Atlantis#

TLDR#

Atlantis was meant to be a coop horror puzzle game similar to popular coop games such as It Takes Two and Split Fiction, but with a more gritty atmosphere. The project was abandoned due to life getting in the way for my teammate, and the gameplay after working on it for a month or so didn’t feel good enough. I may go back to work on it if I feel I can rework the gameplay to be more enjoyable, as there is at least a solid foundation for a coop game already there, with functional multiplayer.

The project source code is available here.

Why Unreal?#

Unreal Engine was chosen here for a couple of reasons. First, the multiplayer support via Replication is good for small games like this and is well supported within the engine. Second, as this was going to be a narrative game, we felt Unreal would provide better options for visuals as opposed to Unity. And finally, the other member of the team, being more of a designer/artist, would benefit from the blueprint system as opposed to more traditional programming found in other engines such as Unity.

Player Setup#

In the game, we have two distinct roles for players to pick from. One can be the Bodyguard who has a more powerful weapon and is meant to protect the Researcher from the dangers of Atlantis. Later in the game, there would be mutations that would augment the Bodyguards’ abilities, allowing for more combat and movement options, such as a stretchable arm that could be used to attack as well as grapple up to previously unreachable areas, as well as having more health and a larger oxygen bar.

The other player is a Researcher who can read the ancient text found around Atlantis to help find out the story, as well as assist in doing the various puzzles. The player had an ancient book, which would later be empowered to allow it to be used to attack and gain movement options; this effectively would make them a spell-slinging mage by the end.

For the selection implementation is very simple as shown below, with the red box being to select the Bodyguard and the blue one being to select the Researcher with a ready check.

Prologue#

As we wanted to start the players in Atlantis or just outside of it, we felt a brief prologue explaining the reason we are going down to Atlantis and how. While the dialogue for the scene was never completed, the way we were going to provide the dialogue was in the form of a communicator similar to what is found in the Metal Gear Solid games.

This effectively is just a scrolling text box that will cycle through all the lines given before loading into the next level upon completion. This is simple to implement, as you can either update the text via a smaller timer between each character, which allows for control over how fast the scrolling text happens. And when a line is complete, it waits an additional time of about 2s before going to the next line; otherwise, players won’t be able to read it comfortably in time.

Possible improvement that I could have added is loading the level in the background during this sequence, but there was no reason to do this quite yet, as this is still early into the project.

First Level#

For the game, we intended to split the levels up into sections of Atlantis, with the player gradually getting closer to the centre of Atlantis, the further through the story the players get. Below are some of the design steps before the eventual greyboxing of the first level.

The player would have to navigate past or kill the enemies that are patrolling around areas of the level before completing two puzzles and navigating from oxygen bubble to oxygen bubble to complete the level. While I’m happy with the vision of what this section of the level would look like, there were definitely issues with the puzzles and navigating around the level, as it felt very linear, which, while the level is going to be quite linear, felt like it was too much of a go from A to B.