The A.L.E.X. Protocol

Development Summary:

• Game: The A.L.E.X. Protocol
• Engine: Unreal 4
• Team Size: 17
• Development Time: 4 months
• Genre: Diablo-inspired, Arena Brawler
• Platform: PC

Responsibilities:

• Level Designer and World Builder for both shipped levels
• Collaborated with Game Designer to create interesting player abilities and enemies
• Codesigned, developed, and populated both levels and backgrounds
• Worked alongside art team to create modular pieces for both arenas and decoration
• Collaborated with programmers as part of an A.I. Strike Team to implement and polish enemy behavior

Game Overview:

As part of Capstone, my team and I created the A.L.E.X. Protocol, an isometric, Diablo-like arena brawler.  In the A.L.E.X. Protocol, the players take on the role of A.L.E.X, a robot built by the few remaining humans in an effort to stop the evil forces of the Iron Realm.  The Iron Realm has many robotic servants ranging from the quick and aggressive Flyers, the front-line Guardsmen, to the distant artillery, Lobbers.  To defeat the Iron Realm and its minions, the player has their grappling hook which they can use to grab and throw enemies, smash foes, crash through enemies, and swing around in a devastating spin move.  Using these abilities, the player must advance through various arenas, destroying waves of enemies and each room's power core in order to finally put an end to the Iron Realm.  

Level One:

Arena 1 Overview:

Wanting to ease the player into the experience, the first arena provides players the opportunity to experiment with their various abilities.  We did this by giving the player a small number of the weakest enemies that infinitely respawn.  This way players can practice their rush, learn how to aim with the throw, and discover the rock/paper/scissor like combat system that makes the game so engaging.  The arena sports a number of simple waves of flyers, fast moving, floating enemies that attack players with straight, swooping cutting lasers.  Alone or in few numbers, the flyers are not dangerous, but in large groups they act similar to an angry hive of bees.  Once the last wave spawns, the room's power core rises up and the player is directed to destroy it.  However, while the power core is exposed, the number of flyers increases greatly showing the player how dangerous these oneshot enemies actually are.  Once the player destroys the core, the few remaining enemies explode and the door to the next area opens, indicated by the power cable lighting up.

Arena 2 Overview:

Wanting to still keep the challenge light, we decided against introducing the second enemy during this arena in favor of introducing the spin attack and control point mechanics.  At the first combat, the player receives an objective to use the spin attack, just in case they did not discover the ability during the previous arena.  To faciliate this, the flyers spawn infinitely and in high numbers.  Once the player completes the spin, the arena directs the player to the control point, a large computer that slowly changes control the longer the player stays in the area.  Once the player captures the control point, the power core spawns allowing the player to destroy it and move to the final arena for the level.

Arena 3 Overview:

The final arena of Level One focuses on introducing players to the second enemy type and showing player how they can work together.  The first section of the arena starts by spawning several ground units, large, heavy enemies that work to surround and crush the player or charge the player from afar.  The arena also teaches the player the ground unit's weakness, the basic bashing attack.  Once the player shows mastery of this skill, the second objective directs the player to another capture point.  However, unlike earlier, instead of just facing one enemy type, the player must fight both flyers and ground units.  This is particularly difficult as the ground units disrupt player movement, allowing the flyers to get an accurate swipe at the player. Taking the capture point, exposes the arena's power core.  Once the player destroys the arena's power core, the player can exit the arena and continue onto Level Two.

Level Two:

Arena 4 and 5 Overview:

For Arenas 4 and 5, I primarily acted as level architect, building out the physical space, helping to divide it up so players were not overwhelmed or confused.  The final encounter designs fell to another designer.  Throughout these last two arenas, we really wanted to push the player and challenge them.  We started by introducing the Lobber enemy, a fast moving, hovering enemy that fired massive damaging shells the player had to avoid.  This combined with the other enemies creates a hectic environment where player need to keep moving while still accomplishing their objectives.  These arenas also show the value of our modular pieces, both large and small, as Arena 4 is nearly the same as Arena 1, except the player enters from a different angle, the addition of a capture point, and some of the enemy spawns have moved.  This design, allowed us to reuse many pieces of and even whole arenas, while still providing unique experiences in each area. The same is true for Arena 5, as it is a reorganized Arena 2, with a little extra space tacked onto each side. We pursued this idea of augmenting existing arenas and switching camera angles by our professors so we could keep the scope of the project in check, and further polish many other aspects of the game, such as the A.I.  

AI Strike Team:

Throughout the production of the A.L.E.X. Protocol, my primary role was to act as a level designer building out the actual arena spaces, cluttering those spaces, and designing the waves and encounters for a majority of the spaces.  However, towards the later half of the project, the team decided the enemy A.I. was not meeting certain goals and ultimately detracting from the gameplay.  To solve this, the producers partnered myself and two programmers, Albert Chen and Andrew Socha, creating an A.I. specific strike team.  Together we developed a list of several tweaks and systems we needed in order to help make the A.I. a boon to gameplay instead of a hindrance.  Some of these changes were rather small such as, helping to communicate to the player that the throw was the worst ability to use on the Lobber by having the Lobber bounce slightly on its hover jets before returning to it usual routine of firing shots at the player.  Other concerns were more complex such as defining what the team meant by having the Flyers "Swarm" the player and how that would playout in game.  Ultimately, we decided to have the Flyers shift between various different groups with some directly attacking the player, some attacking near or around the player, and some attacking ahead of the player.  These and other fixes, tweaks, and subtleties helped to give the ALEX Protocol the enemies it needed to have fun and interesting gameplay.

Postmortem:

The ALEX Protocol was an ambitious project for our team.  Yet even with certain technology failings and some necessary team restructuring, we still managed to make a fun and simple game demo.  Personally, I am glad I worked on this project for many reasons the least of which being the opportunity to work directly with two great programmers.  Thanks to this opportunity, I was able to practice many of the communication techniques and theories we often discussed in previous classes and that I had seen my producers use throughout their time at the Guildhall.  I also continued to grow as a level designer, building out several maps and adjusting to new technological issues or gameplay concerns.  I even had the opportunity to do some scripting, building a small and simple conveyor belt for to put in Level 1's background, giving life and movement to an otherwise static scene.  Overall, the experience was one I would gladly go through again, working with amazing people, building a fun game, and laughing all the way.

I worked on the ALEX Protocol alongside:

Producers:

• Kevin Morris - Producer
• Ed Dearien - Associate Producer
• Marc Mixion - Art/Audio Producer & User Testing
• Brian Applegate - Design/Programming Producer

Artists:

• Bill Hood - Lead Artist/Character/Environment
• Soraya Abtahi - Aniamtor/Environment/Lighting
• Ben Parise - Environment/Particles

Programmers:

• Tyler George - Lead Programmer
• Andrew Socha - AI/Mechanics
• Albert Chen - AI/Mechanics
• Rukan Yang - HUD/Player Attacks
• Cesar Rocha - HUD/Mechanics/"Juice"
• Christian Walker - Menus/Sounds/Objectives