Mantra
Mantra is a movement shooter FPS taking inspiration from Titanfall 2 and DOOM. Players make use of advanced mobility such as wall running as they blast their way through hordes of evil robots in arena-style combat spaces. Set in a distant future, the player takes up arms, vowing to destroy the robots that have taken over the planet. As they make their way to the main factory of the robots, the player explores unique levels, each with their own goal. RubyShark is a game still in development, everything you see here is not representative of the final product, rather where it was in development when I was on the team.
COre design pillars
Fast Paced Combat
Whether it's positive or negative, the player always has a reason to keep moving in combat. Substantial cover is sparse and enemies drop critical resources players need to continue fighting. Areas to wall run and boost off give players that little edge they need to get out of harm's way fast and reposition themselves without having to rely on cover.
Puzzles
The player has to solve puzzles, whether it is for creating paths, or the mission objective, they're presented with increasingly difficult puzzles to solve. Puzzles don't just include mind-bending solutions but require players to utilize timing and skill, platforming between areas.
Exploration
Levels are built with the idea of having multiple different ways to get somewhere or do something. The intent of this is to make the player feel empowered for choosing to play their way. To incentivize this, levels have multiple collectibles and items hidden inside them in areas just out of the way of the main path, where players can take side paths or solve puzzles differently to obtain. -- This is something that hasn't been fully integrated yet. We're still working on polishing the main paths.
prototyping
During this phase of development, I rapidly cobbled together an extremely basic version of my level. My level in the game takes place inside of a volcanic cavern mining facility the robots have constructed. The mining facility has monolithic sized drill set up over top of a lake of lava, mining up a red liquid that the robots then bring to their research and development facility inside the mine to crystallize that liquid, which becomes power sources and is shipped off to the shipping facility (the next level). Players find a way to destroy the drill in the level and in order to progress to the next level they eventually have to climb over the wreckage of the once towering drill. As a unique mechanic to this level, I wanted to have players shoot minecart tracks with the Ion cannon (an electrical gun used to activate a large majority of mechanics in levels of the game) to rotate the tracks as a minecart filled with explosives went across the play space. Spaces were blocked out with this mechanic in mind and I later cut it entirely as it ended up not fitting with how we wanted the game, and our puzzles to play.
Fixing the failures
As with all first passes, things aren't final, and my level needed a lot of work. I got feedback from testers on my level and took a long hard look to determine where the pain points in it were and what players liked the most about the level so I could cull the bad and add more of the good. Some areas got cut, others got refactored and improved upon and all for the better. These are just a few of the revisions made to the level, but some of the most significant so far.
Originally what I wanted to do here was have a big vista of a massive cavern, while showing the player where their objective is. It became pretty clear later that players were having difficulty knowing to look right so and see that there were walls they could run on. With how open the area was it felt pretty empty and there was a bit too much focus on the area in the back left. To fix the issue I added a bunch of walls to make the area feel more enclosed, and worked on the framing, as well as adding a saturated light to help light up the wall I want players to look at.
When I made this combat space, I wanted to have a room with two levels on it that players could easily switch between by jumping off the top level. One of the issues with the room that became apparent very quickly was that there wasn't enough headroom between the bottom floor and catwalks. While the player could walke under them, it both didn't feel good and acted as a wall for some of the AI as they were a bit taller than the player. To fix these issues, I dropped the floor a substantial amount and shifted around the catwalks and ramps to look more realistic and flow with the space better.
This area originally wasn't a puzzle but I decided to turn it into one when I cut the minecart puzzles from my level. Originally it just served as an ascent where players would wall run and jump up to the area with the crane. It didn't quite feel that good, players would bonk their head on the circular platform when jumping off some wall runs and and it wasn't doing anything special. Instead, I changed it into a two tiered puzzle. Players need to get over to the bridge for the next area, but they have to move a rotating platform after running around the wall on the bottom part. That allows them to get to the second story where they activate a button that moves a wall runnable surface that allows them to get to the bridge.
At first, this area was going to be a cargo bay with one of the minecart puzzles. However, after scrapping those, this area was left without a gameplay purpose. Rather than make this space a new puzzle, I opted to change the location of the final combat encounter. Rather than taking place inside the hole the drill created, I added a facility. Players start up at the top with the high ground as enemies start to filter up in waves. Once enemies start to overtake the room, the player gets pushed to drop down and run around the room more.
