Game Overview
DeadBeat Wizard is a comic book inspired Action RPG, set in a modern magical world. You play as Garth: a freelance investigator and dead-beat wizard. Your current job has you investigating missing persons, which leads you to the mansion of a wealthy and crazed inventor. Find clues, defeat robots, and solve what has happened to the unfortunate souls who came to this mansion.
My Role
I was the Technical Designer and sole programmer. I worked on creating decision trees for enemies, player mechanics, and systems.
Original Pitch
This game started out as a pitch (originally titled Freelance Magic) to my classmates for a group project. After working on another project my team came back to this pitch when we needed a project to work on to send to PAX Australia. We went over the original pitch multiple times to pull out the best ideas and start working on DeadBeat Wizard.
Player Mechanics
The very first thing I started working on was player mechanics. The game was to be an Action RPG Shooter centered on a wizard, so we needed the player to have Spells as abilities that felt magical and unique. I created the first spells for the game: the cantrip for basic damage, teleport, flame thrower, and summon box (which would eventually change to chain lighting). I created a scriptable object as the foundation for these spells so we could add more and iterate on them as needed.
Enemies
I took on the task of designing and creating the enemies in the game. I used a decision tree within Unity to set up their initial functionality and then created custom decisions for multiple enemies as well as designed the boss for the level we built.
Systems
For the Demo to be presented at PAX we also needed some smaller systems ready for ease of play. I created a mana system for the player to gain spells back quickly, and a few other simple features such as pause, save, and reset to quickly start the demo level over for the next player.
