The Team :
Game Designers :
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BRAYE Lucas : Project Lead, Lead Game Designer, Level Designer, Menus & Wave System Prototyping, Narrative Designer & Scenario
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LEGER Florian : Game Designer, Level Designer, UI & UX Developper, Producer
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LEMAITRE Guillaume : Main Developper , Main Chara Programmer, Blood Abilities & Enemies Programmer
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SALMON Nathan : Level Designer, Game Designer
Game Artists :
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FALCE Alexandre : Estli Chara Designer, Blood Abilities UI Artist
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KREMIC Nikola : Enemies Chara Artist, Early Blood Abilities UI Artist
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MOTREFF Romain : Lead Game Artist, Enemy Chara Designer, UI Artist
Tech Artists :
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CHEN Christian : Enviro & VFX Artist
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RICHARD Damien : Lead Tech Artist, Enviro Artist, Character Designer, 3D Animator, VFX artist, Tool Programmer
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ROUSSEL Hugo : Main Character Blood Abilities VFX Artist
What is :
Blood Trial is the graduation project I worked on with a team of fellow students from October 2022 until June 2023.
Let's go through the basics shall we ?
This game is a top-down isometric Hack n' Slash, playable in solo, set in an Aztec inspired univers.
In Blood trial, you play as Estli, an aztec-inspired warrior responsible for protecting the temple of the Humming Bird God, the Celestial wind deity.
One day, as the underworld armies are starting to take over the human world, Estli is chosen by the Hummingbird god as their Champion against these evil armies. Granting access to a wide variety of abilities in exchange for his blood during a Blood Offering phase before starting the level.
All About the gameplay :
In Blood Trial, the basic actions can be listed as following :
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A 3 hits combo that Estli performs using a Macuahuitl, an aztec club
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Bolas throw which allows the player to stun enemies hit
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A parry that grants the player the possibility to tank 3 enemies’ attacks
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A dash in order to quickly travel short distances, allowing the player to reposition themselves amongst the enemies swarms
In addition to that, we have the unlockable abilities found in the Blood Offering phase. We designed them with the idea in mind to upgrade the basic action kit by adding a layer of interactions.
Here's a description of all the Blood Abilities in unlock order :
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Gust Bolas : If the Bolas hits an enemy, the player can press the dedicated input a second time in order to trigger a powerful gust, inflicting damages to the enemy and its surroundings.
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Blood Waves : Just like in the Zelda series, when the player is at max health, each time a melee attack is performed a Blood Wave is shot, going through every enemy on its trajectory.
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Humming Bird Hurricane : The player summons 4 little tornados around Estli, inflicting damages to each enemy hit. If the player dashes while the tornados are active, they form a giant growing tornado, damaging all the enemies in its range.
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Vampirism : A passive ability that heals Estli each time an enemy dies. Being the last unlockable ability, it comes with a “curse” that kills every fruit trees in the temple, preventing the player from recovering health in any other way than being aggressive.
Lastly, our last gameplay main point is the upgrade system. At certain points in the vertical slice, the player is given a choice between two upgrades. These upgrades are part of arrays, selected randomly each time the player reaches it. There are 12 upgrades in total in the game, and every choices the player takes allow them to engage in a somewhat stats-building state of mind regarding their play style, and how they want to approach the fights.
My role in the project :
Role : Project Lead, Lead Game Designer & UX Designer
As the project lead & lead game designer, I came up with the game's original pitch, which contained the following basics :
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Blood Offering system to unlock abilities
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Aztec inspired univers
The project's intention was to create a game that would revolve around an important Risk & Reward system, in which the player would directly choose their difficulty by selecting the amount of abilites they want to unlock. More abilities means that the player is stronger, but much more exposed to a quick death as their Maximum Health is deminished after each abilities unlocked.
All this set in an appropriate context to motivate the player's engagement in the combat system.
My task mainly consisted of keeping the project in line with this intention by regularly exchanging with the artists, and the other game designers.
I also worked on UI-UX tasks with Florian Leger, who got in charge of putting everything together.
Lastly I did the level design of the game's last section :
For Blood Trial's level design, we defined that it should work as such :
The game's sections are devided in 4 different room types : Combat (Brown-ish areas), Exploration, Healing (green areas), Transitions.
Prototyping wise, I implemented the following systems :
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Enemies Waves Spawn System
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Wave Manager
For this Wave Manager System, Mathieu Rebolledo helped me set up a much more reusable method, relying on the Unreal Engine's "Select" node, which allowed me to easily place spawners in the levels as I wanted, and order them in a list that would define the exact moment they would spawn the enemies.
I also tried to implement several Quality of Life features, which ended-up not working as intended and got cut from the project as it would create more problems than required :
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Input remapping system : Due to lack of ressources the different menus and widgets couldn't work as I intended them to, and resulted as frustrating and confusing. So it was cut from the project.
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Sounds & Visuals Settings : Even if this particular feature does work, I struggled to create a menu that updates its values efficiently upon re-opening it. Which causes the Volume Sliders to display their default values instead of the last saved values. This feature stayed in the project as the issue only depends on the settings' display, and doesn't really affect the players' gameplay.
Postmortem :
Working on Blood Trial was an opportunity for me to endorse the reponsibilites of Project Lead for a longer duration than any other project I had worked on during these 3 years at LISAA.
Even though we are satisfied with the project's final result, we learned and enumerated a list of mistakes that shouldn't be made again if we were to remake the game entirely, build stronger and more reliable foundations :
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Iterate more on the design ideas : Design wise, the game didn't change that much from the intial concept during a looong time in the developpement process, mainly because of our prototyping routine, which, mainly relied on 1 Game Designer who had way too much work on the protagonist. This workflow greatly reduced the possibilities to iterate on designs and systems, thus, forcing us to implement features late in the development process to compensate gaps in the gameloop. This also heavily impacted our playtests, speaking of which...
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Run more playtests : Indeed, we made the mistake of not running enough playtests as our protyping capacity wasn't healthy at all for the project's sake.
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Better Communication : We also suffered from a poor comunication in general, which ultimately resulted in a slower assets production and a lower iteration margin accross all fields.
Game Design Document :