NPC
About
NPC was created by a team of nine as part of the fourteen week Major Production module of the Advanced Diploma of Professional Game Development.
NPC is a top-down hack-and-slash adventure where you play as a bard following in the footsteps of the most lauded heroes in the land. My role focused on level design, narrative design, asset implementation, particles and testing.
Particle Effects
A key part of my role was designing and implementing different particle effects within the game. Before this, I had very minimal experience with particles.
To start with, I focused on replicating a YouTube tutorial on fire. To my surprise I discovered that this required three unique textures and four particle systems.
One of the last effects I created, a meteor, required several components working in tandum. I broke these into two catagories: before and after impact. For before the impact, I identified the particle systems needed as the meteor tail, meteor head and sparks. For after the impact, I needed an explosion, sparks, a dirt cloud and dust motes.
To start with
Level Design
One of my main responsibilites was designing the 'gothic town' level. This series of images shows how the level evolved.
The changes from the pen and paper design were iterations made based on the camera angle.
Similarly, the level design was iterated from the greybox after testing feedback to prevent player confusion.