Recently, Xiao U got started with a special cyberpunk-style wargame game - "CYBER RUNNER".
The game was created by 5 Unity bootcampers, and just like the game's name, the scenes are set on randomly generated cyberpunk-style skyscrapers, especially like the classic rooftop scenes from the movie Infernal Affairs!
CYBER RUNNER adds elements of wargames and cards to such a scene, and you need to use the skills on the cards to defeat the enemies in the scene.
But CYBER RUNNER not only has wargame and card elements, but also adds roguelike elements.
The game is set in a duo mode, the protagonist is a teenage programmer Emily, her partner is a wats-like electronic dog Watson, after fully understanding the cyberpunk style concept, the two game characters have also been given a similar concept: Emily master control technology, can remotely control skills, like a mage who puts skills at a distance, Watson is a new generation of robots developed using high-tech technology, good at melee combat, just to make up for Emily Disadvantages of poor close resistance.
The reason why the game is designed as a character setting for female programmers and electronic dogs is because the creators of "CYBER RUNNER" feel that people around them always link programmers with fixed images such as science and engineering men, in fact, programmers can also be cool girls! What kind of girl is the coolest, must be a programmer who masters the best technology - hacker!
The top hacker must have a mysterious bodyguard around him, which is like 007 has a bang girl by his side, and the ace agent has a mysterious white-haired science doctor next to him, and the electronic dog Watson is such a character.
Since each has its own strengths, they both have their own technology tree routes. Emily's upgrades mainly rely on gold coins to buy weapons and equipment, in order to reflect the advantages of warboard games, with fewer resources and materials to allow players to get a differentiated game experience, the team members of CYBER RUNNER created 11 unique weapons for the game, and gave each weapon a different price, and players want to get these weapons need to open the store and choose a combination of 5 randomly generated weapons.
The form of randomly generated weapons is not the imaginary scheme of "CYBER RUNNER", they observed many traditional RGP games and found that the skills and actual operation of many games are not independent, but constantly used and replaced, such as 1-10 levels of games will give you several skills, upgrade to level 20, the system will assign you a new skill, in the long run, the skill effect set by the previous system will make the player tired, there is no freshness, and "CYBER RUNNER" Each weapon integrates all the skills, and each one is unique, and there are many possibilities for players to get the option they want to see randomly generated by the store!
Unlike Emily, the electronic dog Watson is upgraded by skill cards after the battle. Of course, it also uses a combination of 4 different rarity skill cards that are randomly generated, and in the words of the team members, we have made a lot of cards, and what the player can draw depends on luck.
In addition to skill-integrated weapons and randomly generated weapons and skill cards, the game also requires players to be careful. Because of the limited funds, it is impossible for players to buy all weapons at the same time, and each weapon has a different attack area, which requires spending money with strategy, by choosing the best combination of weapons, so that the linkage effect between the equipment to achieve the best attack effect of one plus one is greater than two.
And Emily in different modes Watson has different skills to serve her, these skills also have mutual connection, such as the king bombing is another long-range skill trigger, Xiao U think about it all feel stimulating, but how to play continuous high damage, it depends on how the player chooses weapons and skills!
It is a combination of skills, and a random combination of weapons, the game also has a lot of equipment and special effects, not to mention that the technology tree mode of the two game characters is not the same, so complex game logic, how to do without a good program design?
The team found that Unity has a particularly good function, called Scriptable Object, using its convenient data management instead of the original complex data upload work, through the Scriptable Object can be used to exaggerate the interconnection of the scene, all the skill equipment documents in the game, are implemented here, when you need to call any character, any skill, just need to take it in the Scriptable Object, The workload of scene calls is greatly reduced.
In the strategic dimension of the game, "CYBER RUNNER" hopes to bring players a richer game experience, so that the game is more strategic, the game's 16 * 16 map is divided into 4 areas, through the pattern generation of long-range and short-range enemies, neutral objects and obstacles of each gradient.
However, when setting up character shooting, the members of the "CYBER RUNNER" team feel that there are problems in the determination of existing warboard games in the determination of shooting hit damage, such as some games in order to maintain the authenticity of the game, increase the false strike rate, for example, in some games, even the player puts the gun on the face of the character, there is still a 30% possibility of being missed by the enemy, which makes the normal game experience like an unbox lottery full of variables, which greatly affects the game experience of unlucky players. It can also cause some counterintuitive behavioral results.
So instead of choosing the shooting error mechanism of traditional wargames, the team introduced a setting called the Intent System.
When the enemy moves, the player can move the mouse, point the arrow to the enemy to get the position of the grid that the enemy will move, and the character to be attacked, through this exact method, the player can clearly perceive: what the enemy is going to do in the next turn, and find the corresponding countermeasures, either to destroy the enemy, or to build obstacles to block its moving pace, or to briefly escape its attack range, which also provides a strategic depth.
Programming allows the player to respond more actively, then the enemies in the game should be smarter, so the group members let the AI make their own judgments on the corresponding situation through different weight comparison calculations. Even in the design process to list the extreme game situation, such as the enemy only 20% of the health, the player is only 20% of the health, this time in the scene suddenly brushed out a bottle of blood, can restore 50% of the health, then intuitively AI will definitely get the blood medicine through their own actions, but also can prevent the player from getting the bottle of blood medicine, and in fact, the weight is also set like this.
When the attack index and the healing index are equal, the AI will be decided to enter the behavior mode of healing itself, so that enemies that have relatively restored a certain amount of health will exist in a "surviving" way, causing constant trouble to the player and thus affecting the game.
And the use of weights is much more convenient than adding a traditional behavior tree, because as long as the score of each weight is put on it, the AI system will determine which weight option is the most valuable and take a specific action.
As a wargame, CYBER RUNNER's degree of completion and world view setting are remarkable. From the background of the world, to the character skills, growth, and even the construction of the scene and the AI program are quite good.
What is even more surprising is that most of the R&D team of "CYBER RUNNER" did not even have experience in game development before, including undergraduates who are still in college, practitioners in manufacturing, and graphic designers. But it was this group of people who, with their love of games and with the help of unity bootcamps, managed to make what could be the first game demo of their lives.
Xiao U recalled their feelings when chatting with the "CYBER RUNNER" development team: "I had a hard time imagining that I could make this game, and a few months ago I could even say that I was a complete game developer. ”
Of course, love is the best teacher, love will give you the most fundamental source of motivation; and Unity bootcamp, will give you the best guidance and help, it will give you the most powerful weapon, let you on the road ahead, through the thorns.
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