July 12, 2024

Aard and Wyzz is a coop videogame with puzzles and combat
developed with my team at Curious Imp in Unreal Engine 5 with C++. Check our gameplay trailer!

This is my biggest project as a videogame developer. It has been a very intense development in which I have learned a lot of things. In the following sections you will be able to see both the parts of the video game implementation that were implemented by me as well as the ones I was involved in.

The camera uses a weighting algorithm, according to which the camera will move to one side or another depending on the weights of the entities of interest to the player in each level. These entities are registered in the camera when we want that the player focuses his/her attention on these elements, such as enemies. Once these entities are no longer important, they are unregistered and the camera will focus on the players again.

In this game, enemies are controlled by an aggro system. It allows splitting the enemy pressure between both players equally, avoiding to punish only one player. This is a coop videogame, so it has to be enjoyable by two players at the same time, which adds some complexity to the AI, thats why a system like this was implemented. In the following video, you can see how enemies are distributed along the players (melee enemies have less aggro than the ones with the shield because of the skill required to eliminate each of them).

On the other hand, a flocking enemy system was implemented too. This was an additional implementation that was done for aesthetics to avoid the typical "queue" of enemies chasing the player. We wanted that the players had a sense of intelligent enemies, thats why the shield enemy tries to avoid being surrounded by players, as you can see in the following video.

Aard and Wyzz combos and animations have been implemented as smooth as posible to provoke in the player the feeling of wanting to eliminate enemies. A charged attack has also been implemented for both characters, which the player can launch by releasing the button. In addition, both characters have a 3-hit combo, being the last hit the one that makes more damage.

The life system was made with a series of hearts, based on The Legend of Zelda videogames saga. Players may lose life due to enemies or falling into the void the form of heart quarters.

Karen has three attacks: laser beams, scroll rain and the turntable.

Karen shoots laser beams from her eyes for a set time which chase the players.

Karen throws scrolls trying to hit the players. For this attack, a matrix of cells was implemented to detect the players and throw the scrolls as equally as possible to both players, avoiding throwing patterns and giving some randomness to the attack.

Karen tilts the table trying to make the players fall down while continuing to throw scrolls which roll across the table, trying to throw the players out of the combat arena.

A main menu and a character selection menu were implemented to allow player 1 to choose the character to control. In addition a pause menu was also implemented for each of them depending on which player paused the game.

As a final note, all animations (via blendspaces and blends per bone) as well as VFX were introduced and implemented (NOT CREATED) in the game by the programming team through the use of dynamic materials (like Aard's fire fists, Karen's lasers...).

There are more details that I don't want to reveal but I am sure you will like them. The demo is available on Steam , thank you and I hope you like it!