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I’m Making a Video Game Part Four – The Player Character

Heyo. Zed here. This is my fourth post in the series of posts I’m doing about how I’m making my upcoming video games Astral: Allegro and Astral: Alliance. I recommend reading these in order. Use the Labels menu to find the rest of them if you need to. This post is about how I’m designing the player character and the game’s combat style. All of this is being done within the Unreal Engine 5. The Unreal Engine 5 also has all of the assets used in this post and in the entire game line for free as part of its built in online store.

For this project I’m only using free assets. I’ve spent some time designing the player character for Allegro. The character’s name is Reconnaissance Officer Araden Relgrove. Allegro features him as the sole playable character. You can’t switch later on. He is fully voice acted by me. I’ve picked the 3D model I’m using for him already. It’s in the Free Content Marketplace as part of the Paragon line of character and animation packs. I can’t 3D model so I’m relying on the Free Content Marketplace to do that job for me. Here’s the character model I’ve chosen.



This is the character pack known as Paragon Kwang. He comes with the character model; hundreds of animations including walk, run, jump, fall and attack; a fully coded player character version; several skins; and a full combat moveset. By the asset pack’s rules I can’t use the name Paragon or his name Kwang in the game so I’ve renamed him Araden. Paragon Kwang does have all of the animation I need to make the player character and his combat style. Araden is technically a lupine, a race of humanoid canines, so I picked one of the alternate colours for Kwang to match the fact that the character doesn’t have a human skin tone. I think it worked.

Here’s what I have planned for the controls. The game will be for the Android platform and will be third person. With the set of options for Android enabled the game already comes with move and camera controls built in. I just need to not change that. I need to add the combat button mappings to the game myself. Really this is my only job. I have planned on replicating the look and feel of a console gamepad for the control scheme.

There will be four buttons on the right and four buttons on the left. The right four correlate to four combat actions. These are fast attack left button, slow attack top button, fire crossbow bolt right button and jump bottom button. I wanted the character to have a mix of melee and ranged attacks but the asset set only comes with a sword as an option for the character’s weapon. I figure he can have a crossbow mounted under his gauntlet on his off hand. There are animations I can use for that.

The left buttons are all spells. Fire bolt is left button, frost bolt is top button, storm bolt is right button and heal self is bottom button. Each of these spells has an additional effect. Fire bolt lights the target on fire and does damage every second until they die. Frost bolt halves the target’s attack damage for the rest of the fight. Storm bolt halves the target’s maximum health for the rest of the fight. Each of these can only trigger once per target but can still damage them more after that. Heal just heals you. There isn’t a mana bar or magic bar so each spell only takes the time it takes to cast as a cost. That’s the combat setup. I wanted the player to have options for how they approach a fight and these are the ones you have.

Zed


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