Mechanisoul

Mechanisoul is a hack n' slash roguelite developed by Dreamstatic Games in Unity 6. Working with a team of ten to fifteen developers over the course of four months, my role within the team was as a systems designer, conceptualizing and implementing upgrade systems for our dash and ranged attacks.

Design philosophy

Our upgrade design philosophy focuses around emotions, with each section of Melee, Ranged, and Dash having five core emotions available, with ways to level them up throughout the run. Each emotion has upgrades that fit their theme. Anger, for example, has upgrades that deal damage, while Love has a charm effect on dash.

Handling enemy health

When designing and testing the upgrades for Ranged and Dash, there were some changes that were made post playtest that gave me some trouble. The primary example would be our method of handling enemy health, as multiple upgrades used that system to deal damage. Our systems have ways to interface with our weapons to check for damage, but implementing a global damage check for our Boss and Enemy prefabs was difficult, as they have different methods of taking damage.

Building the Charm status effect

The other challenging system was the implementation of Charm, a status effect that forces the AI to attack other enemies instead of the player. Coming in, I knew that I wanted to use a state machine to toggle the AI's behavior, but the implementation of focus priority, or targeting, alongside existing systems caught me off guard. Spending four to five hours traversing the interfacing of our current AI systems alongside new behaviors was challenging, but it helped me learn a lot about how state machines should be designed for modularity.