wall on a button press, and then remove the ability when the arms are removed.
Moving Forward
The final product wound up being really solid, so when I showed it to the team, the concept was clear, and it was obvious that we could add a lot to it. And with all of that in mind, we decided that Evolia was the game we wanted to move forward with. As far as next steps go, we're really trying to focus on making more animal abilities and getting new art. I'm hoping I can do another blog after the holidays and talk about the prototype in more detail, so stay tuned. Exciting stuff happening!