FleshBound
Project Type: Group Project
Role: Tech Design, Systems Design, Gameplay Design, Design Lead (First Half)
Engine: UnrealEngine 5.2.1
Project Duration: April 29 - June 14 2024
Description
FleshBound is an action-packed first-person parkour shooter in which you and your parasite buddy run, dash, wall-run, and grapple your way through the depths of hell, making the monstrous denizens in your way go splat on your way to freedom.
It is incredibly humbling that this game has received multiple awards from the Swedish Game Awards and Futuregames Awards.
I am also very proud that the game has been played by thousands of people all over the world on Steam.
From the beginning, we knew we wanted to focus on action, speed, and mind-bending visuals. With that in mind, we defined the following pillars:
Gotta Go Fast
Action at the Forefront
Uncomfortable aesthetics
Mind-bending Environments
We also knew that we wanted this game to have a decent level of replayability.
With these things in mind, we drew up this game loop.
Development
My Contributions
With Gotta Go Fast and Action at the Forefront as important pillars, we knew we wanted to focus on snappy parkour movement. During the first few days, I made this prototype featuring wall-running, dashing, and double jumping (which we did not use in the end).
After several weeks of iteration, we ended up with this, which is the final result. This short clip shows that the movement feels faster and snappier than in the initial prototype. It now also features camera shakes, as well as a dynamic Field of View that changes depending on speed.
Another crucial aspect of the game that needed to be fast and snappy is the death and respawn system. As you can see in this clip, dying and respawning happen instantaneously, allowing the player to get right back into the action when they are killed. It also keeps track of killed enemies and respawns them when the player dies. This array is cleared upon reaching a checkpoint.
FleshBound features a few different types of doors that I created:
The normal unlocked door - Opens when entering a trigger
The combat arena door - Closes when entering the trigger and opens when all attached enemies are defeated
And then there is the more bespoke Final Boss door, which closes when entering the trigger, and opens once the dialogue ends, revealing the nasty final boss of the game.
Movement
Death & Respawning
Doors!
As is evident by the awards and generous acclaim that the project has received, I see it as a huge success.
The development process was extremely smooth from start to finish, the whole team was awesome, and it was truly a pleasure to show up and work on this thing every single day. I could have easily continued development on FleshBound for for another year or more.
All that being said, I feel like some of my work fell short of our design goals. Specifically on the 3C front. I don’t think I quite managed to capture the sense of speed that we wanted to achieve.
In hindsight, I would have added more visuals to really sell the sense of speed. I also would overhaul the dynamic FoV to be more reactive to actions like dash or grapple, rather than mainly being tied to the player’s walk speed.