A blacksmithing pseudo-simulator where you can craft your fantasy sword and run your business.
Platform: PC
Final Build Release: 11/22/2019
Role: Designer/Programmer
HitBox Studios: Alec Rubin, William Gordon, Oliver Patric, Spencer Whiteway, David Carey
Intent
To create an exciting and authentic blacksmithing experience, having the player progress through legendary materials and weapon designs.
General Description
Being an apprentice blacksmith, the player learns how to craft various weapons and sell them to eager customers. Each piece of the weapon (handle, blade, pommel, etc) has a unique minigame that the player must play to create it. The quality and value of the component will increase based on how well they player does the minigame. With a variety of customization options, players will make their dream weapons and unlock new styles. New materials can also be purchased to make interesting and higher value weapons.
Personal Contribution
As a systems designer, I designed and implemented all the minigames we had in the build. I also worked on a system that scaled the minigames difficulty based on how expensive the material was.
VIDEO REEL GOES HERE
Team Collaboration
This group had a hard time being as productive as we wanted to. We didn’t get assigned a producer so one of our artists took up the role since they were feeling confident about it. They did a great job but it did take quite a while to get the ball rolling since we were all trying to divy up the production work. Another issue we had was a teammate that wasn’t working well with the group. We ran into a lot of issues with them and ended up having to talk to the faculty about it. It was awkward and definitely made group communication harder, trying to avoid frustration.
Minigame Design
At the start of the project, we decided that we wanted every component of the weapon to have it’s own separate minigame. As things progressed, we had to limit our scope and only have minigames for most of the components. We only managed to fully design our sword having a blade, crossguard, handle, and pommel as it’s components. All other than the pommel had a minigame implemented; the pommel minigame was under designer and out of scope.
The first minigame I made was a hammering minigame that was a precision, rhythm based challenge. The player would have to click on each rhythm circle at the right time (not too soon or too late). After some time, we realized that since hammering was such a big part of the blacksmithing experience, we wanted to make it a more central part of the process. We changed it so that the hammering minigame was required to hit all components into shape from the regular ingot form. To scale this minigame for more difficult materials, I made it so the timing was tighter and the circles appeared faster with a pretty standard equation.
The final blade minigame was a scenario where you had to quickly drag your mouse from point to point inside of an area. If you accidently went out of the area, it would penalize you (sort of like coloring in the lines). This was meant to represent the back and forth motion of sharpening with a rotating grindstone. Failure to stay within the lines implied that you applied to much or too little force to the blade.
The crossguard minigame was a simple button mashing minigame. This was meant to represent boring a hole on the top of it (so that the blade could be inserted). The player would have to mash the spacebar fast enough to stay within the threshold without going too soft or too hard. Boring too little wouldn’t leave a big enough space for the blade to be inserted and boring too much would make the blade rattle around inside.
The handle minigame was designed but never implemented due to a time constraint. The intention was to make a game where the player wrapped a leather strap around the handle, slowly rotating it. The minigame would be a simple balance game, where the player would have to keep an arrow in the middle of a bar while it sways back and forth. The more the bar swayed, the worse the design on the handle would be.
David Carey Portfolio Site 