EMIL MARIS

Cyborg Ultra Dragon

First person shooter Bossfight

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Full Playthrough

Summary

Specifications

Cyborg Ultra Dragon was a project I worked on during a scripting course last autumn. It was a ton of fun to develop and I felt it really broadened my understanding of Unreal 4's AI and script systems. It was an easy choice to push it further as one of my pieces. 

​ The focus of the project is on the AI, Game feel and spline movement so I wont be pushing graphics and visuals further than a basic white box.

• Created in 6 Weeks, 4h per day.

• Made with Unreal Engine 4

• Made using assets for the epic gamestore.

• Workload involved Boss design and scripting 

Boss Design 

The design principles I wanted to focus on where a steady escalation in difficulty, effective feedback/telegraphing and presenting threats/player objectives in healthy ways.  ​

Phase 1 focuses on introducing the player to these different threats and objectives. When the player has destroyed each of the four weak points the dragon starts phase 2 which builds upon what the player has learnt by combining multiple attacks at once.  ​ ​

Cycling between states

Changing between a grounded and flying state was a great way to change the pacing and utilising the FPS camera's freedom of movement. 

In both stances the dragon runs through a set number of moves before initiating a state change.

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Grounded Attacks

Fire ball barrage

The Dragon spreads fire balls in a cone infront of itself using its mouth and flame turrets.

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Gets the player to strafe.

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Ground Pound

The Dragon smashes the ground creating a shockwave around it. (has no weakpoint)

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Forces the player to jump.

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Propeller Bomb

The propeller bomb launches and slowly moves towards the player, the player needs to shoot it to destroy it.

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Temporarily forces the players focus away from the dragon.

Dodge​

The Dragon hops to its right or left.​

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The Dragon ended up feeling stationary, adding a jump dodge made it feel more alive.

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FlightState and Flying attacks

The flying state serves as a healthy change of pace, after showing off the different threats the dragon can present whilst grounded it enters its flying state. When flying it uses the same threats as it does in the grounded state but deviates in how these threats are presented. It also introduces the missile projectile.

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Missile/FireBall barrage

The dragon launches missiles at the player, these missiles shoot upward and home in on the players current position. 

BIG FireBall barrage

The dragon continuously rotates towards the player, barraging them with bouncing fireballs. 

Pound Blast

The dragon charges its chest piece momentarily before firing a large orb that creates two shockwaves around it. 

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Presenting the ground pound this way lets me use attacks the player is familiar with whilst allowing me to add a 4th weakpoint (on the chest).

WeakPoints

Each of the dragons attacks present the player with an accompanying weakpoint. Each weakpoint has a damage threshold, when reached the respective weapon will brake and the dragon wont be able to use it in future attacks (until phase 2).

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The Dragons fire ball's spawned from its mouth will always work as it has no weakpoint. 

Flight Strikes and spline based movement

Using predetermined splines im able to move the Dragon in a smooth and precise way, I felt that this changed the pace of the fight drastically and gave the fight a WOW moment.

I use splines to make attacks like this flight strike possible too. 

Phase Two

After the player neutralises all 4 weapons the dragon transitions into phase 2. The twist here is that the dragon now combines threats and weakpoints that the player has learnt to deal with in phase 1.

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Stage Changes:

The Dragon also changes the arena, adding lava and limiting the players movement options. 

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This move combines the ground pound, fire barrage and the missiles it uses in the flight stance.

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This move combindes the Pound mine and the basic missile barrage from phase 1. 

In this example the player needs to jump between shockwaves whilst strafing.

The Arena

The arena allows the player the freedom to learn how the dragon works in phase 1 and then transforms into a smaller less forgiving arena in phase 2. limiting the players movement is a great way to add some difficulty on top of the other changes in phase 2. 

Adding mountains and terrain was a healthy way to fill out a lot of empty space and making the area around the arena feel more alive. 

Gif of Dragon transitioning into phase 2. limiting the space the player can move around on.

PlayerCharacter

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After some testing i decided a short dash, a double jump and a snappy blaster was more than enough to make the player character fun to use.

Left click to shoot, hold in to keep shooting.

Right click to dash, a walking direction must be held to dash.

Sprint planning and progression

Alpha:

My alpha sprint consisted of creating behavioural trees, scripts and the flying state. I also needed to fix up weakpoints and the attacks the dragon would be using in the final product.

Gold:

I spent most of gold polishing the arena, the dragon and implementing changes I had planned from testing during the previouse sprint. 

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Beta:

This sprint had a big focus on getting a testable version going and then getting the fight tested with as many different people as possilbe. 

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This really helped me iron out a few problematic design flaws.

Behavioural trees and Blueprints

The dragon swaps between two behavioural trees, one for the grounded state and one is for the flying state.​

Animation montages

I use montages to run events like attacks, sound ques and rotations. 

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Gallery