Struggle of Strife

A 2D top-down boss rush game that centered around dodge windows and understanding boss patterns. The combat design was heavily inspired by our team’s experiences with the Dark Souls series’ boss fights.

I personally:

Adjusted and tweaked all combat timing variables
Created and modified 2D pixel art assets
Scripted most of the player/combat mechanics
Designed and implemented UI
Was project lead and managed/assigned tasks
Designed boss attack patterns and tweaked AI.
Designed player weapons and attacks.

This was an important lesson in combat design and difficulty for me.
By this point I was experienced enough to lead the project smoothly. Even on the limited time frame and the limited skill set of the team, we all learned a lot and those with little to no experience were able to learn and contribute working code.

The biggest hurdle, and one that went unfixed, was that it was too difficult for new players to feasibly get through on their first try. My biggest lessons from this project was to focus on understanding and optimizing the new/mid level player experience and push past my own preconceived notion of difficulty and feel.
I also think that my team noticed something was wrong in terms of difficulty, but either felt too helpless to fix it, too stressed by the deadline, or too reserved to speak up that something was wrong. This project helped me form a habit to remind myself to check-in on team members and get their opinion how they feel about the project and what they think could be working better.

Struggle of Strife

Project Details