Bloompunk
A fast-paced rogue-like FPS with an emphasis on resource management. It takes place in a world of plants and steampunk where your weapon & abilities are alive and grow on you.
Bloompunk
is a game that I joined for my Advanced Game Project at USC as a gameplay engineer focused on abilities. It is still in active development.
In Bloompunk, abilities are essential to the core gameplay loop. Each ability has a hunger meter that drains over time, and the player needs to perform certain actions (like making headshots, and killing enemies from above) to feed the abilities and prevent them from being lost. Abilities also carry passives that change the behaviors of the player or the weapon.
My main contributions:
Communicate with designers and give my opinion from both game design and technical perspectives.
Prototype new abilities in grey box scenes.
Design and code ability features in C# and implement them in Unity.
Development build footage
Features I am working on
An AOE System with blocking detection
For many AOE abilities we plan to have in Bloompunk, we want a framework for getting all targets in an area. However, if a target is behind cover, like the white cube in the top image, we don’t want to affect it.
So I engineered a simple system where we have a collider volume for getting all objects in an area, and we do ray cast visibility checks on them to determine if they should be affected. In the images, the blocks chosen as targets to be affected are pointed to by a red line from ability origin.
Some of our abilities are already using this system. It can also be used for other features like enemy visibility checks for stealth, or target-locking for missiles.
See it in action:
A repulse ability that pushs enemies away, but not the ones behind cover
Ability and passive framework
Ability is a key feature of our game. It is what makes our game unique.
Design-wise, the player has three ability slots, each can be upgraded by attaching passives to them. Every time the player completes a quest, they can pick three out of a few randomly given abilities or passives.
For our game, I have constructed a framework that supports the following key features:
Equip, swap, and lose abilities.
Upgrade abilities with passives, which alters the stats of the gun (fire rate, accuracy, and more) and increases the ability’s hunger drain rate.
Unique Abilities (knockback, propulsion, missiles, lasers, force shields) organized with a consistent interface.
Super passives(explosive bullets, black hole spawn on kill) for max-upgraded abilities. (Feature axed due to artist shortage :\ ).
All of these are achieved while maintaining a highly modular and designer-friendly code. When they decided to axe my super passive feature, all it took to unhook it was dragging a prefab out of a field.
