Border Of Life
A Persona 5-styled action JRPG with full combat and cutscenes.
A school project
It started with a school project for showing off what you've learned this year. You could make anything, from a website to a game or even software tools. I decided to go for a game.
The idea of the game was pretty easy to get to. I already had an idea for a game for pretty long so I came to the conclusion that I wanted to make a small demo of that game idea.
The game is an Anime-Styled hack-and-slash JRPG. I mixed persona's 2D graphics style into the game and merged it with Zenless Zone Zero's fast combat style.
Developing the project.
As I started developing the project, I ran into some problems and annoying things. I was working on the game in the Unity Engine for the first 2 weeks of the project.
I came to the conclusion that Unity wasn't the best choice for the project and I switched over to unreal engine, which was the best second option for the game. Though I didn't have much experience with the engine, I learned a lot of things fast and development became pretty quick.
The environment
While I not only developed the systems and UI for the game, I also designed and made the environment of it. It was supposed to be a Tokyo-style environment, and not too big that the player would get lost. So I started placing all kinds of floor tiles and buildings that I could find online to try and bring together the environment.
After I placed down some buildings and roads, I started polishing the environment and adding neon signs, props, and other things like the gate which I will explain in the next paragraph.
The goal of the game
The goal of the player is to find an NPC which will redirect the player to a gate. The gate they go in is a mirrored world of the city they live in, but evil. While in the gate, the player should defeat all kinds of different enemies using combo attacks. Once the enemies are defeated, the player can go back to the normal world and the gate will be closed.
The name Border of Life, was thought of by my partner. It represents the border of where the normal city ends and the dark mirrored world starts.
What I learned
In this project I learned that sometimes things don't go as planned and that you have to be prepared to make a big switch in a small time frame. I learned a lot of Unreal Engine and it's Blueprints. I also learned how to make explandable systems like a combat and objective system, and used sequencer to make cutscenes to spice up the game.