Breyton Atkins
Fear The Tears
Fear The Tears is a Video Game project completed as part of the Vist405 Vertical studio class at Texas A&M. I was in charge of a group of 7 people as we worked together over the course of the semester to design and develop our game from start to finish. My role was mostly to code and develop all the systems and mechanics for the game but I also Lead the Game Design for this project. The concept of our game was developed from the class them of "Folklore and Storytelling" and we chose to base the game of the legends of 'La Llorona'.
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Fear The Tears is an action game similar in concept to Doom but put through the lens of La LLorona in a more humorous manner. In the game you run around "liberating" babies from their parents so that you can bring them to the lake to score points and shoot for the highscore for each level.
Mechanic Development: La Llorona Abilities
I designed all of the mechanics and abilities for the player's character (La Llorona) including her: movement, 'killing' mechanic, pickup/drop objects mechanic(s), scream/freeze ability, and the flip-flop/chancla throw.
Movement and Jump
The movement systems use the default Unreal first-person movement system, modifying the speed the speed to fit the concept better. The jump mechanic was changed to be more of a 'leap' that the player needs to hold down spacebar to charge. The choice to make it into more of a leap felt like it would fit more thematically with the 'monstrous' strength narrative we were trying to give the character the player plays as.
Pickup/Drop System
The pickup/drop system was designed as the primary way to move the babies around the level as well as other physics objects to add to the play experience we wanted. Using a line trace, when the player presses the pickup button over a baby or another object it will attach itself to a physics handle attached to the player's camera. This allows the player see the object as it's moving around and allows it to freely spin in place while it's moving, adding to the fast-paced chaos we were looking for. To drop an item you just press the pickup key again, but for the babies you also have an option to throw them playing a specific animation for it and sending the baby flying in the direction you are looking. Also, when a baby hits an NPC it causes the NPC to be 'stunned' and ragdoll for a second or two before getting back up.
Killing Mechanic
This mechanic was done by having collision spheres built around both the player and all the NPC characters. When the player's sphered overlapped with an NPC it would enable the ability to kill the NPC and have text pop-up under your crosshair to prompt the player. When the player presses left-click to initiate the kill, it will forcibly rotate via a lerp over 0.5 seconds from the camera's current rotation to the rotation that has it look directly at the NPC that is being killed. While this is happening, it will also signal one of the hand kill animations to play as well as for one of the kill quips to be played as well.
Scream Ability and Chancla Throw
The player also has the ability to press a keybind that sends out a signal to all NPCs alongside a scream sfx that cause all NPCs to freeze in place for a few seconds, allowing the player to run around killing a few before they start moving again. This scream has a more sizable cooldown as to not let the player abuse it. To aid in this the player also has the ability to throw a flipflop/chancla that when it hits a NPC it causes the NPC to get killed as well. The chancla throw has a shorter cooldown as it takes skill to actually hit a moving target with the ability and we also found through playtesting it was one of the favorite abilities of player's so we let them use it more often to increase the 'fun' factor.
Mechanic Development: NPCs
I designed the initial concept and mechanics for each NPC and implemented each one's mechanics. There are 4 NPC types of each with their own quirks that add challenge and make each one unique. Each NPC has a somewhat slower base speed than the player, each NPC will drop a baby upon death, and when coming into contact with a baby each NPC will also get stunned and perform a ragdoll for a few seconds before getting back up to return to normal function.
NPC 1: Normal/Parent
This NPC will walk around randomly in the available area, but upon 'seeing' the player the Parent will then try to walk away from the player in an attempt to try to avoid them. These NPCs act as the main fodder to go around killing for babies
NPC 3: Melee Cop
This NPC is the first of two NPCs designed to specifically hinder the player. This cop will upon seeing the player, go straight for them and once in range swing their baton and knock the player back a distance. If the cop looses track of the player, it will return to it's default state of wandering randomly like NPC 1. For the Cop NPCs, we didn't want to implement a 'damage system' or anything similar, so causing the player to get knocked back felt like an appropriate way to hinder them without outright causing a 'game over' or other system to be implemented.
NPC 2: Teenager
This NPC will spawn off a spawner after an interval and always ignore the player. They will always try to move to a designated point on the map set by me and upon reaching that point they will despawn. These characters are intended as more of flavor but are more rare than the first NPC, though they give the player an easy kill if they can find them.
NPC 4: Ranged Cop
This NPC was designed as another hindrance for the player to deal with as similar to the Melee Cop, it'll knockback the player once they see them. Once line of sight is established with the player within a certain distance, it will stop moving and fire a projectile at the player causing knockback if the player gets hit by it. Otherwise the random wandering will be the default state of this NPC.