Kotaro’s Revenge

Slash your enemies and dash with your grappling hook!

Origins of the project

Kotaro’s Revenge is the first project of the second year of the Game Design program at Isart DIGITAL. The goal of the project is to make a fun 3D brawler game involving a combat system that allows the player to attack and defend himself while adapting to the enemy’s patterns. I was part of a group of 4 game designers and we had to make everything by ourselves from programming, designing the game, and adding assets and sounds.

Concept of the game

In Kotaro’s Revenge, you take control of Kotaro, a cyber ninja seeking revenge for the murder of his mentor by the evil corporation Megacorp. To help with his quest, Kotaro has a sword and a grappling hook. This grappling hook can be used to hook on green drones scattered throughout the city to facilitate traveling, but can also be used on enemies. When hooking to an enemy, the player will dash directly in front of the enemy. It serves as a counter-attack. The combat loop we designed is to perform a dodge roll when the enemy is attacking then use the grappling hook to move quickly in front of the enemy and attack him again. The grappling hook is a great mobility tool that can be used in platforming and combat sections. As part of the level design, enemies have different patterns. The player has to learn and master the dodge roll to make effective use of the grappling hook and vanquish his enemies.

Development

Developing the game proved to be difficult. Making a 3D game with free control of the camera in a third-person game is difficult to make. Many changes have been made to make the game easy for the player to control the character. At first, the player could confront multiple enemies at the same time, with even an IA capable of group behaviors, letting each enemy attack in order in a circle around the player. But after some testing, the gameplay wasn’t satisfying enough. We had to cut down this feature and let the player be in situations where he could confront only one enemy. With this, we made a camera that automatically locks on the enemy when entering the combat zone. To compensate, we made sure to make each enemy unique by creating various attack patterns for each one of them. It was myself that designed the level, platforming, and combat situations included. Then I dedicated myself to building the entirety of the level. It was a difficult task as some minor changes had to be made to keep everything balanced. In the end, we were satisfied with the final result and learned many things when it comes to combat systems or 3D games with free camera control.

The entirety of the project has been developed with the visual scripting of Unity. We also made use of occlusion culling to only render visible objects. With this, we could gain better performances for our game.

Behind the scenes of Kotaro’s Revenge!

Influences

The major influence is Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. From the camera to the use of a grappling hook, we took inspiration from many mechanics of this game.