Unnamed 1D Combat System
Main Developer
(February 2024 - April 2024)
Download link: [coming soon]
Programming responsibilities: Systems design, gameplay programming, technical design, testing and automation, telemetry integration
Team Size: Solo
Misc. responsibilities: Playtesting, quality control, art assets
Page under construction! Contact me to learn more about this project!
Unnamed 1D Combat System, as the name implies, is a simple series of encounters which takes place on a one-dimensional battlefield where the player is only able to move left and right. Making use of the variety of bakery-themed skills, your goal is to strategize and battle against the confectionary creatures attacking you in order to win. The encounters have been balanced and tested for gameplay and quality assurance using the built-in telemetry and testing systems, and automated testing can be activated with the press of a button.
Development history and retrospective
Unnamed 1D Combat System is a project made for a system design class during my undergraduate degree. It’s one of the more unique projects I’ve worked on in recent times given both the project requirements and my choice of game engine; I used the Godot for the second time ever in order to create it, the project required built-in telemetry reports to balance the gameplay.
Godot’s built-in systems and existence of signals helped with the automation and testing portions of the project significantly. Because the UI elements available to the user have many built-in functions and signals, it was easy to make it so that a computer could virtually “press” the buttons or keys meant to trigger actions. It was also easy to customize and expand the tools I could use during a playtest; every possible combination for an encounter was pre-loaded so I could vary my tests with the skill of the playtester.
While the main focus of the project was to automate the system I created, I still made sure to create a fun and engaging gameplay experience. The project itself was based on baking and creatures made out of food, so it allowed me to be creative with abilities; some prime examples being a hand mixer which rolls along the ground to do piercing damage and a stationary heat lamp to deal area-of-effect damage to approaching enemies. The enemies themselves were also varied, with two baseline behaviors able to be modified for speed, power, health, and projectile attacks in order to expand the potential for encounters.
This project was a valuable practice in automation and testing for game systems, and figuring out what needed to happen in order to implement said systems. I implemented the behaviors of six different enemies, and procedurally created an “encounter” for every possible combination of one, two, and three animations. Using two different types of automated player behavior, I exported data about each simulated encounter and how the computer player behaved to a detailed report which included win/loss ratios factoring in player/enemy health, average round time, average player damage per second, average usages of specific abilities, and more.
