Asterfel
Open World RPG
Game Description
Developed by Mysteria Studio UG, Asterfel is a third-person Action-RPG inspired by classics such as Gothic and The Witcher. You find yourself shipwrecked on an island nation, where greed and magical mining rouse an old god from it’s slumber.
Encounter three factions, discover forgotten history, and shape the island’s future. Will you thrive, survive, or witness the end of an era?
My Contributions
During my internship on 7 months and now freelancing part time I have contributed to the following areas;
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All of the quests gameplay implementations
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Scripting gameplay ingredients and dialogues
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Loot and encounter placements
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Game balancing and player progression
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Creating in-game cutscenes
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Feedback and Quality Assurance
Quests & Scripting
During my time as a game designer on Asterfel I was responsible and had ownership of implementing all the quests in the game, everything from main story, faction quests to minor side quests. Collaborating together with narrative and level designers I had to make sure the gameplay would fit the game's narrative and the location.
When implementing quests it was important to be open for iterations and feedback, since things could change whenever the narrative team iterated on dialogues, level designers made layout changes or if I had seen a problematic segment of the quest that had to be brought up and adjusted.
During implementing two of many quests I came across some challenges that I wasn't sure how to tackle without discussing it together with the team.
1. One of the quests is an escort NPC objective. When I initially read the dialogue scripts I felt that the length of the escorting was way to long, we would need to fill it with content that felt varied and given the fact that following NPCs for to long would probably get the player fatigued or frustrated. I had to bring this topic up before the quest went further into production and after discussions with the team we came to the conclusion that it needed to be shortened and change the premise of the quest a bit.
2. For another quest we had a mechanic that I identified risks with early on, since this mechanic was only used in this certain quest and never again in the game I thought it would be more relevant to cut it and rework that part of the quest. The result ended in the quest changed and the team saved valuable time and resources to be put on more pressing tasks.
Due to NDA I'm not able to show any full playthroughs of the quests yet. But down below you can see some snippets of visual scripting I did for some quests and other gameplay interactions.
Click to enlarge
Investigation Actor
Investigation Actor
This blueprint serves the purpouse of the player being able to follow and interact with clues in the game.
My goal was to make this blueprint as reusable as possible since it was needed in other quests as well, but with different premises. I also wanted it to be flexible to designers where they could either have interactions be in a sequential or random order.
Pillar Variant
Creating a child actor of the Investigation actor I could still keep the core functionality and build upon it to have a version that behaved a little different.
This time the player can interact with the pillars in any order they want, but for each pillar interacted with they will light up to signal that something happened. If the player light up all pillars the gate will open up.
Teleporter
The teleporter was one of the first blueprints I scripted for the project. Since this location in the game required teleporting to access different floors this was a priority to create.
I made so the screen fades to black, added audio, vfx and that the player controls disables since we don't want the player to run around while they are teleporting in or out.
We wanted to have functionality for reading notes via a UI pop-up in the game. Building upon our main pickup actor I created a public bool that a designer could easily access, then once set to true it would execute a function that would add the correct widget and text to the HUD.
When setting the text I created the function to pull the text data from our already established data tables for notes so we don't have to manually put in the text for each note.
Cutscenes
During my studies at The Game Assembly I touched a little bit on the Unreal Sequencer tool. At Mysteria Studio however I got to improve my knowledge with the tool and I was tasked to create some in-game cutscenes that would occur within some quests to present something happening or changing up the quest.
More cutscenes will be added over time.
Game & Level Design
Player Progression
An example of the first 10 levels.
An example of the first 10 levels.
When I joined the team I had to establish what the player progression would look like, since it wasn't really defined how many levels the player could get throughout the game I had to settle this first to be able to keep the pacing even throughout the game.
Working with sheets/excel was a great tool to get an easy overview of the amount of XP needed and collaborating with a programmer we settled on what kind of exponential math formula the player would use, that can be seen in the second screenshot.
Items & Crafting
Working with sheets gave me more ideas so I decided to create one for all the things in the game. By creating tables for all the items the player can loot, crafting recipes that could easily be created and iterated upon.
Yet again this helped me getting an quick glance of what the game has and what could be added, instead of opening the engine and edit the datatables.
Green lines are main roads.
Green lines are main roads.
Creating Overviews
When planning how the encounter difficulties would be placed within the world, the level designers and I came up with this idea that if the player stays close to the main roads the game would have some easier encounters. But straying away from these roads could ramp up the encounter difficulty but also reward the player with some new items.
I also created overviews for where the quests in the first part would take place. This was a way to present to the narrative design team to see where they are currently located and if we had areas in the game that felt empty and could be filled up with a quest or an objective. For the demo I did create an overview for all the gear the player could find, this was my way to present it to the level designers and other team members where they were located and if changes had to be made we could easily look for it on this top down map.
This portfolio page is actively being updated with current content or whenever I have something new to show and talk about!
